Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Buyer Beware - A Story of the Worst Wedding Dress Sale Ever

My eternal dilemma as a bride-to-be is that I have no money. The world of wedding planning is one with the attitude 'have lots of money or get out', where the word "budget" denotes something around the £600 range. At the same time, I don't want to pitch up at a tacky registary office wearing just a t-shirt and jeans. I want to look back on the event and be able to say I created something meaningful and nice with the resources I had. 

Wedding dress shopping, however, presents the biggest hurdle. There really are very few options if you don't want to pay the same for a dress as you would for several months of mortgage. You could try the high-street, but in the handful of places that have their own bridal collection (monsoon, john lewis, house of fraser), the styles available are limited and prices can still push the £1000 mark. The worst bit though, is that the majority of these shops only sell the bridalwear online, forcing you to buy something before you've even tried it on. Yes you can return the dress if it's no good, but the thought of parting with such an enormous wad of cash when all you've got to go on is the tiny website picture, is not appealing. This problem encompasses all the other 'budget' ways of getting a wedding dress, from the online handmade store 'etsy' to the places selling cheap Chinese knock-offs, to the websites selling preowned dresses. You will never have the security of seeing yourself in the dress first. 

Wedding dress shopping is constantly touted as the most exciting and fun part of organising the whole thing, but for someone with no money - it isn't, it really isn't. I will never be able to walk into a fancy bridal shop and just try things on for the sake of it. I will never have that moment where I try on a dress that makes my mum cry, then only glance at the price tag as an afterthought. It's very disheartening, and actually takes the 'bride' part out of being a bride. This is where I get people telling me to just wear anything, that it really doesn't matter if the dress is a funny colour and so on. Actually it does matter. I want to be able to have the same feel to my wedding as the girl who's got unlimited access to daddy's credit cards. I want to look back at my photos and not cry because I couldn't even wear a wedding dress to my own wedding, and at the moment that's looking like a distinct possibility. 

So I googled 'wedding dress sale bristol' and came up with this http://www.theweddingsale.com/. Looking at it you'd be fooled into thinking there'd be an enormous room with hundreds of different dresses to choose from. If you look at their FAQ page here http://www.theweddingsale.com/pages/faq.html they say people will be 'spoilt for choice' and that it'll be so popular you have to register for a particular time slot. And right at the bottom they say that it doesn't matter if you come on a sunday, because they re-stock overnight. Now I got quite excited about this sale, because I thought it would finally be a chance to grab a wedding dress at a price that wasn't rediculous. So I booked two places, for my mum and myself, on Sunday 29th January. At the time I'd been given a job in a wedding shop that meant I had to work saturdays, so sunday was the only time I could go (after doing one day of work they then gave my job to someone else because they wouldn't have to pay that person, but that's another story). As it was a sale, I wasn't expecting 5* service, and I assumed most of the dresses would be a bit naff, but I thought there would be a handful of things I could try on and, if I didn't find anything I liked at least I'd get an idea of what was available. 

This sale turned out to be the biggest disappointment and case of false advertising ever. It was held at the Berkertex Bride shop in the city centre and, having been past the shop a few times, I thought it would be too small for the supposedly enormous number of dresses on offer. My mum and I turned up, however, to be greeted by the smallest sale we've ever seen. There were less than 30 dresses there, taking up only a tiny part of the shop. When I explained to one member of staff that the website said they re-stock, she said that wasn't true, and that most things had been purchased on saturday. This obviously meant that the claim of there being a huge choice no matter what day you come was a complete lie. She also said that pretty much all the dresses left were in sizes 12 and 14. I am a size 16 so this meant there would be nothing to try on, even though the website had said there would be a wide variety of sizes available. My mum and I were then left to go through the rails on our own, as the staff were simply not interested in us. We found one size 16 dress and the tag said it was damaged, so we'd essentially wasted our time. There was hideously loud rap music playing, which gave me a headache and which really isn't the sort of thing you want to hear in a bridal shop. Once a shop assistant did decide to talk to us, she immediately tried to sell us things from their full price collection, which I'd already said I couldn't afford. So my word of warning is this: if you are a bride on a budget DO NOT even consider going to one of these sales run by TheWeddingSale.com. It is a TOTAL con and not worth your time.