Wedding Startup RegistryLove (YC S12) Lets Couples Register For Anything | Hacker News Reader

Wedding Startup RegistryLove (YC S12) Lets Couples Register For Anything

techcrunch.com

72 pointsJerpo38 comments

From their "Tour" page:

The fun part! Browse and shop our gorgeous gift catalogue filled with inspiration and ideas and add things to your registry

While their (more obscure) "How it Works" page says:

Find things you love on our gift database, or list gifts and services from your favorite stores.

I think they could do a better job of making it clear that you can go and add registry items from everywhere. And honestly, as someone who just got engaged, I would probably be inclined to use Amazon Universal Registry if it came down to it (as someone else mentioned).

Edit: Part of the confusion is that I skimmed the landing page and went right to the bottom. I looked so quickly for the call to action that I skipped the tag line! (Any Gift. Any Store. One Registry.)

"How it Works" for HN people is Ruby on Rails, google hosted webfont, twitter bootstrap css and javascript.

Would like to know a bit more about the business side of it.

The most difficult part about getting into the wedding business as a startup is advertising. People (hopefully) only get married once, and they're usually too happy to go shopping around for deals. This is why wedding businesses can rake in huge profits by ripping off their customers. You get similar phenomena in the baby business and the funeral business (although with the latter the lack of interest in comparison shopping is due to grief). So RegistryLove's success will hinge largely on their ability to get the word out to the general public.

I would pay good money for a service that advertised vendors with a fair rate. I'm so sick of every vendor marking things up 100% or more because it is for a wedding. I'm really happy to pay for quality, but it becomes exploitative quickly.

I recommend refraining from using the W word when getting an initial quote if you can.

The mortuary industry is also covered by state regulations designed to keep out competition, justified by entirely specious public health reasons. For example, it is illegal to import wooden boxes without a license in most American states, if those boxes are intended to be either buried or burned. Wooden boxes are well-understood commodity items which, if they had an OSHA sheet, would be stamped "generally regarded as safe."

The bridal-industrial complex does not benefit from similar regulations, but not for want of trying.

Honest question: could the wooden box license be intended to slow the transport of pests via wood? Moving firewood that hasn't been heat treated has been responsible for a lot of pest plagues in forests.

If so, it would be about moving wood that hasn't been heat treated. The law is generally worded to specifically be related to the funeral business. There are other laws that are similarly restrictive, such as a law in Louisiana that prohibits anyone from selling "funeral merchandise" if not licensed:

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/casket-making-monks-fight-sel...

Not really an issue with treated/finished lumber.

So RegistryLove's success will hinge largely on their ability to get the word out to the general public.

I agree with this. But, assuming the advertising dollars are there, it's extremely easy to target brides-to-be through specialty wedding publications, etc.

if it's easy for them, it's easy for others as well.

You could easily apply the wedding registry idea to baby registries. I think there's a lot of potential in trying to make this more local instead of only at the big box stores.

Thanks for the input! We have plenty of local/ independent stores signed up, and want to have a huge focus on that.

Baby Registries are coming up soon :)

I think you are spot on. It's the same reason why making a successful online dating website is very hard.

They could do some work on the (privacy) protection of those registries, for example by making the URLs of registry a little harder to guess. (Yeah, I know, adding obscurity instead of security, but nevertheless).

I wanted to see an example list, didn't knew a valid first and last name to search for, so guessed http://registrylove.com/registries/ and some low ID number after that. Pronto!

I don't know if some Daisy & Javier mind that I can see their wishlist for their wedding. Personally I would have wanted to keep that list a little more private to only those people knowing I had registered my list at RegistryLove.

I'll admit I haven't dealt with wedding registries much at all (really, I watched somebody use a registry kiosk at a store once and that's about it) but I was always under the impression that registries are generally pretty much public.

You're right. If you know the first and last name of either the bride or the groom, and the store at which they registered, you can access their registry. This is by design--stores want it to be easy to find what the B&G want, because they want it to be easy for you to buy something for them.

I could access a registry by guessing an ID (an ActiveRecord primary key, so just an integer), not searching for names. Agreed, this isn't very useful, but the list isn't protected/obscured if the URLs are that easy to guess.

