1. Buy Our Honeymoon is run by Shelley and Andrew Green — and we originally set up the site in 2005 for use at our own wedding.  We’d lived with each other before taking the plunge, so we already had all the housewares traditionally given as gifts, and very little room in our flat for any more.  The honeymoon registry concept hadn’t really made it across the pond to the UK at that point, and since Andrew had been a web developer since 1996, we decided to create it all completely from scratch.
2. Our honeymoon was a three-week, 3000-mile road trip across Florida and the Deep South.  We were amazed at the generosity of our family and friends, and we can honestly say that they all helped us to kick-start our marriage with the most amazing honeymoon we could possibly have dreamed of.  It sounds like marketing flannel, but it’s absolutely the truth: those memories are far more valuable to us than physical gifts ever could have been.
3. It was only after the birth of our daughter, Zoë, that we decided to further develop the site for other couples to use.  Some friends-of-friends really wanted to have a registry for their honeymoon to Las Vegas, so a lot of our initial work was to expand on what we’d done, for them.  Their enthusiasm, and the great response from their family and friends, really convinced us that the service might have legs.
4. Shelley’s dad was born and grew up in West Virginia, and Shelley lived there too when she was a toddler.  She’s told that, for a while, she talked with an American accent, but lost it when she moved back to London, aged four.
5. Andrew’s father was born in 1911 and, as a young man, worked as a footman to the former Lord Saye and Sele at Broughton Castle, and then as a butler to the Courage family (at the time, owners of a large brewery here in the UK).  Despite this, neither of us have ever watched Downton Abbey.
6. To celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary, we totally plan to repeat our honeymoon — but of course taking the girls with us (our second daughter, Ava, is now nearly two).  We can’t be sure which one of us is the most excited about this.
7. We called the site “Buy Our Honeymoon” because we knew that our family and friends would find it amusing (we were very careful to make sure everyone knew we really, really didn’t expect gifts).  In developing the business, we’ve found that the name is helpful for couples in understanding the concept — but most couples use one of the other URLs we offer for their actual registry.  Most guests never see those words at all!
8. We’ve been shortlisted as the UK’s Best Wedding Gift List in the annual Wedding Ideas magazine awards for three years running now, alongside giant High Street retailers and household names.  We’re hugely proud of this, and very, very grateful for the support our customers have shown us.
9. We’re always amazed by the creativity and adventure shown by couples using the site.  One of our earliest couples spent part of their honeymoon on an expedition to Antarctica!  Others have included fantastic gifts on their registries, including his-and-hers tattoos in Thailand, a drive through Death Valley, or scorpion kebabs from the night market in Beijing.
10. Until about a year ago, our offices (and before that, our home too) were in-and-below an old Victorian shop in Greenwich, just a stone’s throw from the Thames and about a hundred yards east of the meridian. Just before we moved in, some scenes from the Mike Leigh film All Or Nothing were filmed there.  The movie itself came out after we’d settled in, so it was very bizarre to see our home (looking quite different, but clearly recognisable) on the big screen!

Our listing will appear in the Little Black Book soon! Thanks so much to Kristina and the team at Style Me Pretty!

We’re delighted to announce that we’ve now added Dutch to the range of languages available for you to use on your site.  This brings the number of translations we offer to seven:

• French
• Spanish
• Portuguese
• Italian
• German
• Swedish
• Dutch

To use our multilingual wedding list service on your registry pages, just let us know which languages you’d like to use, and we’ll be happy to set it up for you. If you’re using PayPal to collect the value of your gifts, we’ll also make sure your guests have the same language options for their credit card transactions, where those options are available.

This service is completely free, and if you feel your guests would benefit from another language apart from the ones listed above, do please let us know.

This past year has been our busiest yet! We’ve served more couples, and helped guests reserve more gifts, than ever before. Our customers have been based across 38 different countries, and have made plans for over 130 different honeymoon destinations.  Last summer, we gave our site a top-to-toe redesign, and we were honoured this January to have been Highly Commended for the third year running in the annual Wedding Ideas Awards.

And as always, we have lots of plans for the year ahead. We’ll be introducing several new and exciting features for couples later this year, and we’re working on upgrading and improving the cogs and gears that run the site behind-the-scenes. Like all five-year-olds, we don’t like to sit still for too long!

We’re committed to bringing you the best wedding list service possible, and we’re really thrilled that so many of our customers take the time to send us their kind words of feedback, fantastic suggestions, or to recommend us to their friends and family. Many of our new customers choose us for themselves, having used us first as a guest — and we’re really honoured and grateful. Thank-you all!

Last month, Barclays Bank launched a new service that we think has the potential to provide a brilliant payment option for our customers here in the UK. Called Pingit, the service allows people to send and receive money using a simple app on their smartphones.  By simply providing guests with your mobile phone number, you can receive payments directly into your bank account, without having to pay any fees.

