Gyft CEO Vinny Lingham knows what it feels like to give a bad gift. Lingham was scheduled to attend the wedding of a close friend, but after checking the online registry only a few days before the ceremony, he found just one item left unpurchased. "I gave one of my best friends a trash can for his wedding," says Lingham, who now laughs at the memory.
Lingham, hoping that bad registry purchases will soon become a thing of the past, announced Gyft's Gift Card Registry Wednesday afternoon. Users who log into their Gyft account from the company's website can register for up to eight gift cards they'd like to receive from more than 150 companies, then share those selections with friends and family either on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter or through email. Others can then purchase and send the cards through Gyft's website, or through the company's mobile app.
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More than 60% of holiday shoppers said that they wanted gift cards in 2012, and Lingham is hoping that mindset rings true for newlyweds, too. From venue costs to tuxedo rentals, nearly every aspect of the traditional wedding increased in price last year, according to a study by TheKnot.com and WeddingChannel.com. The 2011 version of the study found that guests spent more than $10 billion on registry gifts, not including cash gifts or presents purchased without using the registry.
A growing number of couples are choosing to share their registries online through personalized websites or social media channels, a trend that plays well into Gyft's strategy, and Lingham thinks biology could help point users toward a gift card registry, too. As the average age of the bride and groom continues to rise (brides are 29, grooms 31, on average, according to the study mentioned above), there is less need for small, household items and a greater desire for general travel or dining-related gifts, he says.

San Francisco-based Gyft will need to compete for attention, of course. Numerous online wedding registries already exist, including another gift card registry called CardAvenue, not to mention mobile gift card competitor Wrapp, which announced a $15 million funding round this summer.
But in some ways, Gyft has already outlasted some of its major competitors. Square axed its gift card service in June only seven months after it launched. Facebook killed its physical gift service last month after spending a reported $80 million on the startup Karma. The world's largest social network is moving toward digital gift codes instead, and while it is now competing in the same arena as Gyft, Lingham feels his company has a major head start.
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Gyft, meanwhile, has continued to grow. When the company launched in the fall of 2012, iOS was its only platform (it has since added an Android version and website). In addition to the new wedding registry function, users can buy and send gift cards to friends through the app, but they can also use it to upload the balance of physical plastic gift cards to their phone, meaning they no longer needed to carry gift cards in their purse or wallet. Lingham won't divulge how many registered users the company has, although it is less than a million, he says. More important to Lingham is that more than $10 million in plastic gift card balances have been uploaded using the app.
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Images: 401(K) 2012/Flickr, Gyft