Hello Peeps it's been a while so I thought I would gabble on for a bit. Watched the X-Factor last night and noticed that one of our fabulous friends Suzanne Neville had designed one of the dresses again.. she is really becoming a regular on that show and never fails to make the girlies look great!
She was one of the first Designers I chose for the shop when I first started out and was with me to the end. She was one of our more successful stories however, as we have spent many thousands of pounds on what we thought would be great collections only to find out they were complete and utter duffers...
Lucky for me this didn’t happen very often but when it did it usually resulted in a showdown of massive proportions between me and the Designer in question. Designers usually spend a lot of time with people who kiss them on both cheeks and for ever gush at them at how wonderfully superior they are until they believe it to indeed, be totally true and find it hard to get their ever exanding heads through the normal sized doors.
In the early days Designers used to be so lovely to their customers, the bridal shop owner. We would be welcomed open armed to a lovely comfy chair with a glass of champagne, offer of a free lunch or at least some luxurious chocolates and before we left given some lovely thank you gesture of a designer item or suchlike. Nowadays you are lucky if you get a plastic chair, beaker of tap water and an extra strong mint for the £20k a season you spend! and when we closed our doors only one of our Designers wished us luck for the future even though we had spent literally hundreds of thousands of pounds with all of them.
We decided at one bridal exhibition show to add another designer, something different we said, something we didn’t have. Straight away this was our downfall, as if you don’t have it, more often or not, you don’t need it and the bride doesnt want it! Quite an expensive lesson to learn but that was not the least of our worries.
We order thousands of pounds worth of her designs which looked fantastic at the show. Her embroidery was equisite and the dresses looked amazing on her model Natalie. They arrived and looked great on the rail but once we started trying them on the brides we found, our best attempts of persuasion could not get them to look right and on close inspection one dress had the bust dart one inch from the shoulder (no I am not kidding). Trying our best to explain to Brides to be how it would look if it fit them by unzipping the back and pulling the dress down then up then down again.
Hmmm we thought this cannot be right so we contacted the designer who, very disgruntled and rudely said “obviously you cannot sell or this would not pose a problem!” as you see we are expected to say to anyone who tries the dresses on “well if its made correctly it will look like this” in our opinion not a great sales technique.
She couldn’t understand our amazement when she actually admitted all her dresses were not in fact a standard dress size 12 or cut from a dress makers dummy but cut from her sales assistant Natalie who, in her opinion, was the best way to cut a dress. So, as you can image if Natalie has a great night out one Saturday drinking excessive amounts of alcohol and a chicken madras and several onion bargis heaven help the shop that gets their samples that week!
Finally we managed to get someone to order a dress hurrah! After all, she did offer a made to measure service complete with Toile fitting (supposedly cut to exact body shape). The problem was that this designer who appeared to be extremely good when we ordered the samples had absolutely no bloody idea when it came to ordering for the customer.
The Bride stood in her dress looking herself up and down in the mirror. I looked at her, turned my head to one side then the other... and whispered to my seamstress "is it me or is that embroidery crooked?" on closer inspection the intricate embroidered centre panel was obviously created by Natalie after on of her Saturday nights on the booze as it was half inch from the left seam but two inches from the right! explaining to the designer that the bride wanted to neither walk slanted down the aisle or photoshop all her wedding pictures could she put it right.
Next the dress went back because the boning cut through the dress into the skin of our poor bride and as we don't usually like our brides to bleed to death at the altar could she do the job properly! In the end, we pretty much re-made the dress ourselves to get the fit right and corsetry to the standard we expected. In the end we remade all her samples to fit perfectly and sold them off cheaply to get rid, easier in the long run we thought and totally glad to see the back of this poor excuse for a designer.
Other problems that can arise are not receiving the dress at all! This one is slightly more stressful as you can sort out wonky embroidery but there is not a lot you can do if the dress isn’t even there. Although we feel sorry for those companies that go under we can't understand why they continue to take orders knowing full well that they will not honour them. Whilst this had never happened to us we had a Designer that gave us a few sleepless nights.
We decided to be much more careful chosing the new range, this time checking out the competition, asking all the right questions like, how long is ordering time? where are the dresses made? Can you sew? Do you have an assistant called Natalie? All the answers seemed ok so we went ahead and ordered a collection.
It took four months for the collection to arrive, after which we noticed a destinct lact of any advertising or even a website from the Designer not a good sign when you want Brides to see the range to want to try it on and not a good sign when you consider the first thing to depreciate when a business is struggling is their advertising budget. Assurances were given that her new re-vamped business would give us more coverage, more advertising and more orders. Months went by then, a year later, just before the next Bridal show the website was uploaded (what a coincidence).
Deciding to drop this dead weight before it caused us a major meltdown was probably the best decision as the only dress ordered for a bride didn’t arrive til about four days before the wedding after we had threatened to visit her shop in London. Before this we telephoned despatch who said “I don’t know what’s happening” then we were told “its on its way” then “no it hasn’t even been despatched yet” then “its stuck in customs”. When the dress arrived and we managed to get all our work done and ready before the wedding date minus a few marbles in our heads and to the relief of the bride. The company closed down the following season leaving many brides (from other shops) without their dresses. After this fiasco we refused to deal with any designer who manufactured their gowns anywhere else than the UK.
So brides please remember when a bridal shop tells you they need to allow arrival time as well as ordering time don’t shrug it off or mess about for weeks before ordering listen and learn ladies the more time is always the better.
Now I must say before I finish on this subject for every really bad supplier there are at least ten really great ones. The designers we had year in and year out were brilliant they were rarely late and always told you what’s happening and never cut a dress from a sales assistant called Natalie. If a dress was ever wrong (which was rare) it’s sorted and back. They take pride in their work and although they do kiss on both cheeks and sometimes have huge ego's they know their stuff.
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