Although you have to register with the service to use it, you don’t have to bank with Barclays to receive money. However, right now you do have to bank with Barclays to send money — though Barclays plan to lift that restriction soon. Once that happens, we think this service will be a great alternative to online payments through PayPal for anyone based in the UK, and we’ll offer extra FAQ pages for guests to help guide them through the process.

There’s a lot of activity in the field of person-to-person payments at the moment, and it’s great to see big institutions like the banks start to offer new and innovative services like this. We’re all very used to making online payments with a credit or debit card, but we think that simple, convenient and trusted alternatives are just round the corner. We look forward to supporting every viable option that comes along!

We’re completely thrilled to reveal that Buy Our Honeymoon has won a Mumpreneur UK Gold Website Award!

The award acknowledges visually pleasing and easy-to-navigate web sites run by parents or parents-to-be, and we’re very honoured to be in such excellent company.

Mumpreneur UK offers a brilliant support network to mums (and dads) in business, and websites submitted for the award are considered by three professionals in the online industry who mark the site on a variety of criteria. The gold award is the highest level presented, so we’re truly delighted and deeply grateful!

We launched Buy Our Honeymoon shortly after our first daughter was born, and we’ve found that balancing the needs of our family with the needs of the business has actually benefitted our customers. The flexible working schedule involved means that we’re often more available at times when couples need us. Part of the reason we’re able to deliver famously-prompt responses to email enquiries is that we’re not a traditional business.

Of course, it’s the web that makes this kind of business possible. The way we work has changed so much in the last 15 years, led by the growth of the Internet.  This has enabled working parents to be more creative and innovative in terms of finding a work/life balance.

If you’re interested in the work of Mumpreneur UK, check them out on Facebook and Twitter!

On Buy Our Honeymoon, you can divide a gift up in a variety of ways.  The simplest is to present an item as a single gift, and once it’s reserved, it’s unavailable for other guests. Alternatively, you can allow a gift to be reserved an unlimited number of times, perhaps to receive contributions towards the cost of a larger item. You can also work out the overall cost of an item and break it down into a set number of manageable chunks.  For example, if you were planning on taking a helicopter flight costing £300, you could break this down into 6 lots of £50.  Once all 6 gifts have been reserved, the item will become unavailable.

Guests sometimes choose to reserve more than one piece of the pie, though. A generous guest might decide to give you the last £100 of your helicopter ride in a single gift.  Your email notifications and your Gift History have always shown the total value of an individual gift, but we now also show you how this relates to the way you’ve divided up the item:

It’s a really simple change, but one that we’re sure will make your gift notifications and gift history that little bit clearer and easier to understand.  Thanks to Christina for her excellent suggestion!

If you have any queries regarding this — or if you have any suggestions of your own like this — please don’t hesitate to get in touch, or to leave a comment on this post.

For the third year running, Buy Our Honeymoon was in the shortlist for the Best Wedding Gift List in the annual Wedding Ideas Awards!

Each year, the brilliant Wedding Ideas magazine organises the UK’s most prestigious consumer awards, with couples voting in their thousands for their favourite wedding suppliers, venues and services. The finalists this year for the Best Weding Gift List were:

• Buy Our Honeymoon
• Cancer Research
• Debenhams
• John Lewis
• Not On The High Street

We’re so thrilled to be in such illustrious, heavyweight company, and we’re very, very grateful to all our customers from 2011 that voted to put us there. You’re amazing and lovely, every last one of you!

This year, for the first time, the award winners in each category were chosen from the shortlist by a team of judges. And so, last Friday night, the award ceremony was held at The Brewery venue in the heart of London, where over 300 of the industry’s finest gathered for an awesome evening.

The 2012 winner in our category was Not On The High Street — a fab and hugely popular service for unusual and personal gifts sourced from a vast network of small, independent suppliers. Many congratulations!

One of the best things about this is how little we’re actually in competition with the other finalists — in business, that is, if not in the awards!  We mentioned this in 2010, when John Lewis won: we’re here to offer a romantic, practical alternative for couples who would actively prefer a different approach to their wedding gifts. To be rubbing shoulders with the biggest names in UK retail, both in stores and online, is a fantastic honour.

Thank-you to the team at Wedding Ideas — especially both Rachels and Martha — for the event, for their support, and for their ongoing dedication to providing an independent and individual voice on the newsstands. Commiserations and hugs to our industry colleagues who were also shorlisted in their respective categories, especially our friends at Shoot It Yourself, Cards By Sophie and Maisie Fantaisie. Howdy also to the lovely Mrs P and P, plus our tablemates at the National Wedding Show and the delightful Hellofoto Booths. And of course huge congratulations to all the winners, including the ever-fabulous Giddy Kipper and Lucy Ledger!

Lastly, thanks again to our amazing couples. We’re really honoured by your votes, your kind feedback and encouragement, and your trust in choosing us to be part of your big day. We promise again to do everything we can to deserve your support for next year!

