Couples shaking up wedding registries
For better or worse, traditional gifts are traded in for simple request: cash
Rachel Osborne and her fiancé, Kyle Rapp, have more silverware than they know what to do with. Same goes for drinking glasses. And plates and bowls, and all those other bed, bath and beyond necessities they have crammed into their one-bedroom apartment in Rice Village. So in preparation for their July wedding, they’ve decided to forgo the traditional wedding registry.
Sound crazy? Osborne has some family members who’d agree. But the truth is that millennial couples such as Osborne and Rapp — who are 27 and 28, respectively — are changing the game when it comes to bridal registries, whether you think that’s for better or worse.
Osborne has plenty of friends who still opt for the traditional registry. Last year, she even offered to have one friend’s wedding gifts shipped to her apartment during the bride’s honeymoon.
“There were these
gigantic boxes, and we barely had space to keep it all,” Osborne recalled. “It had me trying to picture where we would put all these things, if they were for us.”
They’d need a bigger place, which, to be fair, is what she really wants anyway.
“We want money toward something. We want to buy a house,” she said. “So if we had help with that from our family and friends, then that’s worth more than a KitchenAid mixer or pots and pans that we have no room for.”
In 2019, it’s tempting to take one look at Osborne’s story and file it away as evidence that millennials are killing wedding registries. But really, they’re just shaking them up. When Macy’s launched the wedding-registry concept in the 1920s, brides and grooms were much younger, moving out from their parents’ houses to a home of their own and in need of basic things such as flatware and linen napkins.
But now, the average age of a first-time groom has reached an all-time high of 30, and brides are an average of 28. They’ve likely lived together already, like Osborne and Rapp, and they bought their own toaster years ago. As a result, a growing number of brides and grooms are creating new traditions by asking guests for help paying for honeymoons and down payments on a home, stirring a major shift in America’s $80 billion wedding industry.
Cash, not presents
Still, their decision to nix the registry altogether makes Osborne and Rapp outliers in the shift.
“Registries as a whole are not dying,” said Alyssa Longobucco, style and planning editor for The Knot. “Still, 9 in 10 couples establish a wedding registry — that’s 88 percent of couples, which is still a large majority. It’s just a matter of those registries looking different.”
Specifically, many millennials are asking for cash. And some are even registering for it.
“Cash funds are a huge, huge way of asking for wedding presents,” Longobucco said. “And they’re up 6 percent in the last year alone.”
Arden Larberg, 30, and her fiancé, Matt Phillips, 31, felt similarly to Osborne and Rapp when they began discussing registries upon their engagement last May. At first, they considered doing without any of the traditional registries, in favor of a cash fund. But after some thought, they picked out a set of towels and a few pieces of stemware they’d like to have.
When Larberg told her mother that the couple planned to ask for donations toward their Hawaii honeymoon, her mom wasn’t completely surprised, knowing that her daughter had bought blenders and flatware for her condo in Woodland Heights along the way. But she wasn’t quite on board either.
“She was like, ‘Well, I don’t know how people are going to feel about that,’ ” Larberg recalled, laughing. “Our older friends and family had this knee-jerk reaction where they were like, ‘That’s tacky.’ ”
She sighs. “Which is so weird. I’m like, ‘We’re in our 30s. We don’t need stuff, y’all.’ ”
Though the reaction was weird for Larberg and Phillips, who’ve made their fair share of cash contributions to friends over the years, it’s not that surprising. In 2018, the financial website NerdWallet found that 52 percent of wedding guests agree that “it’s tacky to ask wedding guests to give money instead of a gift,” and the share only goes up with age, with 57 percent of baby boomers believing this. The survey doesn’t include data from the Silent Generation, but common sense holds that the disapproval is likely even higher among that cohort.
‘Perfectly appropriate’
It shouldn’t be, said Lizzie Post, co-president of the Emily Post Institute, which serves as America’s unofficial authority on etiquette.
“It’s perfectly appropriate to give cash, checks or gift cards,” she said. “And that’s been appropriate for quite some time.”
Especially among people of color. While linens and irons have been staples at white weddings for decades, ceremonial gifting of money has always been a key part of many Asian weddings, as well as ceremonies for many other cultures. With millennials representing the nation’s most-diverse generation ever, it makes sense that a shift like this would coincide with their move into the wedding generation.
Still, Post noted that some guests who’ve never encountered this may feel like cash is more of a financial transaction than a gift.
“We suggest you not just do random or cashonly funds. You want to have something it’s going towards, and that helps the giver feel like they’re giving something specific, and I think that makes it feel connected,” she said. “When you have an open cash registry, it’s like, ‘Did you just spend it on bills?’ It’s supposed to be a gift. So you want to see it get treated that way in some way, shape or form.”
This is the route that Larberg and Phillips opted for, posting a link to their wedding website for a registry with Traveler’s Joy, one of a growing number of honeymoon funds that allow couples to list various parts of their trip as separate presents.
“When I told my family that someone can buy us lunch one day, and we’ll send them a thank-you note with pictures of lunch, or text them, like, ‘Thank you so much for lunch,’ that seems to go over much better with older relatives and friends of the family,” Larberg said. “At first, they reacted poorly, and now they’re all on board. They’re telling their friends about it, like, ‘Isn’t this cool?’ ”
It’s as if Larberg and Phillips have become ambassadors for their generation. And they’re not the only ones.
“This shift has been happening for a while now, and I think we’re reaching a critical turning point in the shift,” said Sara Margulis, CEO and co-founder of Honeyfund, a major name in the cashfund space, which has collected nearly $600 million in contributions since its launch in 2006.
“More and more couples are living together before marriage. They have their household set up, and they don’t have that savings that prior generations have — and they also value experiences over things,” said Margulis, who officially launched the company with her husband a year after they created it for their own nuptials. “Things happen gradually until there’s a tipping point, and I think we’re at the tipping point. And the millennials as the wedding generation now, it’s just a no-brainer.”
As diverse as they are, not all millennials are going to agree to head in one direction. So though Larberg and Phillips post a honeymoon fund on their site, others will continue to use the more traditional registries while still others, like Osborne and Rapp, will skip registering altogether.
“No two couples are alike,” said Natalie Dawley, who owns the wedding-planning company Two Be Wed, and is Larberg and Phillips’ wedding planner. “And it really depends on what the couple values and truly what their needs are.”