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It’s been two years since we launched Buy Our Honeymoon and we never expected it to have the enormous success it’s had.

Since our launch, very nearly 2000 couples have signed up to our honeymoon wedding list service from around the globe.   Tens of thousands of gifts have been reserved through the site and the service itself has changed almost beyond recognition.

For some time now, I’ve joked with Andrew about how embarrassed I am about the original list we wrote back in the summer of 2004!  It now seems so sparse compared to the lists I’ve written for our couples using the Ultimate Service.

Of course, back then the idea of a honeymoon gift list barely existed in the UK — and there wasn’t much to help me from the States either.  So the list was written completely from scratch, with no structure or format to guide me.  Just me making it up as I went along.

So we thought it would be a nice idea to see how far we’ve come in the last two years by re-writing the original list by showing all the features we’ve added along the way (and how much writing practice I’ve had in that time!)

Here’s our original list — that we used for our own wedding:

http://www.buy-our-honeymoon.com/farley.green.1

And here’s the Special Edition:

http://www.buy-our-honeymoon.com/ShelleyandAndrew

The most obvious change between them is the pictures.  We really didn’t want to go down the route of just providing a library of stock images, so we needed to figure out a way you could upload your own pictures (from anywhere) that would look great.  I really feel it adds interest to the page and helps guests get a flavour of what they’re giving you.

Many of our themes are now customisable — so for the new version of our list, you’re treated to a picture of us.  It’s actually from our honeymoon, which I guess is bending the rules just a bit!  The customisable designs mean that you can effectively create your own theme for any travels around the world.  We thought Disney’s Cinderella Castle represented our honeymoon best — although I am personally not the biggest fan of the mouse. That honour goes to our daughter!

Another significant change is in the level of description I’ve put for each item.  The more detail you can provide, and the more personal you can make each gift on your registry, the more engaging and successful your list will be. Our original list used the four categories we provide as defaults when you first sign up for your free trial — but we’ve seen couples make incredibly creative use of categories to break up their registry and to tell the story of their honeymoon.

We’ve also added links within item descriptions, a choice of website domains, and the ability to personalise your web address too. Not to mention the ability to request contributions or to specify the number available of an individual item.
Although many of the changes are behind-the-scenes, we feel the comparison really shows how much the site has developed since we went live back in 2007.

So, as we raise our champagne in toast to another successful year, we look to the future and the all the plans we have to make it even better.

Please keep your suggestions coming in, because we really do listen and we really do want to make Buy Our Honeymoon the best honeymoon registry service we possibly can.

But after a few weeks people started to find us. Month on month our numbers grew — and then, at new year, interest in Buy Our Honeymoon blew through the roof!

On this, our first anniversary, we’re extremely proud of the site we have created. We top the main web search results and are often recommended on the wedding planning forums – people seem to know who we are. As well as all our couples from the UK, we’ve had customers from Canada, the US, mainland Europe and Asia too!

We love how adventurous and creative our clients are, with amazing honeymoons to Zanzibar, Bora Bora, Easter Island, and even Antarctica. We’re constantly impressed by people’s humour and imagination in putting together their lists.

And it seems we were right about many people’s preference for paying a one-off fee instead of having commission taken from their gifts. In the vast majority of cases we are cheaper (sometimes a lot cheaper) than registries based on a service charge. Indeed, many lists have been wildly popular — one of our couples in the US were given almost $18,000! The typical 9% service charge on this would have been $1,620!

The site has changed and developed hugely over the year: we’ve listened to our customers and responded to your wishes. Themed registry cards, alternative domain names, uploadable photos, availability countdowns, sortable lists — we’ve averaged two new features a month since our launch.

As so to the future! We will continue to listen and improve the site. We have lots of plans and lots of ideas. But as we crack open the champagne, we mainly wanted to say this: thank you all for being part of a great year!

Although we have a good presence in the states, we are principally a UK company, so we were really flattered to be listed when there are so many honeymoon registries in the US (much more so than in the UK).

Our excited plans to blog this were diminished somewhat when we read one of the comments that followed:

“Poorly researched, picked obvious sites like The Knot and something as crass as buy-our-honeymoon.com (why not give-us-money.com?) There are way better sites for the honeymoon registry concept and there are a number of wedding-related sites that are not as commercial as The Knot yet offer great information.”

