Jennifer Hyman knows that a fashionable wedding can mean financial pains.
Nuptials are the No. 1 occasion that prompt women — both brides and guests — to visit Rent the Runway, the online shop she and business partner Jennifer Fleiss started started in 2009 that lets women borrow expensive designer clothing for a more modest price. Now, they’ve launched a new Weddings Boutique section on the Web site that helps brides, bridesmaids and guests rent all the garments and accessories needed for a wedding — save for the bridal gown.
(Courtesy of Nearly Newlywed/ ) - Nearly Newslywed founder Jacqueline Courtney (center, in dark blouse) with models wearing examples of gowns available from Nearly Newlywed.
“There’s nothing a woman hates more than buying a bridesmaid dress,” Hyman says. “A woman can buy eight or 10 bridesmaids dresses that she may never wear again.”
Instead of asking friends to shell out hundreds of dollars for one-time formalwear, she says, brides-to-be can choose styles for their bridesmaids by designers such as Nina Ricci, Issa and Diane Von Furstenberg for about $75 a dress. They can also search through a variety of curated styles for all the events that lead up to the wedding.
“We were observing the behavior that brides started coming to Rent the Runway for everything but their wedding dress,” Hyman says. “They had often budgeted for the dream gown, but they haven’t thought about the two to three bridal showers they would have, the engagement photos, the bridal lunch. Those events are Cinderella moments to the bride as well, and she wants to look her best but to also keep with her wedding budget.”
As for those dream gowns, other sites also are trying on the rental model.
While planning her wedding last year, Jaqueline Courtney couldn’t help thinking about her experience as a fashion publicist.
“You have all these A-list celebrities borrowing 90 percent of what they wear on the red carpet,” Courtney says. The thought was the beginning of Nearly Newlywed, an online service launched this month that lets women buy barely worn wedding dresses at a discount and then either sell them back to the company for a guaranteed 30 percent of the purchase price or consign through the Web site for a potentially higher return.
The result can mean wearing a high-end Oscar de la Renta or Vera Wang gown for a fraction of what the dress may cost new — leaving money in the budget for other things.
“For me and a lot of like-minded women, it is a much larger trend than just saving money. The idea of having a moment or what is sentimental or traditional about that moment has changed,” Courtney says. “[P]hysically possessing a dress forever seems to be less and less of a concern.”
Loading...
Comments