This is this third Bridal Shop Story post about the goings-on at my old bridal salon, Promise...for the savvy bride.
****I swear this story is true....and all the customer names have been changed! *****
Kori and I looked at each other helplessly, unsure of what to say to the woman who had just blown into my shop heralded by imaginary trumpets. As she breezed past giving us the royal wave, she said, “I need a wedding dress.”
Her blonde hair tied in ponytail so severe my own head ached, I followed her silently, simultaneously weighing my options and wondering how she had gotten her hair that way.
Since opening four months ago, I had learned a few things, but still had not yet figured out how to deal with random, imperious women charging into my store.
In that short amount of time, though, I had figured out that ladies who shoved the gowns as though they were parting the Red Sea, metal hanger hooks screaming indignantly as they raked across the garment rack, was never a good sign. Neither was snatching gowns to be thrown over a shoulder in the manner of one shopping for discount designer merchandise at T.J.Maxx.
Muttering to herself as she shifted a Louis Vuitton bag that obscured her torso, my customer reached a hand up to grab a gown. I needed to take control of the situation. Swallowing my trepidation, I greeted her again.
“Hi! Would you like to try that on?”
Smiling brightly, I removed her selection off the rack and held it aloft, arm vertically extended, the gown a luxurious white shadow behind me.
“Yes. I didn’t see anyone here when I came in and assumed I should help myself. I need a wedding dress.”
Ah. Well. She had come to the right place.
“You see,” she continued with an impatient sniff. “I am very busy, and while this is my third marriage, he can afford it, and I want the gown I wasn’t able to have for my other weddings.”
Oh.
“OK!” I chirped, desperately hoping my tattletale face didn’t give away what I thought about that. Introducing myself, I asked her what type of gown that would be.
“Well, Jessica, I don’t know. I’ll have to try them all on to figure that out. What’s your most expensive? We are having our wedding at our 5 million dollar home in Georgetown.”
Sherri* delivered this with a straight face, while I struggled to keep mine.
Consoling myself with the notion that once we got started I’d get a feel for what she liked, and unable to even bring myself to address her other criteria, I skimmed my fingers over our catalogue of gowns. Lustrous fabric cool beneath my hands, I considered.
Behind me, Sherri checked her watch, fairly vibrating with impatience.
In a flash of insight, I knew what to do. I reached for an elegant, silk charmeuse bias cut gown with a deep V, my favorite lace gown, a draped mermaid, and a ball gown. Before she was able to gather the words to tell me she wanted to try more than that, I said, “Why don’t we start with these? We’ll come get more after we get a feel for what you like.”
Pursing her lips, Sherri nodded and followed me to her dressing room. Gently pulling the chocolate curtains aside, I hung her gowns on the wall and handed her a robe.
“I’ll just be outside. When you’re ready, let me know, and I’ll help you into the dresses.”
Adding that we also had bras if she needed one, I excused myself to stand beside the curtains while she changed out of her clothes.
“Excuse me, Jennifer?” Sherri called out amid the rustling of fabric. “I don’t need your help, so could you please leave after you zip me?”
Um.
Planning to explain why I needed to help her after I closed her gown, I passed through the curtains and into the soft light of the dressing room. Standing before the large mirror, Sherri stood, twisting herself awkwardly as she attempted to zip the dress closed. Pooled around her on the floor and caught under one spiked pump, was my delicate silk charmeuse dress.
I could already see a run where her heel had dragged across the fabric and pulled a thread loose. Barely containing my irritation, I quickly knelt to release it and shift the fabric away from her feet.
Standing, I started to zip and tell her what she had accidentally done as a means to explain why she needed my help, when I stopped cold. All sense of decorum and customer service fled with my next words.
“Wait. Are you not wearing any underwear?”
“Of course not. I never do. Even when I wear jeans.”
More information than I needed.
“I have to ask you to wear underwear while you try on our gowns.”
“Why? I don’t have cooties. I have a home worth millions in Georgetown. I’m not some girl off the street.”
