Offbeat Bride
At the end of May, Buy Our Honeymoon was featured on the popular Offbeat Bride blog. Ariel, who runs the blog and is the author of the fantastic book from which it takes its name, has a novel approach to advertising. Vendors can contact her to be profiled on the site, but she’ll only accept services that she feels will genuinely have interest for her readers. She also retains full editorial control, and the blog post is clearly marked as an advertisement. This is great for vendors like us, because it allows us to get both exposure and honest feedback on our service.
We had phenomenal interest generated from the feature, and we’d like to welcome all our new offbeat customers! Thanks for choosing us for your wedding registry!
The comments that arose on the blog post were fascinating. A fierce debate opened up on the etiquette of wedding registries in general, and honeymoon registries in particular. Some brides find the idea unspeakably tacky, others think it’s terrific. This wasn’t entirely unexpected, of course, particularly in the US market, even though the honeymoon registry concept arose in the US first.
Matters of wedding etiquette in the UK are surprisingly different from the US. We’ll think nothing of including a registry card with a wedding invitation, whereas in the States that’s a massive faux-pas (mind you, we don’t generally have wedding showers over here, which may well be a factor). It’s not unusual (and certainly not rude) in the UK to have a cash bar. Even the format of the wedding itself is different — in the UK, the ceremony will generally take place earlier in the day, and there isn’t a tradition of a rehearsal dinner.
As for us, we’d never try to persuade anyone that didn’t already want a honeymoon registry to open one. But we do feel that there’s an enormous difference between the service we offer and merely asking for donations towards an anonymous pot of cash. Our couples take a really creative, personal approach to building their registries. Each item on your registry has ample space for a description where you can convey what that gift would mean to you as a couple. You can upload your own photo for each item, and introduce your registry in a way that’s completely unique to you. And we keep advertising completely out of the way, and our own branding to an absolute minimum. This isn’t a Brand-X registry, it’s your honeymoon.
The result of this is that guests engage with your registry on a personal level. Their gift isn’t $50, it’s what it represents: a scuba diving lesson, or (as Ariel mentions) dinner in rural Mexico. Often, they’re making an emotional connection with their gift that just isn’t possible with a cutlery set or a crystal bowl.
Comments are closed now on Offbeat Bride, but they’re open here. We’d love to hear your views.