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.