Brides and grooms have a new place to register for wedding gifts
By Parija Kavilanz, CNN
Brides and grooms, fret no more. While Bed Bath and Beyond and its popular wedding registry service teeter on the edge, Etsy is stepping in to fill any potential void.
Etsy announced on Wednesday that the online marketplace for handcrafted items is launching its own wedding registry.
In addition to selecting registry items from Etsy’s vast offerings of handmade and vintage items, the company said the Etsy Registry will also provide couples with a personalization service for nuptial-related paraphernalia, such as wedding decor and bridal party items.
“On Etsy, we’ve seen a staggering 872% increase in searches for handmade gifts, telling us that couples and their guests are moving away from mass-produced gifts,” Dayna Isom Johnson, trend expert with Etsy, said in a blog post Wednesday.
She told CNN in an email that there is a search for a wedding item on Etsy every second. “So, launching Etsy Registry was a natural next step,” she said.
Retail industry expert Neil Saunders said he had also observed the trend.
“Consumers already have lots of stuff. They don’t need more things. They’re more attracted to items that are a bit more unusual and perhaps things they wouldn’t have bought themselves,” said Saunders, managing director with GlobalData. “This is a real point of differentiation for Etsy, because it is a large marketplace for unique products.”
Clamoring to fill a void
Etsy’s bid to become a large player in the wedding market comes after previous wedding registry behemoths either scaled back offerings for newlyweds or shut down entirely.
In the prestige department store space, Barneys closing, Lord and Taylor going out of business and Neiman Marcus filing for bankruptcy contracted the wedding registry market, said Burt Flickinger, retail expert and managing director of retail consultancy Strategic Resource Group.
The space shrank further as mid-tier retailers that were popular destinations for affordable wedding gifts, such as JCPenney and Bed Bath and Beyond, struggled to stay alive or finally closed up shop, he said.
Bed Bath Beyond, which filed for bankruptcy on April 23 and has proceeded to liquidate and shut all of its stores and services such as wedding registries, had for decades been a top destination for engaged couples to set up their wedding registries.
But in recent years, the home goods chain’s lead in registries had slipped.
According to a 2022 report from investment firm Baird, Bed Bath and Beyond had lost ground in wedding registries to Amazon, Target and Williams-Sonoma.
For Etsy, which gained 7 million new customers in its last quarter (and has 90 million active shoppers in total on its marketplace), launching a wedding registry could help it continue to boost that number.
“It is a sensible move because Etsy’s growth, while good, has slowed a little,” said Saunders. “With this new venture, Etsy would hope to generate incremental revenue and introduce the platform to new customers. Some wedding guests might not have used Etsy and they could turn into a new, long-term customer.”
“This could be a win-win if Etsy gets it right,” he said.
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