I admit it – I’m a plagiarizer. Of course, I’m not a copier when it comes to writing, but rather I’m a copycat when it comes to creating gift registries.
When I was putting our baby registry together, I checked out the registry of a friend whose taste I trust and added a bunch of what she had on her registry to mine, and I also consulted the registries of a few other friends for gear help as well.
This copycat trick saved me a bunch of research time and helped me make tough baby gear choices (like which stroller to get) once I’d narrowed my options down to a few choices with the help of the book Baby Bargains.
This is why today’s hint is a really easy way to create your baby registry: Copy what’s on the registry of a friend (or the registries of friends) you trust.
I’m not the only advocate of this trick. Writer Nicole Fabian-Weber, for instance, in a piece on “The Clueless Girl’s Guide to Creating a Baby Registry” notes that her first step in creating her baby registry was to look at an old friend’s registry and tailor it to her needs.
And the site WhattoExpect.com is now encouraging those creating registries to “get inspired” by its new and helpful “Love-It Lists,” which are lists of favorite baby gear products from influential moms. In other words, registry copying is going mainstream and now you can even copy famous moms.
To be sure, you’ll want to be selective when picking out gear to copy, only choosing the items that work for your lifestyle. You’ll also want to use relatively recent registries as inspiration since baby gear items are like cars, with new models coming out annually.
It’s important too to be sensitive to the fact that not all friends may appreciate the copycatting. As one Baby Center mom recently asked the site’s community in a post entitled “Registry copycat:” “Has anyone dealt with a friend copying almost all the same items on your registry? Trying not to overreact- but it is so bizarre to me. We are due 3 weeks apart and have a lot of mutual friends.”
For this reason, try to stick with copying friends who live in other states (so you’re not likely to be walking together with the same exact stroller and gear all the time).
And perhaps most importantly, before you do the copying, you’ll want to read through a book like Baby Bargains to make sure you know which baby gear products are wastes of money and not worth registering for, instead of assuming your friends have this information as well.
Finally, this copying trick doesn’t just work for baby registries. I also used it to create my wedding registry (another variation of the decade-long copycat wedding trend) and it can also help you narrow down other hard decisions, like picking out photos to include in wedding or baby’s first year albums. For instance, to create our wedding album, I used a sample wedding photo album my wedding photographer had as the outline and framework for deciding which photos to pick out from boxes of proofs.
What are your thoughts on the copycat registry approach and your registering tips? How did you make registering for baby (and wedding) gifts easier?
[…] I was pregnant and figuring out which baby gear to get, I spent hours interviewing my friends and checking out their online baby registries, compiling their product choices and recommendations into a messy Microsoft Word “gear list” […]