We were at an impasse. I had no desire to see what was under my poor sample dress, and in no mood to back down.
“I’m sorry. You’re welcome to come back when you have underwear.”
Sherri’s face bloomed, anger dancing in splotches across her too-taut complexion. Shaking the gown from her shoulders, it crumpled to the floor.
“This place has no class, and you’re a bitch.”
7.23.2010
7.20.2010
Haiku: Vacation All I Ever Wanted!
image source
Tropical journey
No work, blog, walking the dog
Bon Voyage D.C.!
I'm going on a trip! A cruise! I've never been on one, but I am always down for relaxation and endless days of uninterrupted reading.
We're leaving the end of the week, so until the beginning of August, not much Foxy will be happening around here while I try to get all my real work done! I've got a couple Bridal Shop stories ready to go (one for this Friday, one for next week), but other than that, it's Slackerville as far as the eye can see.
7.16.2010
Bridal Shop Story: She Said What?!
This is this second Bridal Shop Story post about the opening, running and closing of my old bridal salon, Promise...for the savvy bride.
****I swear this story is true....and all the customer names have been changed to protect the uh..innocent *****
Remnants of a sleepy afternoon’s light clung to the edges of the dresses and buttery walls long after the sky faded to a pinkish-purple. Even after owning Promise for over four years, the room’s firefly glow worked its magic in the early evening lull.
Pushing back rich brown taffeta curtains to reveal a spacious dressing room, our manager Kori placed her customer’s information card within arm’s reach. Crossing over caramelized floors to the front of the shop, I passed underneath my mother’s amber blown glass Murano chandelier and over her soft Persian rug to find our bride’s favorite dress.
Anne had visited us before. In fact, Kori pointed out with a sigh, Anne had been to Promise no less than three times to try on dresses. Each time, she fell in love with the same gown, spending the better half of her appointment watching the mirror as she sat, stood, walked, and danced.
We liked Anne, but we wished she would figure out what she wanted to wear on her wedding day.
My mother, Kori, Tania, and even our seamstress, Lana, had seen Anne with a veil, without a veil, bustled, hair up, hair down. We had considered all the options, and admired her as she pretended to walk down the aisle, complete with faux bouquet, her organza hem sweeping the floor.
At this point, we didn’t care if she bought the dress from us or not, her wedding had rounded the corner and was creeping within sight...we just wanted her to have something to wear!
The swish of our downstairs door and the sound of footsteps on the stairs hastened our actions. I hung Anne’s gown in her room, straightened my sun dress, and busied myself with the neverending task of fluffing the racks of gowns. Kori sat at our writing desk to welcome Anne and her best friends.
Ignoring our hellos, Sarah abandoned her purse on a seat to paw through the gowns with ferocity. While Anne’s remaining two friends observed from their seats near Anne's dressing room, Sarah played a nightmare version of “Goldilocks” with each helpless gown that came within her grasp.
Her condemnations steeped in a tar of vicious negativity and cloaked in concern, Sarah hoisted each offending garment for her companions’ feedback while offering her opinion. This one was too ugly, that one too cheap. This one she couldn’t bear to look at, this one should be burnt…and who in their RIGHT mind would wear that??
With the insidiousness of a gateway drug, trashing the dresses opened the floor for mocking stories about Anne and her bridezilla ways.
I had had enough. Swallowing my own ugly thoughts, I approached Sarah as one would a hissing, spitting, rabid cat.
Gently extracting a now crumpled vintage lace gown from where it twisted in her hands, I suggested she join her friends to see Anne in her favorite gown.
“Who are you?” Sarah asked, holding on to the dress a beat too long so that I almost had to tug it away from her.
My face flushed, and I reminded myself that, despite my most fervent wishes, I was a business owner, not a roller derby girl. Explaining that I was the owner, I coated my voice in honey until it spilled from my lips into a winning smile while I asked her to join her friends to see Anne in her favorite gown.
With a look that left the scent of burning hair in the air, the missing Macbeth witch took her seat, and feeling dazedly behind me for the desk, I sat.