We set up Buy Our Honeymoon for our own wedding because we’d lived together for several years before taking the plunge, and didn’t need more stuff. We’d looked at traditional department store gift lists, but everything we thought about adding felt like we’d be listing it for the sake of listing something. What we really wanted was the trip of a lifetime, to start our lives together as a married couple.

We’ve found that guests love the romance of this. Your guests want their gift to be meaningful to you, and want you to have something by which you can remember them, something that acknowledges their love for you. If that’s an excursion swimming with dolphins, or a bottle of champagne on room service, that’s just as exciting — maybe more so — than glassware in your cupboard.

You don’t have to go into painstaking detail, but guests engage really well with lists that have a variety of items, and that allow your personality to show through. It becomes something much more real than just a bland request for cash.

If you’re concerned that some of your guests might be cautious about the idea of a honeymoon gift list, here are a few tips:

• Remember that your guests never have to see the phrase “buy our honeymoon”.  You can choose from a whole range of discreet web addresses for your registry, including the-gift-of-memories.com, our-hearts-desire.co.uk, our-wedding-list.co.uk and our-honeymoon-registry.com.
• You don’t have to limit your list to only honeymoon contributions. You can add any number of gifts for back in the real world too — see this sample registry for a few ideas.
• Guests are always attracted to unique gifts and special treats more than donations towards the basics. Show tickets, spa treatments, excursions, meals, room and car upgrades are all always popular choices. And you can be creative with the way you divide up items and write your descriptions to emphasise the romance of flights and accommodation — consider allowing a guest to sponsor the first night of your hotel stay, or that last hour of your flight just before you land.
• There’s only really one golden rule of etiquette: thank your guests. Send a personal, handwritten thank-you note or card after you’ve returned for your honeymoon. Perhaps you could include a photo of you enjoying your gift?

For more ideas on making the most of your honeymoon registry, see our ten top tips. And if you have any queries about setting up your list, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

So we got in touch with Kate from perfectminimoon.com to see if she’d like write a guest post for us on the rise of the minimoon! We’re really thrilled that she agreed! Over to you, Kate…

Getting married is one of, if not the best time of your life and the icing on your perfectly crafted wedding cake is of course your perfect honeymoon.

These days however many newlyweds often find it impossible to have the trip of their dreams straight after their wedding. Maybe they don’t have the time, or any holiday left to take at work. Increasingly, people want to celebrate their nuptials with their children, their dog, and even their in-laws. Then there’s the factor of cost and the current financial climate; many couples simply don’t have the cash to spend on a honeymoon.

Of course, that’s often why couples choose to set up their wedding gift list with Buy Our Honeymoon — but if you’re getting married in June and you’re planning a honeymoon in the Maldives, you’re going to have to wait a while before the monsoon weather settles down and you can jet away!

And that’s where the minimoon comes in…

A minimoon is simply a glorious short trip, for example a long weekend, which is usually within driving distance or via short flight. Here you can spend a little time away with your beloved, without worrying about the passport you’ve left by the kitchen sink, the three-hour long check in queue at the airport, papier-mâché airplane food, or sitting next to the most annoying man in history on your 14-hour long-haul flight.

One of the great things about a minimoon, is that it can be exactly what you want – luxurious and decadent, small and cosy, dog- and child-friendly, set in a forest, city-based, or with a country pub at the end of the road… it is your chance to fall in love all over again, in your own time and at your own pace.

The UK is blessed with a wide selection of minimoon locations ranging from romantic boutique escapes to indulgent city centre chic. From the eminently affordable to the gloriously expensive, you’ll want your minimoon destination to be perfect for you.

To make the process of booking your minimoon as easy and as enjoyable as possible, take a look at perfectminimoon.com, which offers independent reviews of the very best UK minimoon locations. There you’ll also find rich colour photo galleries of the lovely venues we recommend, insider information on the best rooms to stay in, and you’ll even be able to email your loved one a link to the venue you’ve set your heart on… we’re here to help!

Thanks, Kate! You can find out more about perfectminimoon.com on their blog, or you can follow @perfectminimoon on Twitter —and don’t forget to follow @BuyOurHoneymoon for all the latest news and developments here at the UK’s leading gift list service for honeymoons of any size!

• When adding your PayPal account to your honeymoon registry, we’ll now ask you to enter the address twice, just to make sure there are no typos. It’s really important that the email address you enter here is the right one for your account, to prevent any gifts being sent to an account that doesn’t exist. (We’ve already got systems in place to try to catch this if it does happen, but we’re hoping that simply re-entering your address will help prevent it happening at all.)
• We’ve simplified our signup form a bit. We no longer ask for titles (Mr, Ms etc), or your postal address. This also means that, if you’re in the UK, when you go to request your registry cards, you can specify a delivery address there and then.
• Do you have a promotional code but forgot to enter it when signing up for your trial? It’s OK, you can now enter it when you go to the checkout.

If you have any queries about making the most of your honeymoon gift list, or have any suggestions for improvements we could make, please don’t hesitate to drop us a line. You can also reach us on Facebook, Twitter, or by leaving a comment using the form below.