We have to admit we were a bit put out by that. At first we thought, well we can’t blog this now, it doesn’t make us look good. Well, actually we thought of giving him a good telling off first, but then we both realised we’re in our thirties and it’s not the done thing…

But then we got to thinking: crass? We aren’t crass. It evidently wasn’t the concept of a honeymoon registry that bothered him (some people have issue with gift lists at all, in any form) but the name.

Well, apart from the fact that he clearly wasn’t at all familiar with our service, otherwise he would have known we have lots of domains available for people to use, I think the problem here is really a cultural clash.

Americans can often be much more literal than the British (I am allowed to say that because my dad and brother are both Yanks). When we first created Buy Our Honeymoon, we called it that in a tongue-in-cheek, ironic way that we knew would amuse our guests. But then that’s what the English are famous for: taking the mick.

We created Buy Our Honeymoon because we hated the idea of asking friends and family to simply donate to a travel agent. Aside from the fact that we know many of them would not have done it, we felt we would have been robbing them of the opportunity to buy us a gift.

Although, having helped many other couples put their lists together over the past year, I think our own list could be improved, I put a huge amount of effort into making it. I wanted each gift to be special and important so that it would please whomever bought it and a little piece of our joy would be shared.

That principle guides every choice we make. That’s why we do everything we can to encourage people to make their lists fun and creative, so that their guests really enjoy buying them the gift.

According to the Cambridge English Dictionary, crass means: “without consideration for how other people might feel.” That couldn’t be further from who we are.

That’s why I think we are genuinely the best registry available — it is precisely because we are not crass that we work so well.

You’ve always been able to add pictures to items on your list – but previously you needed to resize the images yourself, to have them hosted on an external site (such as Photobucket) and to use some special formatting code to include them on the site.

But as of today, you can upload pictures directly from your computer to your list, and they will automatically be scaled, cropped and positioned to look great. We’ve added some images to one of our sample lists, so you can see the end result!

We’ve tried to make the whole process as easy as possible (don’t forget to check out our friendly online help when you log in), but as always do drop us a line if you need any assistance at all.

Happy uploading everyone!

We’ve always offered our UK and EU customers a set of 100 registry cards when you sign up for either our Standard or Gold plans — and now, you can choose your design and your own message. Each design corresponds to one of our list themes (although you don’t have to choose the card design that matches your list if you don’t want to).

You can also decide if you’d like to include our telephone number on the cards so that we can help your less Internet-savvy guests reserve an item for you. If you prefer to follow tradition you could put the mother of the bride’s number instead — or simply include an extra thanks.

The new cards are roughly credit-card sized, and include the URL of your own list, so that your guests can go straight to your pages without having to search for you from our homepage.

We’re really pleased with how this project has turned out. We liked our old cards but really feels this sets us apart from everyone else who offers this type of service.

But, of course, we’d love to know what you think…

PS: You can order your cards once you’ve chosen your plan — but if any of our already-signed-up customers for 2008 simply must have these new cards, please just get in touch, and we’ll be very happy to sort you out.

I must say that Andrew has been very clever and customised this carefully so that a extra information is displayed if you’ve set up your list to accept payments by PayPal. There are also slight differences between the FAQs depending on whether you’re using our honeymoon registry service in the USA, or our honeymoon gift list service in the UK.

If you’ve got any suggestions for further topics we could add to the guest FAQs, please do get in touch, or leave a comment on this post.

We have recently launched a US version of Buy Our Honeymoon and have just begun our marketing process in the States.

Pricing, time zones, and the language gap have all been considerations and we’re pleased with the results.

It’s nice that on the day that we’re fully up and running, one of the trials has turned into our first US sale. The timing is great.

Now let’s just see if Mr Williams can fare as well.

I really feel like a kid at Christmas over this. Why? Because that was the magazine I read when I was planning my (oops I mean our) wedding back in 2004/05.

Details about us are on their homepage and they are also offering a Gold Plan. So that’s two ways to get the full service treatment. Fingers crossed to all!

The new edition of Perfect Wedding Magazine was released today and they are offering their readers a chance to win a Buy Our Honeymoon gold plan! The prize includes a honeymoon gift list, a choice of design, 100 gift registry cards, a personal consultation and the entire list written for you.

There is also a 20% discount available to everyone who signs up with the special code printed in the magazine and a trial lasting until the end of July.

Good luck folks… winner to be announced next month!

We want to wish them a wonderful day, a fantastic honeymoon and a happy life together.

Congratulations to the Clarks!