Four sets of eyes watched as Kori scurried out from behind the curtain to collect Anne’s favorite mantilla veil and disappeared again with a rustle. To pass the time, Sarah began reminiscing aloud about Anne’s other favorite dress. Cackling, she and her companions savored how horrible it had been on Anne and how inept the salesperson had been.
Kori stepped out and, with a flourish, drew back the curtains.
Beaming, her lace-edged veil falling over her shoulders, Anne floated to the pedestal in the center of the viewing area on a thick sea of silence and twirled.
Kori, carefully straightening Anne’s hem, murmured what I had been thinking.
“You look beautiful.”
Sarah rasped, “You look like a corpse bride.”
****I swear this story is true....and all the customer names have been changed to protect the uh..innocent *****
Remnants of a sleepy afternoon’s light clung to the edges of the dresses and buttery walls long after the sky faded to a pinkish-purple. Even after owning Promise for over four years, the room’s firefly glow worked its magic in the early evening lull.
Pushing back rich brown taffeta curtains to reveal a spacious dressing room, our manager Kori placed her customer’s information card within arm’s reach. Crossing over caramelized floors to the front of the shop, I passed underneath my mother’s amber blown glass Murano chandelier and over her soft Persian rug to find our bride’s favorite dress.
Anne had visited us before. In fact, Kori pointed out with a sigh, Anne had been to Promise no less than three times to try on dresses. Each time, she fell in love with the same gown, spending the better half of her appointment watching the mirror as she sat, stood, walked, and danced.
We liked Anne, but we wished she would figure out what she wanted to wear on her wedding day.
My mother, Kori, Tania, and even our seamstress, Lana, had seen Anne with a veil, without a veil, bustled, hair up, hair down. We had considered all the options, and admired her as she pretended to walk down the aisle, complete with faux bouquet, her organza hem sweeping the floor.
At this point, we didn’t care if she bought the dress from us or not, her wedding had rounded the corner and was creeping within sight...we just wanted her to have something to wear!
The swish of our downstairs door and the sound of footsteps on the stairs hastened our actions. I hung Anne’s gown in her room, straightened my sun dress, and busied myself with the neverending task of fluffing the racks of gowns. Kori sat at our writing desk to welcome Anne and her best friends.
Ignoring our hellos, Sarah abandoned her purse on a seat to paw through the gowns with ferocity. While Anne’s remaining two friends observed from their seats near Anne's dressing room, Sarah played a nightmare version of “Goldilocks” with each helpless gown that came within her grasp.
Her condemnations steeped in a tar of vicious negativity and cloaked in concern, Sarah hoisted each offending garment for her companions’ feedback while offering her opinion. This one was too ugly, that one too cheap. This one she couldn’t bear to look at, this one should be burnt…and who in their RIGHT mind would wear that??
With the insidiousness of a gateway drug, trashing the dresses opened the floor for mocking stories about Anne and her bridezilla ways.
I had had enough. Swallowing my own ugly thoughts, I approached Sarah as one would a hissing, spitting, rabid cat.
Gently extracting a now crumpled vintage lace gown from where it twisted in her hands, I suggested she join her friends to see Anne in her favorite gown.
“Who are you?” Sarah asked, holding on to the dress a beat too long so that I almost had to tug it away from her.
My face flushed, and I reminded myself that, despite my most fervent wishes, I was a business owner, not a roller derby girl. Explaining that I was the owner, I coated my voice in honey until it spilled from my lips into a winning smile while I asked her to join her friends to see Anne in her favorite gown.
With a look that left the scent of burning hair in the air, the missing Macbeth witch took her seat, and feeling dazedly behind me for the desk, I sat.
Four sets of eyes watched as Kori scurried out from behind the curtain to collect Anne’s favorite mantilla veil and disappeared again with a rustle. To pass the time, Sarah began reminiscing aloud about Anne’s other favorite dress. Cackling, she and her companions savored how horrible it had been on Anne and how inept the salesperson had been.
