Choosing items for your gift list has to be one of the most pleasant aspects of planning a wedding: should we go for the duck-egg blue Le Creuset or the teal? Is it distasteful to ask for a £150 toaster at the height of the credit crunch? Will we ever actually use a salad spinner?

After considering a few companies that organise these lists, my fiancé and I decided to plump for Wrapit, which calls itself the “ultimate wedding-list service”. We’d read that it offered more than 30,000 products from 350 brands; it had even won Wedding Ideas magazine’s award for best UK wedding-list provider.

At Wrapit’s showroom, we were greeted by our own personal consultant, who managed to seem enthusiastic even though she must have done present round-ups hundreds of times. She even knew when to back away discreetly (during a minor spat over what colour kettle we wanted). The showroom, one of 16 in the UK, is arranged like the rooms of a house. Even the loo for customers is decked out with Missoni towels and a designer loo brush, all of which can be added to your list. As we wandered around we were plied with champagne and pastries. It all seemed too good to be true.

A few weeks later, on the day our wedding invitations were delivered, one of our guests told us he’d heard a rumour that Wrapit was experiencing financial difficulties. My fiancé rang Wrapit’s head of marketing, Sarah Fawkner, to find out whether there was any truth in this. No, he was assured – if anything, the company was looking to expand.

So where did the rumour come from? Fawkner attributed it to a Facebook group set up by a couple called Amy and Craig Hinchliffe, who’d given an interview to a newspaper about the company’s poor customer service. As Fawkner was so insistent that all was well, we accepted her assurances. Meanwhile, we took to checking the Wrapit website on a daily basis as our friends and family started buying presents for our first home.

Then last week, with just over a month to go until our wedding and nearly £1,500 worth of presents already bought, I heard that Wrapit was on the brink of going into administration. The customer care line was either continually engaged or ringing off the hook and furious couples started pouring their wrath into the Hinchliffes’ Facebook site, which swelled to 500 members. To stop our guests risking any more money, we closed our list.

As customers became more and more frustrated at the lack of communication from the company, Wrapit’s founder Pepita Diamand posted a message on its website explaining the bank was holding £1m of its available cash, but that problems should be resolved the following week.

So what was causing the problem? Wrapit handles up to 3,500 wedding lists a year. It doesn’t hold any stock as it orders directly from its suppliers once the lists are closed, so its overheads are minimal. According to Companies House, Wrapit had a turnover of £6m in 2006 but has been looking to refinance since September 2007. Rumours have been circulating about the financial health of the company since May this year – and yet it was still trying to trade its way out of difficulty.

However, as many couples attest, Wrapit hasn’t been delivering the level of service it promises for quite some time. The Hinchliffes, for instance, got married in September 2007, but their order was completed only in June this year. They had been told that numerous items on their list had been discontinued, or would not be available for months. “We checked online and found that these items could be delivered by other companies within 24 hours,” says Amy Hinchliffe.

“I don’t want to be overdramatic about it, but it was really upsetting – presents that should represent the happiest day of our life are now associated with months of wrangling and frustration.”

Lucy Denyer, of south London, who got married in May and was due to receive her first delivery of presents from Wrapit last week, is facing the excruciating prospect of asking her guests to begin the process of trying to get their money back. This could take up to nine months and can only begin once the company has officially gone into administration.

“I spent days trying to get in touch with Wrapit when we heard the news, and it was my father-in-law who finally managed to speak to someone,” she says. “It turned out the warehouse had only 14 out of 80 of our presents. Meanwhile, we’re surviving on a random set of crockery and a few odd wine glasses.”

So what now? Fawkner suggests those whose lists closed before June 1 should head to the company’s warehouse in Acton, west London, to collect what they can. For couples like us, who ordered presents after this date, we just have to wait. In the meantime, we decided to set up a new list with John Lewis – and when we went there last weekend, we found numerous other furious victims of the Wrapit meltdown all moaning about their friends being out of pocket – and how they are out of crockery.

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