When to start your Wedding Dress shopping at TWC

Give yourself enough time, but not too much time…

Finding a wedding dress is one of the most exciting parts of wedding planning for a bride. At The Wedding Collective we prefer our brides to feel calm and stress free throughout their wedding planning process. And the best way to achieve this is to do your wedding dress shopping at the right time, lets call it the Order Sweet Spot.

The Wedding Collective’s Order Sweet Spot is 8 months before your wedding date

This means booking your wedding dress fitting consultations 8 months out which will give you time to find your dream wedding dress and placing your order for it. By ordering your dress 8 months before your wedding date, it allows the supplier the necessary time to produce your dress, have it sent to South Africa and allow our seamstresses the opportunity to do the required alteration appointments before your wedding day without any rush. Some wedding dresses require 1 - 2 alteration appointments, some require 4 - 6 or even more, it all depends on the intricacy of your wedding dress and the alterations required.

What should I do if my wedding is less than 8 months away?

Depending on your timeline, we can still assist you. Most of our suppliers can produce wedding dresses on a shorter lead time with an added Rush Fee if they have availability in their schedule. If your wedding is less than 3 months away we recommend that you purchase a Sample wedding dress from our Sample Rail or that you rent your wedding dress from our available rental options. The wedding dresses available to choose from are less when you have a shorter lead time, but we would still be able to assist you.

But don’t start shopping too early…

When you book your wedding dress consultation appointments, don’t go with the mindset of ‘I am just looking around’. We can fully understand the reason for this outlook on your shopping experience, but would like to explain why it is not helpful to you finding your dream wedding dress.

If you start your shopping too early and go to different bridal boutiques with the idea to just see what they have, you will try on many dresses without the need to make a decision. You will most probably find a dress or dresses that you love, but won’t order it as you feel there is no rush. Fast forward a few months later to when it is time to order your dress, you will probably go to more boutiques and try on even more dresses as boutiques get new stock in regularly. By this time you have tried on 100 dresses without making any decisions. You will start feeling overwhelmed and find that it is difficult to choose just one dress. The more you try on, the more confused you will get. That is why:

We highly recommend shopping when you are ready to order your wedding dress

And when you have said the coveted ‘ Yes to the dress”, stop looking at other wedding dresses. Delete that Pinterest board, unfollow any distracting brands on Instagram. Like we always say, wedding dress shopping is a lot like finding your husband. Once you found him, you stopped looking for better options.