Identifying a niche in the online wedding gift registry market, Yanika Amarasekera, the founder of Silver Aisle helps young couples receive the gifts they want.
Words: Tina Edward Gunawardhana
Photographs: Arantha Sirimanne
Cue a Sri Lankan wedding and guests come armed with boxed gifts of copious sets of glassware and dessert bowls which end up surplus to requirements. In the modern age couples are more savvy in their understanding of what they need to set up their new home. The advent of the wedding registry enables many new couples to select exactly what they need so that guests can buy those much needed items as wedding gifts. In order to make this process easy and more streamlined, young entrepreneur Yannika Amarasekera set up Silver Aisle, an online wedding gift registry service which has a vast selection of carefully curated weddings gifts which ticks all the right boxes from being practical to aesthetically pleasing.
What inspired you to start Silver Aisle?
It was a lot of little moments combined with the right timing. Having been at UC Berkeley for my undergrad, I was in very close proximity to the Silicon Valley which sparked an early interest in the world of tech startups. Given this, I completed a MSc in Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Management at Imperial College London and moved back to Sri Lanka in the hope of starting my own, although at the time, I wasn’t quite sure what it would be. It was over a casual conversation with my parents that one of their recurring jokes resurfaced; how they received ten tea sets and ten irons as wedding gifts. This was the ‘eureka’ moment! Having lived in the U.S. and London, I was already familiar with the concept of an Online Wedding Gift Registry, and was surprised to learn that it had not yet made its way to Sri Lanka––especially given our vibrant wedding culture.
The more people I spoke to, the more I realised that everyone had their own variation of ten-tea-sets; AKA––newlyweds either receiving multiples of the same item, or simply, items they don’t particularly love or need. This realisation sparked the beginning of Silver Aisle.
How receptive are Sri Lankans towards the concept of an online wedding gift registry?
More receptive than I initially envisioned! Once the process is explained, the most common response has been, “I wish I knew about this when I got married!”
What is its USP?
The right mix of cutting-edge technology and style. We developed proprietary technology with the customer in mind, and constantly try to elevate our product curation, quality, and of course, provide excellent customer service.
