Best Buy banks on gadgets trumping china with first wedding registry

Best Buy wants to be that something blue in your wedding.

The Richfield-based electronics retailer is leaping into the lucrative wedding industry by launching its first gift registry, catching up to couples whose lives at home center around multimedia family rooms instead of dining rooms filled with the traditional bounty of crystal and china.

Wedding registry kiosks, in the company's signature blue color, will begin rolling out to stores next month. Best Buy already quietly added a registry page to its website earlier this year and its mobile app will be updated with it next week.

"It makes sense for us to be in that space especially as some of the traditional [wedding registry] products like silverware and linens have migrated for millennials to digital products," Wendy Fritz, Best Buy Co. Inc.'s head of gift strategy, said.

Because Best Buy tends to sell bigger-ticket items than are typically given as wedding gifts, its registry carries an option for a group of people to contribute to pricey gifts.

The registry is the latest way Best Buy is trying to expand its appeal with women, who pull a lot of the strings when it comes to major household purchases. Over the past decade, Best Buy has tried adding personal shopping assistants, turning down the music in its stores and hiring more women in corporate roles. More recently, it has added colorful tech accessories from designers such as Kate Spade to dress up its otherwise drab selection. The company declined to disclose the gender makeup of its shoppers.

A hurdle for Best Buy will be catching the attention of brides, who tend to have the most control over the decision of where to register. But Fritz said many women want their partners to be more involved in the process, so having the registry at Best Buy could inspire more men to show interest in selecting items.

"We've approached this as the registry for that modern couple," she said. "We do know that Best Buy has a good percentage of customers who are male and we think this will intrigue them."

Fritz added that the wedding registry will also be a way for Best Buy to engage with female customers beyond just the brides since the primary gift givers are typically women.

While couples may be wary of registering at Best Buy because it has more expensive items, she noted that it also sells products such as Keurig coffee makers, Roku streaming sticks, and Ninja blenders. Best Buy is offering free shipping on all gifts purchased from a registry and a 10 percent completion discount for the couple to use to buy unclaimed items.

It's surprising that Best Buy hasn't had a wedding registry until now, said Dave Brennan, co-director of the University of St. Thomas Institute for Retailing Excellence. After all, most other mass retailers have them, including home improvement store Menards.

"It's a potential opportunity for them," he said. "But one of the things that will make it more of a challenge is that people don't normally associate Best Buy with weddings. So it's going to take some time to see whether or not this is really going to work."

Over the years, Best Buy executives toyed around with the idea of adding a registry. The idea finally gained some traction under CEO Hubert Joly's Renew Blue turnaround strategy. In addition to cutting costs and matching prices, he focused on driving sales around key life events such as birthdays and graduations. The retailer debuted a wish list application on its website and app around the back-to-school season and made enhancements to it before the holidays.

A wedding registry is also something that Best Buy's chief financial officer, Sharon McCollam, is well acquainted with from her former role as an executive at Williams-Sonoma, which has a popular wedding registry.

More than $10 billion is spent on wedding gifts every year, according to the popular wedding planning website The Knot. Most couples register at three stores. Bed Bath & Beyond, Target, and Macy's dominate the market.

Universal registries, which allow couples to register at more than one retailer, have also been gaining in popularity. So Best Buy will allow couples to sync their registries with some of those options.

Kitchen items are still the most common items couples ask for when they're getting married. But about 20 percent of couples said they would register at electronics stores if they had one, according to a survey by the Knot.

Amy Zaroff, a Minneapolis wedding planner, said it makes sense for Best Buy to have a registry since many couples, having waited until they are older to get married, already own the starter household items that once dominated registries.

"They may already own their own homes and they may have lived together for awhile and already combined their things," she said.

So these days she sees more couples registering for experiences such as funds toward their honeymoon or for cooking classes as well as for higher-priced items that are a bit of a splurge. While she hasn't seen iPads or Bose sound systems show up on a lot of registries yet, she wouldn't be surprised to see them start popping up there.

"You may not be registering for your first television, but that big screen you wanted may be more likely," she said.

Kavita Kumar • 612-673-4113