Saying Yes to the Dress

Over the past several months, I've watched quite a few episodes of TLC's Say Yes to the Dress. If you haven't seen it, basically a bunch of brides-to-be try on a bunch of dresses. Their dress budget is generally higher than my entire wedding budget, and the dresses generally look so hideous that I wouldn't pay $50 for them.

Like this one, priced at $17,000:

My dress search was a little different. For one thing, most of the brides on the show are more than a year away from their wedding day. Being only 5 months away, my only option was to buy a dress off the rack, but most bridal boutiques don't stock many dresses that are even close to being my size. I did try some on, but in the end, I chose the buy-off-the-rack David's Bridal. Also unlike the brides on the show, I didn't have any big moment when I found "The One." Yes, I love my dress, but I didn't cry when I put it on. I just liked it.

I tried on the dress I ended up buying on a Saturday, with my mom there, and I made an appointment to come back on Monday to buy it. However, the checks that I deposited to my checking account during lunch that day hadn't gone through that evening when I checked my account online, so I decided to reschedule for Thursday. I was somewhat worried about rescheduling since that Monday was the end of their big dress sale, but I had a feeling they would end up once again extending it for another week. And guess what I saw in my inbox from David's Bridal Tuesday morning? They extended it another week! Amazing! Yeah, that's right, DB, I'm on to your little scheme.

In fact, this came in an email this week:

 

Uh huh. Any bets on when the sale really ends?

Anyway, I bought the dress last Thursday. They had to order it in my size, but it will arrive 2 months before my wedding as opposed to 3 weeks before like it would have been from another store I went to.

I'm not posting photos of my dress on here, for obvious reasons, but I would be happy to send some to anyone interested. Nathan could find out what the dress looks like if he really wanted to - he found the receipt for it on my desk and pointed out that he could just look up the style number. Oops! Luckily, he wants to be surprised.

One thing I learned through my dress shopping experience is that you can't base decisions on customer reviews. One boutique had great reviews online and was recommended to me by a friend. I made an appointment ahead of time and was the only customer in the store, yet I felt incredibly unwanted there. And I was also pleasantly surprised with the excellent service that I received at David's Bridal, since I had read so many bad things about their service. Don't believe everything you hear!