For example, at Amazon Universal Wishlist, the ID of a valid wishlist is very hard to guess -- like 6HV8XSTGDT3E7-difficult. On top, you can select whether you want that list to be public (discoverable via name search), visible if one knows the link, or private.

My engaged brother is using Amazon Universal Registry for this purpose - http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/universal

We provide a personal concierge and service unparalleled by Amazon. Amazon does have a large collection of item's but they don't partner with local boutiques!

(To be clear: the amazon service lets you add anything with a website, not just items sold through the site)

We're still in Beta, but http://www.mixwish.com allows you to add items from any website as well. Similar concept to Amazon, but much easier to use.

This has gotten comically out of control and is probably saying something about the wedding industry.

Speaking of Amazon, you may enjoy: http://www.amazon.com/One-Perfect-Day-Selling-American/dp/15...

My wife and I started a similar site awhile back, originally just for our family. After realizing there were so many other competing sites out there we put it on the backburner. Never even really finalized a name/URL.

http://giftregistry.hindessite.com/

Based on the name and the vertical, I thought this was going to be another site from the team behind http://weddinginvitelove.com/, http://weddingplannerlove.com/, http://weddingphotolove.com/, etc... but there appears to be no connection. Interesting to see that this naming convention is becoming a pattern.

I'm actually quite surprised that this team would use this name when another, earlier company (WeddingLovely) has clearly established that naming pattern for its own name and that of all its products/business lines as you mentioned (WeddingInviteLove, WeddingPlannerLove, WeddingPhotoLove). If they did any research on startups in this space, they must have come across WeddingLovely, so why continue with this name choice?

None knew how to code, so Sofia taught herself... “At first we tried to hire somebody, but we quickly realized that master coders are just not that interested in the wedding market,” says Markia, “and we were like, well, we could just sit here forever or we could just do it.”

I advised a startup with a premium domain in the wedding space a few years back. Both founders were non-tech founders, and they struggled day and night to find a tech... anything. Lots of folks like myself offered little bits of assistance and packages of discount consulting work but nobody was really willing to commit and take the plunge as a tech cofounder. I'm sure this is a common story. If you don't have a huge amount of capital investment its really hard to rally tech folks behind bootstrapping something like this

We've been using myregistry.com and have been perfectly happy with it. MyRegistry syncs directly with several popular registries, and lets you add anything not in one of those stores with a bookmarklet that intelligently grabs name/price/etc. from the page you're on.

It doesn't sound like this doesn't anything significantly different, other than having syncing with more stores (which is, admittedly, nice).

Huh, interesting that it's YC-backed. It overlaps with my own website http://GiftyWeddings.com -- though mine is more of a gift list, where you really can add any gifts you like (you just type them in, and optionally add a web link).

One thing that really put me off trust-wise with Registry Love is the payment page (for guests) is sent, and I think submitted, over clear-text HTTP, for example http://registrylove.com/carts/N/payment

Is the only difference between this and all the other gift registries like http://wantsthis.com http://wishpot.com etc. that they handle payment/customer service? I'd be curious to see how things like returns and really odd items like "cash" are handled.

Is this international? I would recommend the service to friends but can't find any list of which retailers are supported from the FAQ or About pages. I suppose I could create an account and trudge deeper but honestly, I can't be arsed to do that much work just to find out if Canada is supported and advertise this to my friends.

Hey there! We are currently focused on the SF Bay area, but we are expanding very quickly! Depending on what they are looking for we may be able to accommodate them immediately. I appreciate you considering suggesting us, and would love to hear from you/or them at any time! Marika@registrylove.com

We launched this social feed feature today and play in this space: https://knackregistry.com/hot

Instead of browsing through various retailers websites knackregistry.com has set up a What’s Hot product feed so brides can easily see what friends and other brides are adding to their Knack registries. When a bride finds something she wants she just clicks the add to my registry button and the item will be added from the feed to her registry.

This would've been fantastic for my family member who got married recently.

Almost makes me want to get married....NOT. but cool shtuff.

Great idea, my sister would have loved this too!

Thanks! <3 Marika

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