Review: Zola Registry
At my bridal shower my Mom called me a non-traditional bride and that feels pretty true. I didn’t wear a wedding gown, I attended my bridal shower in bright orange, we had our ceremony privately, and we delayed our honeymoon two months to work it around an NFL football game in Munich. We are who we are. I have however tried to share some useful wedding related advice along the way including what we registered for since we already had two homes worth of essentials and I wanted to also write a review of Zola, who we used for our registry, in hopes this will also be helpful to other brides.
First, Blake kept saying we didn’t need a registry since we weren’t actually having a wedding that would be attended by others BUT since I was having a bridal shower and we have an insane network of friends and family I knew we’d be better off giving people ideas who did want to purchase items for us than not. In hindsight my thoughts are that if you have most of what you need for a home it’s even MORE important to have a registry as you will otherwise get a lot of duplicates. I used this as a chance to upgrade (example: real silverware instead of plated) and to stock us with awesome items for entertaining (something we both love).
So, why Zola? Honestly, I researched how you could register for items from multiple sites and not only did Zola have a HUGE selection of items from most of my favorite stores (Crate & Barrel) and brands (Yeti) but they also had a button you could add to your browser to link to ANY item on ANY website you wanted. If you picked something that wasn’t already on Zola you had the option to get the equivalent in cash and purchase yourself (I did this with Away Travel to add a piece to my luggage set) or you could let them purchase from outside sites (I did this with a couple Amazon items so people who wanted fast shipping could get it).
A piece of advice for all Zola registry users : price matching. Zola offers price matching. So after people purchased items for us, if I could find them on the internet for less money I would call or e-mail and ask for a price match. Each time they credited me the difference in Zola credit which I later used to buy: a yeti blanket, a Blackstone grill, 2 nice charging stations, an ice bucket, and the bowls for our dish set. These were items we wanted but hadn’t been purchased off the registry so I used the price match money to cover them. After your wedding date Zola gives you a 20% discount on items for 6 MONTHS that you still have to purchase. I shared previously that we had no real needs only wants but we were able to cover everything with only a few bucks out of our own pockets which was amazing. The price matching process wasn’t tedious, the customer service was friendly, and it paid for itself easily.
Another thing I’d like to share because I think many other couples do this: we did a cash fund. We debated between a boat fund or a couch fund but in the end we went with a honeymoon fund. A few weeks after we made a registry we found out we were going to get to spend 10 days in Europe for our honeymoon and this gave us the chance to take contributions for the trip. This worked out so well for us that we may actually get to do everything we want without coming out of pocket (did I mention we have THE most generous family and friends?). Zola gives you the option to put the processing fee on your contributors (we did) and then you get every penny they intended for you too. The fees were just your standard card processing so it only added a couple bucks for our people. Funds became available after a couple of days and could be added right into your bank account.
Final thoughts:
Loved the way it tracked addresses and let me mark when I sent thank you cards so no one will be missed
Zola gave me the option to ship things to myself whenever it made sense for me (before we got married, after, avoiding any travel, etc)
One negative if I were to give one is that their e-mail customer service was a bit slow - usually a few days for a response (no chat option available) but by phone I had pretty good luck
Shipping was QUICK and I didn’t have anything come broken, damaged, wrong, etc which wins them points in my book
So, landing this plane I would definitely recommend Zola. It made the process easy and we were so thrilled with everything we received. Most of our guests gave good feedback as well about the user experience for guests. Hope this helps other bride-to-bes navigate getting what you want & need.
