Wedding Dresses on ebay?! what will they think of next?
Plagued with bridal dress fatigue, my best friend and I drug ourselves into the final bridal shop on our list. I had tried on no fewer than 40-50 dresses in 2 days. We had figured out what style fit, so every dress I tried on was pretty because it was the right cut. As the sales lady informed me “we are not trying to find a pretty dress, there are lots of those, we are trying to find the ‘perfect’ dress”. Yeah whatever. At this point, I just wanted A dress so that I wouldn’t have to try any more on.
THINGS I LEARNED: Don’t make any decisions immediately after you have tried on lots of dresses. It is like going to the grocery store when you are hungry. You will not have a clear enough head to make a sensible decision. You need to rest. Take a few days of not looking at dresses. Clear your head. Otherwise, you may end up with WAY more dress than you want.
I am not sure if it was due to our glassy-eyed bridal dress fatigue or the fact that we really just wanted out of there, but we actually found “the perfect dress”. As a matter of fact, we found two. The sales lady was kind enough to give us the designer names (no model number though) and sent us out the door, reminding me that I needed to make a decision pretty quickly because it was February and we needed at least 6 months to order a gown. No pressure or anything.
So I went home and started to surf the net. I went to the designer’s websites to see if I could find the dresses. I did not trust that the sales lady had necessarily given me the correct designer name, so I wanted proof. After much searching, I found both of the dresses on the respective designer’s sites. Now I had the model numbers! I went to an online dress website with a shop in Louisiana, and got prices for the two dresses I was interested in. The prices came in around 30% lower than the bridal shop’s prices. I was making progress!
For the next few days, I searched through page after page of dresses on ebay. I read the message boards on the Bridal Bargains Book website regarding dresses from China. Lots of women had written about the various ebay shops. I knew which shops sent good dresses on time and which ones had faulty cheap zippers. (Note: I just went on the website to see if I could find the message boards and I could not. So either they took them down, or their site is just that poorly designed). In the message boards and in the book they give seller IDs of ebay stores that people had had good luck with. One of these was called Cinderella Bridal, at least that is what it was called when I found my dress. The book did warn you that the shops changed names frequently. A little concerning, I know.
So, I went to the online shop and looked at the dresses. I started to recognize some of the names of the dresses as one of my designer’s dress names. It was a shop that knocked off one of my designers! I was ecstatic! I typed in my model name (the designer used women’s names) and there was the dress for around 80% less than in the store! I placed my order immediately. The site said it would take 35 days to get the dress plus 10 more because it was their busy season. 45 days was way more reasonable than the 6 months that the bridal store told me that I needed. Plus I figured, if the dress didn’t show up or showed up wrong, I wasn’t out that much. I had the dress done!