Hard Times and New Web Sites Persuade Owners to Let Sentiment Go, Even as Brides-to-Be Intensify Search for Something Cheap
For many women, a wedding dress will be the most elaborate and expensive thing they will ever wear -- the crowning glory of a day that will pass in a blur of adrenaline and joy.
And then what?
I have dutifully carted my silk Priscilla of Boston gown through six moves and 18 years of marriage. I am not alone; closets across America are hiding fancy gowns of silk, tulle and French lace amassed in the 30 years or so since the wedding industry became a juggernaut.
Now, the combined forces of the Web and the recession are bringing many of those dresses out again. As online venues for selling dresses proliferate, wedding planners and other specialists say that they're seeing more brides selling their dresses.
Josie Daga's Janell Berté gown, for which she paid $3,000 in 1999, arrived home after the wedding, cleaned and preserved, in a three-foot-by-four-foot box. "You can't fit it under the bed or in a closet, and I thought the reality of my daughter ever wanting to wear my dress is pretty slim," says Ms. Daga, who is 38.
She listed the dress in 2004 on Craigslist, where she received a few $200 bids and a lot of offers that she suspected were scams. On EBay, ditto. In consignment shops, nada. So she did what an enterprising young advertising executive does -- she launched a Web site, PreOwnedWeddingDresses.com, and sold her dress for $800. A year later, she had 400 listings, with each seller paying a minimum $25 fee, and soon afterward, running the Web site became her full-time occupation. T
PreOwnedWeddingDresses.com has about 2,360 gowns listed.
Boosting its business these days are brides on a budget. There are 2.2 million weddings each year in the U.S., according to Brides Magazine. While their cost on average in recessionary 2008 was a still-high $22,000, that was down roughly 20% from 2007. Disc jockeys, photographers and videographers are being hit hard as brides opt for iPods and friends with cameras.
Emotionally, it can be hard to downsize a wedding-dress dream. Some women justify the purchase of an expensive gown by planning to resell it. Sally Lorensen Conant, owner of Orange Restoration Labs in Orange, Conn., says fewer brides want to have their gowns preserved these days. "I'm seeing more women who say, 'I just want you to clean the dress. I'm going to try to sell it,' " she says.
It's a risky maneuver. A gown isn't a financial investment. It can take months or even a year to sell a gown, and the returns are comparable to those of selling a used car. Transaction details must be negotiated. That includes not only payment but, if the dress isn't being mailed, where to meet and try on the dress. One seller I interviewed arranged to meet a potential buyer at her dry cleaner, which felt safer than inviting a stranger into her home.
Cranky Consumer
* Until the Best Offer Do Us Part
But when a deal is done, it can feel, for seller and buyer alike, like serendipity. Jennifer Ramsey tore a photo of a Tomasina gown from a magazine when she was 19 and kept the magazine page until she became engaged 18 years later. The dress, miraculously, was still being manufactured, but at $8,000, it was priced too high for her budget. "I thought it was the most stunning dress I'd ever seen," she says. "So I googled Tomasina and the style code."
Suzanne Fargo's listing for the Tomasina dress was halfway down the Google page that led to PreOwnedWeddingDresses.com, and the dress came with a matching bolero jacket, two veils and a tiara. When Ms. Fargo, a 41-year-old retail manager in Orange County, Calif., got married in 2001, "I thought some day my daughter might want to wear it," she says. Now divorced, with no daughter, she says, "I want to simplify my life."
Ms. Ramsey and her mother flew to California from her home in Jacksonville, Fla., to see the dress. When they cracked open the sealed box, they discovered Ms. Fargo's forgotten custom Jimmy Choo shoes and a handbag. Ms. Fargo threw them in, too. Ms. Ramsey, who is getting married in September, says she paid $3,200 for "a dream come true."
ve kept my dress so long because a friend once told me I should save it for my daughter. At seven, Saskia is enthusiastic about the dress, but I suspect that by the time she marries -- if she does -- she'll have less-sentimental ideas. I'm thinking about selling it, but I haven't quite crossed that threshold.
Still, none of the six buyers and sellers of used gowns I spoke to expressed any sentiment other than joy after the trade. Jana Cook, a New York author, sold her $6,000 Vera Wang gown for $2,500. "I was going to donate it, and then I thought: I could use the money," she says. Anna Ntenta, a lawyer in San Francisco, bought it. "It was a lot less than I thought I would spend -- and there were a lot of dresses out there," says Ms. Ntenta, whose wedding is later this month.
Bride-to-be Kate Bulow, a 27-year-old certified public accountant in Fort Myers, Fla., had been given a wedding gown by a family friend. But when she became engaged in April, the dress no longer fit. "I was crushed," says Ms. Bulow, whose $5,000 wedding budget leaves little room for error.
Ms. Bulow found a dress online, tried on the $1,200 style at a bridal shop, then bought the dress for $450 from a young woman in Alabama whose wedding had been called off. "It's the way the free-market system should work," Ms. Bulow says. "She had something I wanted."