Kori stepped out and, with a flourish, drew back the curtains.
Beaming, her lace-edged veil falling over her shoulders, Anne floated to the pedestal in the center of the viewing area on a thick sea of silence and twirled.
Kori, carefully straightening Anne’s hem, murmured what I had been thinking.
“You look beautiful.”
Sarah rasped, “You look like a corpse bride.”
7.15.2010
Thursday Dance Party: I Started Something
I realized recently that the nights I spent listening to The Smiths and dancing in my room (in between staring at the ceiling moodily) growing up are not over.
7.12.2010
Bella Bridesmaid DC
It's heeeeere! Bella Bridesmaid has thrown its big, fluffy peony bouquet into the Washington, DC area bridal scene.
You can find pretty much every bridesmaid line available here, from Jenny Yoo and Simple Silhouettes to Two Birds and Thread. Lines carried vary by shop location, so before you burn rubber to their location on 8001 Wisconsin Avenue (second floor above the Spa/Salon and Citibank, and across from the Benihana) to order your Alix & Kelly dresses, check Bella Bridesmaid's site!
I was bummed to miss their opening party last week - I planned to go, then couldn't and then definitely forgot to even RSVP. So rude. I feel better now that I have confessed my trifling ways.
So I'm gonna try and stop by after yoga one day, apologize in person, and report back soon!
7.09.2010
Bridal Shop Story: Here We Go!
This is this first Bridal Shop Story post about the opening, running and closing of my old bridal salon, Promise...for the savvy bride.
Sitting in the coolness of my mother’s finished basement, the creamy berber carpet created swirled, indented patterns on my knees as we opened the first box. There, among the oversized leopard throw pillows and gleaming ebony legs of my sister’s baby grand, our future was pulled from a ragged cardboard box with a soft, silky whoosh.
Cocooned within layers of unbleached tissue paper and carefully folded in thick plastic lay our first wedding dress. White chocolate silk charmeuse cascading into tiers of soft ruffled chiffon spilled into our hands and quickened our pulses. I stood and hooked its industrial hanger to the top of a large blue-grey French armoire, where it floated like a dream.
Gossamer chiffon stirred in our combined silent exhalations, and the soft, hazy dusk that had been gathering in the corners of the first floor of my mother’s gracious town home receded.
For almost a year, we had been planning to open a bridal shop. Unlike any other in our city, it would feature small designers not represented in the area, and treat its customers with warmth and dignity. I had painstakingly crafted a business plan, spending hours poring over demographics and bolstering projections with data, forecasting, and research. My mother, an entrepreneur all her life, served as a sounding board and hunted down the perfect place for us to open.
Armed with an iron clad business plan and our best “we mean business” clothing, we met with the bank. We were ushered down muted beige corridors to sit stiffly at a massive table the color of molasses. There, our plan was picked apart and questioned until I was convinced that my time as an entrepreneur would end before it even really started.
My mother, with unflagging certainty and poise, schooled me in the privacy of the bank’s grey marble bathroom where we had excused ourselves. Confident they loved our idea and the shop would be a reality, she refused to allow me to brood. I was not so sure, staring at myself, awash and wavery in fluorescent light after she had left to sit with our judge and jury.
After I carefully wiped a damp paper towel under my eyes to remove salty rivers of mascara, I seated myself at the gleaming mahogany table. My mother smiled serenely, nodding like a duchess at the bank representatives to continue. A few more questions were posed, regarding how we would market ourselves and if we had a location, until finally they were ready to give us an answer.
Having prepared for the worst in the bathroom, I uncrossed my legs, heels gouging divots in the thick hunter green carpet, and wrapped damp fingers around my chair’s upholstered arms. My mother, of course, was right. Our plan, and with it an SBA loan, had been approved. Feeling equally thrilled and terrified, the future buzzed in my ears, invading my dreams and turning my breakfast. Over the course of the following weeks, we signed loan documents, leases, build out contracts for the retail space, and purchase orders for wedding gown samples from designers.
