Weddingbee Blog

Well, the parties have started, and the gifts are arriving. You know, they really weren’t kidding when they decided to call them showers, were they? After my first bridal shower on Saturday afternoon, I’m completely overwhelmed by the generosity of our friends and family. This is just unreal!

Oh, and I will post pictures from the shower later this week. Mr. Magnolia and I are in the process of purchasing/moving into our new house (!!!), so the computer isn’t hooked up for me to upload my pictures to!

Anyway, Mr. Magnolia and I registered last spring at Crate & Barrel and Bloomingdale’s. We chose those two stores because they both happened to be having Registry 101 events on the same day, and we liked the items that they offered. Easy enough, right? It works for our friends and Mr. Mag’s family in Atlanta, it works for my extended family in New York/New England, and it works for our friends who are internet-savvy. But you know who it doesn’t work so well for? Our friends and family in Greenville, SC — where my parents live. Greenville doesn’t have a Bloomingdale’s OR a Crate & Barrel.

So my mom and I talked about it while we wandered through Macy’s yesterday afternoon, and we made a decision. I’m going to create an online registry at Macy’s, which will duplicate some of the items on our Bloomingdale’s registry. More than likely, I’ll add our fine china, our casual glasses, our pots and pans, and maybe our casual china.

The purpose is not to get duplicate gifts and return them, but rather to give more people the option of actually going to a store and purchasing items off our registry. I’ll keep up with both online, and as items are purchased, I will delete them from the other store. Does that make sense? I don’t want it to seem like we’ve actually registered for 24 5-piece place settings. But rather, if someone purchases a set from Bloomingdale’s, I’ll also delete a set from Macy’s. It probably would have been easier for a lot of our guests if we had registered at Macy’s from the start…but we didn’t. And the thing is, we’ve had fantastic customer service at our Bloomingdale’s, so I want to keep that one as well.

So here’s my question - has anyone else created duplicate registries to accommodate their guests? How did it turn out for you? Was it difficult to keep up with? Did you have to make that many more returns?