It’s no secret that Bend is booming with entrepreneurs offering experiences from farm to table facials to cooking classes to outdoor adventure and more. Entrepreneur, Marilen Rose, is tapping into that community, with her own innovative startup, bringing these local experiential gifts to the world through her new online gift registry, My World Registry.
Rose created My World Registry for milestone celebrators such as future newlyweds, graduates or people with an upcoming birthday, who have enough stuff and want to have an experience. Rose’s website allows users to register for their experience rather than say, a new blender. If you can dream it, you can create it on Rose’s site. My World Registry also has a marketplace for unique providers to sell their experiences to interested adventurers, gifters, and receivers.
“We felt moved to make a place where dreamers and seekers of all kinds can connect directly with thoughtful givers and get a gift-experience that changes their lives and in turn changes the world,” Rose says.
While Rose was growing up in Chile, her family moved across the country a number of times. The exposure to Chile’s vastly different environments, from the desert to the sea, instilled in Rose the crucial life-skill of adaptation and cultivated a desire within to always be experiencing new things. She grew up to be a lifetime learner. However, entrepreneurship was not promoted in Rose’s family.
“It was not encouraged in my upbringing and society,” Rose says.
Rose moved to the United States when she was 17 years old. She learned English and earned a degree in psychology. Rose also spent time studying and living in the Canary Islands in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain, where she got a degree in tourism and business.
“I loved learning about the travel and hospitality industry and my heart was full from living in other countries and doing what the locals do,” Rose said. “It was a transformational experience and I decided I would one day enable others to enjoy these travel experiences.”
Rose put her passion for experiences on the backburner and pursued other career passions. It wasn’t until she found herself burnt out in the corporate world that the entrepreneur bug really bit. Many of her friends were getting married and Rose realized there weren’t many registries that allowed for the gifting of an experience to celebrate their big day. The ones available, she noted, needed innovation. Thus, the idea for My World Registry was born.
Rose began her journey creating My World Registry while she was living in Austin, Texas. She and her husband moved to Portland and finally settled in Bend. Rose says she was worried at first, about being a female tech entrepreneur in a small mountain town, but that it has been the best move she could have made, for both her family and her business.
While My World Registry is not limited to Bend experiences, it was important to Rose that she gives back to the community that helped foster her launch.
