Marking the start of the wedding season, June is a fitting time for the launch of online wedding-gift registry WeddingChannel.com, the latest bridal shopping site to march down the aisle.
The San Francisco-based company opened for business Wednesday – two days earlier than anticipated – after signing up national retailers including Crate & Barrel, Dillard's, Neiman Marcus, REI and Williams-Sonoma (WSM).
Unlike competitors that work directly with manufacturers and wholesalers, WeddingChannel.com is positioning itself as an extension of retailers' existing wedding-gift services, by some estimates a $17 billion annual market. Engaged couples can register for gifts in stores or online, and guests can visit the Web site to see composite gift lists and make purchases. The site is also constructed so shoppers can buy items for themselves, putting it in competition with traditional gift sites such as 911gifts.com. Retailers will handle their own fulfillment and delivery, and pay WeddingChannel.com undisclosed sales commissions, said Rebecca Patton, a former E-Trade VP who took over as CEO of the online gift registry in January.
WeddingChannel.com will carry some editorial content, but the site's reason for being is to take the hassle out of shopping for wedding gifts. "We're focusing on the part that was most broken," Patton said.
WeddingChannel.com, named after the newlyweds in O. Henry's classic short story, "The Gift of the Magi," is the latest in a growing stable of e-commerce players backed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the Silicon Valley venture-capital firm that provided the original funding for Amazon.com (AMZN), Drugstore.com and Realtor.com.
Despite its silver-spoon beginnings, WeddingChannel.com is playing catch up with competitors that have at least a year's head start and their own deep-pocket investors. Earlier this year, Federated Department Stores (FD) bought a 20 percent stake in WeddingChannel, a Pasadena, Calif., company originally backed by Idealab, the Internet incubator. At the time, Federated officials said they would use newly acquired direct marketer Fingerhut to fulfill WeddingChannel orders. In January, WeddingChannel signed a cross-marketing deal with Conde Nast's Bride's magazine, adding editorial cache.
In April, home-shopping giant QVC made a $15 million investment in the Knot, a New York based wedding and gift registry site that is expanding from its online roots into books and TV. As part of the deal, QVC will assume distribution and fulfillment for the Knot and make available its 100,000-product database.
If all goes well, WeddingChannel.com will branch out into other gift areas. But officials aren't saying whether that might include working with fellow Kleiner Perkins Web store, Amazon.com, which runs its own gift site. "We want to partner everywhere it makes sense," said Jessica DeLullo, who cofounded the company with fellow Stanford MBA grad student Jenny Lefcourt in 1998.
