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A decade ago these mad rush bridal sales were unheard of. A bride needing her gown to fit a tight budget simply checked with her local bridal shop to see what they had with a reduced price. Not so anymore. Like everything else retail, wedding dresses have become the focus of the bargain shopper. Finding a cheap wedding dress is worth bragging about!
Where do all these dresses come from? Most people do not realize if they have not worked in wedding retail that the average life span of a bridal gown is somewhere between 6 months and a year. After that, designers introduce new styles to step up and take the place of last year's fashion. The old styles are no longer produced but both bridal shops and the designers still have them. Season after season come and go and the number of these dresses just continues to climb! It's a daunting task to find the one bride who loves the dress and wants the size and color it is in.
These huge sales began with a group of designers contacting Filene's Basement in Boston looking for somewhere to sell these orphans in the hope of recouping some of their cost. And so the famous sale was born. It has now become so well known that Filene's held it in several cities and more than once a year. They have even copymitted it's now modern name … the Running of the Brides! The ultra couture salon in New York, Kleinfeld's, also holds huge sales called Blowout Sales. But true to their reputation and stature, they still supply personal service to the shoppers … along with a higher price point that at the Running of the Brides events.
As bridal evolved into a really big business in this country in the 1980s, large individually owned bridal salons larger larger and larger. But with their size came the problem of selling off their discontinued styles. Sometimes stores will pool their inventories and host a sale in a large hotel and convention center. An especially large store is capable of having the event in their salon and often contacts designers to have dresses sent in for the event. Alas, there always seem to be more dresses than sales! But that is GREAT for brides!
You may think that a mad dash into a room filled with hundreds of designer gowns is just NOT the way you want to experience the selection your bridal gown. However, if you have ever seen media coverage of one of these huge sales, there are plenty of young ladies willing to go for it! They get their friends together for support, don bike shorts and a tube top, and off they go to seek the bargain of their wedding planning.
Most wedding dresses on these sales range from $ 250- $ 499 with comparative retails at as much as $ 4000. A bargain hungry bride is willing to give up some hand holding for the chance of a lifetime to save thousands on her wedding dress! Some attend just to be able to tell their friends that they were there and to have another memory for their wedding journal. But be careful … you may go for the fun of it and just end up leaving with a dress!
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Source by Barbara Barrett
