Getting onto the registry, six weeks before the baby arrives

Every other brand in the category was bidding on the same purchase moment: the week a parent realizes they need a bottle steriliser. That auction is crowded and expensive, and it arrives late — by then the parent has usually already been given most of their gear.

The decision that mattered happened earlier. An expectant parent assembles a registry somewhere around the second trimester, adds thirty to sixty items in a handful of sessions, and those items get bought by other people over the following months. The brand had no presence in that process at all: it was not appearing in registry-oriented searches, its listings answered none of the questions someone building a list asks, and nothing in its merchandising acknowledged that the decision and the purchase would be three months apart.

We treated the registry as a distinct channel with its own shopper.

• Registry-intent keyword work — the checklist and “must have” vocabulary of the planning phase, which is a different search set from the purchase phase.
• Listings that answer a planner's questions — what it replaces, what it works with, at what age it gets used, so an item can be justified to whoever will pay for it.
• Catalog spread across the checklist — an item in every slot a registry checklist prompts for, because a planner fills categories rather than compares brands.
• Imagery that survives a list view — a registry is browsed as a grid of thumbnails at speed, so the first frame has to identify what the product is for without being opened.

Monthly clicks from registry-intent search terms went from 1.1k to 14.7k, and revenue more than doubled to $402k a month.

The less obvious win is the shape of the year. The brand had been heavily dependent on Q4, which fell from 38% of annual revenue to 27% — not because Q4 shrank, but because registry demand arrives continuously: babies are born every month, and the list that gets built in March is bought in June. Acquisition also got cheaper, since the planning-phase keywords are contested by a fraction of the brands fighting over the purchase moment.