With Spring in full swing and May and June just ahead of us, wedding season is also in full bloom. We’re sure that means that while many of you are perusing tech sites like nibletz.com you’re also checking out gift registries, signing up for wedding sites and taking the telxon to Target’s aisles. Well STOP!
SimpleRegistry, a Cincinnati based startup has a solution for registries for everything. Whether you need a wedding registry, baby registry, honeymoon registry or heck you just want a bunch of gifts, you can use SimpleRegistry’s tool to create your registry and than take monetary gifts to get the things that you want.
The startup was founded by Brandon Warner, Chris Kolik and Tony Alexander. Alexander got the idea for SimpleRegistry after he launched his first registry related startup called “Traveler’s Joy” with a focus on creating honeymoon registries.
More after the break
Sure there are plenty of registry tools online but what SimpleRegistry offers is the ability to hand pick items from multiple retailers for your wedding registry. You can pick that Kitchen Aid mixer that’s mandatory on every registry from Target, and the sheet set you want from Bed Bath and Beyond. But what about that matching set of golf clubs, you can add those too.
Adding to SimpleRegistry is easy, you can post pictures of hard goods products or use the mobile app to scan barcodes of the things you want. SimpleRegistry collects money for those gifts via paypal. Of course there’s nothing stopping you from turning around and using the money to put a down payment on a house or a vacation, but that in itself makes SimpleRegistry unique. You could really just about kickstarter your honeymoon with the SimpleRegistry tools.
“SimpleRegistry was built to solve both of those issues, the first being that if you use it for your wedding, it’s supposed to be your only wedding registry, and the second thing is that you can use it for other life events as well. Get them for their wedding, keep them for their baby shower, and when they need to do fundraising they can do that too,” Alexander told Beatkit.com.
SimpleRegistry has just completed a $150,000 seed round from CincyTech. Alexander says they are going to use the money to scale faster. He won’t rifle off statistics yet but does say they are on track to hit 10,000 registries in 2012.
The site does have a $35 sign up fee and SimpleRegistry takes 3.5% of the gifting money given to the registrant to pay for credit card processing and customer service.
This innovative approach to the gift registry does have some stiff competition from major retailers like Target which already offers a wedding and baby registry. They allow couples to take a telxon gun through the store and scan the items they want on their registry and then as the gifts are purchased they are marked off on Targets gift registry website.
source: Betakit