All of which culminated to this moment. Though the space’s finish had been delayed from November to January, gowns were still being produced for our opening. This box was the first to arrive, carried cross-country from the misty, rolling, sea-scented streets of San Francisco.
The gown was handpicked by my mother and me on our first magical buying trip to San Francisco’s Union Square. Designed by two women, friends since their time studying fashion design in college, who were now business partners, we read its arrival as if tea leaves. They, too, had opened their shop and growing bridal wholesale business in the same inspired tandem way we had.
The gown floated, suspended by two delicate ribbons and ephemeral whisps of chiffon, a gleaming harbinger of the bright future ahead, full of promise.
Sitting in the coolness of my mother’s finished basement, the creamy berber carpet created swirled, indented patterns on my knees as we opened the first box. There, among the oversized leopard throw pillows and gleaming ebony legs of my sister’s baby grand, our future was pulled from a ragged cardboard box with a soft, silky whoosh.
Cocooned within layers of unbleached tissue paper and carefully folded in thick plastic lay our first wedding dress. White chocolate silk charmeuse cascading into tiers of soft ruffled chiffon spilled into our hands and quickened our pulses. I stood and hooked its industrial hanger to the top of a large blue-grey French armoire, where it floated like a dream.
Gossamer chiffon stirred in our combined silent exhalations, and the soft, hazy dusk that had been gathering in the corners of the first floor of my mother’s gracious town home receded.
For almost a year, we had been planning to open a bridal shop. Unlike any other in our city, it would feature small designers not represented in the area, and treat its customers with warmth and dignity. I had painstakingly crafted a business plan, spending hours poring over demographics and bolstering projections with data, forecasting, and research. My mother, an entrepreneur all her life, served as a sounding board and hunted down the perfect place for us to open.
Armed with an iron clad business plan and our best “we mean business” clothing, we met with the bank. We were ushered down muted beige corridors to sit stiffly at a massive table the color of molasses. There, our plan was picked apart and questioned until I was convinced that my time as an entrepreneur would end before it even really started.
My mother, with unflagging certainty and poise, schooled me in the privacy of the bank’s grey marble bathroom where we had excused ourselves. Confident they loved our idea and the shop would be a reality, she refused to allow me to brood. I was not so sure, staring at myself, awash and wavery in fluorescent light after she had left to sit with our judge and jury.
After I carefully wiped a damp paper towel under my eyes to remove salty rivers of mascara, I seated myself at the gleaming mahogany table. My mother smiled serenely, nodding like a duchess at the bank representatives to continue. A few more questions were posed, regarding how we would market ourselves and if we had a location, until finally they were ready to give us an answer.
Having prepared for the worst in the bathroom, I uncrossed my legs, heels gouging divots in the thick hunter green carpet, and wrapped damp fingers around my chair’s upholstered arms. My mother, of course, was right. Our plan, and with it an SBA loan, had been approved. Feeling equally thrilled and terrified, the future buzzed in my ears, invading my dreams and turning my breakfast. Over the course of the following weeks, we signed loan documents, leases, build out contracts for the retail space, and purchase orders for wedding gown samples from designers.
All of which culminated to this moment. Though the space’s finish had been delayed from November to January, gowns were still being produced for our opening. This box was the first to arrive, carried cross-country from the misty, rolling, sea-scented streets of San Francisco.
The gown was handpicked by my mother and me on our first magical buying trip to San Francisco’s Union Square. Designed by two women, friends since their time studying fashion design in college, who were now business partners, we read its arrival as if tea leaves. They, too, had opened their shop and growing bridal wholesale business in the same inspired tandem way we had.
The gown floated, suspended by two delicate ribbons and ephemeral whisps of chiffon, a gleaming harbinger of the bright future ahead, full of promise.
7.08.2010
Thursday Dance Party: Sleigh Bells
I'm on the bandwagon...maybe even tooting the horn.
Sleigh Bells make me shake my booty for sure.
Sleigh Bells make me shake my booty for sure.
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