Photo on thumbnail courtesy of Vey Gallery. Cake created by Cakes by Gina.

When it comes to the wedding planning experience, there are a few things that you and your partner are going to want to keep in mind. First and foremost, you want to ensure the entire process is as stress-free as possible and that you’re able to enjoy every moment of it! This is obviously a no-brainer, right? Secondly, a big factor in ensuring that it is stress-free is going to revolve around staying organized. Unsurprisingly, there are a number of different wedding planning tasks that you’ll need to complete in the months leading up to your big day. Some of these will require immediate attention shortly after your engagement, while others aren’t necessarily as urgent! Nonetheless, they’ll all serve an important role on your special day.

Now…given that there are a wide variety of potential wedding planning tasks that you’ll need to complete, we would like to welcome you to our wedding blog. Having hosted hundreds of weddings at our venue, Madera Estates, our team is always looking to provide engaged couples with resources as they plan their own wedding celebrations. That could be inside looks at past weddings held at Madera Estates, tips on selecting your vendors or anything else wedding-related! The common goal though is to help ensure your wedding is exactly what you’ve envisioned it being.

With that all being said, this week’s blog post is going to discuss an item that you’ll likely start on roughly 8-9 months before your wedding and that is the creation of your wedding registry. It’s something that you can gradually add to, but you also don’t want to find yourself leaving it until the last minute either. We’ll discuss a few tips for creating yours and hopefully answer any questions that you may have previously had!

When should you start on your wedding registry?

As mentioned in the opening section above, one of the easiest ways to make your wedding planning experience stress-free is to stay organized and have a timeline/checklist to utilize. This will ensure you don’t forget anything along the way and take care of the time-sensitive items first. In regards to a wedding registry, you can really start adding to this as early as you want. You don’t have to send it out right away, but you can begin adding items to it when you or your partner think of something. With that in mind, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to get the process started about 8-9 months in-advance of the big day with the goal being to have it ready to go by 4-5 months prior to your wedding.

How should you share your wedding registry with guests?

Now that we have a timetable set for creating the wedding registry and having it ready to share, the next question becomes: how should you share it with your guests? In today’s digital world, wedding websites have become increasingly popular. After all, it can serve a variety of purposes, including just providing your guests with important information and details for your wedding day. Well…amongst those key details should also be a link to your wedding registry. Plus, when you send out your invitations and/or save-the-dates (if your registry is ready by then), you can include an insert with the wedding website URL (not the registry URL) or even a QR code that goes straight to the wedding website. The one thing that you’ll want to remember though is that it isn’t recommended to directly list your wedding registry right on the invitations or save-the-dates themselves (in terms of wedding invitation etiquette, that is!).

Another easy avenue for sharing your wedding registry with guests is to send the wedding website link to your immediate family and close friends first and allow it to spread via word of mouth. All in all though, we primarily wanted to highlight the wedding website aspect here, as that is going to be the perfect platform for including registry details.

What should you add to your wedding registry and where should you pick items from?

Our third and final topic of discussion in this week’s blog post will be about the actual items that you’ll be adding to the registry. This is obviously going to be dependent on the couple creating the registry, but there are definitely a few different places that many couples look into.

Amazon – One place that you can’t go wrong with is Amazon. With such a variety of products available, you’ll have no trouble finding things to add to your wedding registry. Plus, with their easy-to-use registry platform, guests will be able to seamlessly make purchases as well!

Cash – If you’ve already lived together with your partner for some time and don’t need many of the common registry items, then another idea could be to ask for a monetary gift to be used for a bigger purchase, such as a home or honeymoon. There are registries out there that offer this capability, so if you can’t think of too many tangible items to add, this would be something you might want to consider.

Target – Another store that has continued to be a popular platform for wedding registries is Target. As you can likely guess, Target is also an ideal choice for wedding registries due to the plethora of options they have available and ease of access.

As you start to browse through different options for wedding registries, you’ll quickly notice that many places offer them. We highlighted a few of the more popular options above, but that is by no means a comprehensive list. Names like Crate & Barrel and Macy’s are popular possibilities too! Another thing to keep in mind as we wrap up this week’s blog post is to remember to select products available at a variety of price points too! This is key, as you may have immediate family members or close friends that plan to spend more on a gift than other guests attending the wedding. To sum it up, there are plenty of options and platforms available nowadays when putting together a wedding registry, so we’re sure you’ll have no trouble finding things that you and your partner can use.

Host Your Wedding Celebration at Madera Estates!

Compiling your wedding registry is one of many tasks that you’ll find yourselves completing in the months leading up to your big day. As we discussed in the opening section, some of these items are ones that you’ll want to complete shortly after getting engaged, while others are things that you can periodically check off as the wedding day draws near. In the end, having a timeline or checklist is going to be extremely helpful to ensure everything stays on track and is organized!

We hope you enjoyed following along on this week’s blog post all about wedding registries. While it may seem like a rather straightforward wedding planning component, there are a few things that go into it! If you’re engaged and searching for a wedding venue near the Houston area, we would be happy to show you around our venue, Madera Estates, which is located in Conroe, TX. To learn more about Madera Estates, we encourage you to request a copy of our Pricing Guide by filling out the form HERE. In addition, if you have any questions for our team, you’re more than welcome to give us a call at (936) 441-9337.