What kind of gift registries does your store have, and how do you maintain them?

Our store has two different registries: bridal and baby. We keep a white, three-ring binder with everyone's statistics in it. That way, customers can call and say how much they want to spend. We'll also pull a sheet of china patterns off the computer with things like a bowl from a West Virginia artisan or a fireplace tools set, and help them make a choice. We don't have a Web site, because people still want to talk to a real person to be satisfied with their purchase before it goes out. We used to ask our registered couples permission to put their names and wedding dates in the local newspaper. But now we post that information in the front window. It's like a community bulletin board that everyone stops to read.

When we opened our first store seven years ago we also had a flower shop, and a bridal registry. But we lost that store, and I didn't really think about continuing the registry. However, now we're starting up the flowers again, so I guess we'd better start up a registry too. It just makes sense. It's also great free advertising, because people end up promoting the store by word of mouth. Anything you can offer that's a bonus to a customer is worth doing, even if it doesn't get used much. We're switching to a POS system that has a registry function, and we'll do a general gift registry: the broader the categories the better. Be it bridal or graduation or baby, we have merchandise that will suit any one of those categories.

Parchment has a general gift registry, but we haven't gotten into wedding-related registries. With the type of product we carry, we have a few things you could buy for a wedding present, but not really a broad enough selection to make it worthwhile to set up a separate registry. Rather, we suggest to the ladies who make up 95 percent of our customer base that they tell us which items in the store they like. We fill out a card and keep it on file, and then when their husband or boyfriend comes in for birthday or Christmas presents, we'll help them pick something out. We've promoted it in our newsletter, which we send out to 4,000 customers, but we've had very few people fill out the card. Frankly, I'm amazed.

At Ruby & Begonia, we keep gift registries for every imaginable occasion: weddings, babies, and wish lists. The binder with the wish lists sits on a table right by our front counter. When a customer comes in looking for a gift, they can flip through the binder to see if that person has filled out a wish request. In addition to the wish list, we ask for the customer's birth date, anniversary, and any other important dates they think should be remembered. We keep all of this information in a database, and two weeks before an event, we call the people listed on their wish list to let them know the customer has some items they would like. We also offer to pick one of those items out, wrap it, and deliver it if the gift-giver desires.