An Exclusive Bridal Shopping Experience

Preparing for a wedding can be both exhilarating and stressful. It gives the bride-to-be an opportunity to make purchases and be pampered in ways that she normally wouldn’t have the opportunity to be. But it also involves a lot of planning and work within a relatively limited timeframe.

To help alleviate some of this stress, many women turn to bridal salons. Here, a bride-to-be can work with experienced professionals to find her bridal gown, accessories and bridesmaid dresses.

Bridal salons are designed to give brides and their bridesmaids a chance to escape the stress of standard wedding planning. Rather than darting from store to store, busy brides can make a number of big purchases and decisions in one place. Plus, bridal salon consultants are there to offer their expert advice and recommendations.

Making a Bridal Salon Appointment

While many bridal salons do allow walk in browsing, the best way to use a bridal salon is to make an appointment for viewings and fittings. This will ensure that the entire focus of the staff is on you and your wedding. When you make an appointment, the dress designs that you are most interested in will already be pulled from the shelves for you, so you don’t have to search the entire salon for one or two dresses.

An initial appointment for a viewing is made first, and once a wedding dress and bridesmaid dresses have been chosen, additional appointments can be made for fittings and customization sessions. It is generally recommended that you browse the bridal salon when you come to make an appointment so that the staff will have an idea of the dress designs that you are interested in.

Though some salons may use your initial appointment to suggest and help you pick out potential dresses as well.

Viewing Bridal Salon Dresses

When you come in for your viewing appointment, you will be presented with several potential wedding dresses so that you can decide how much you like their overall style and design. If you have previously picked out dresses that you are interested in, this will give you a chance to get a better look at them and will enable you to spend more time with each of the dresses in question.

If you haven’t had a chance to select potential wedding or bridesmaid dresses, the salon may make suggestions based on some of their most popular designs or descriptions of your interests.

Even if you have selected dresses for viewing before your appointment, the salon may pull one or two additional dresses based upon the selections that you have made; these will likely be dresses that you might not have noticed before, and will be chosen to give you a wider range of options.

You may also be presented with bridesmaid dresses at your viewing. These dresses will be selected based on how well they complement the colors and styles of the wedding gowns you’re considering.

Bridal Salon Custom Fittings

Once you have selected a wedding dress and bridesmaid dresses, additional appointments will need to be made for fitting sessions. Often, there will be an initial fitting session in which measurements are taken, with follow-up sessions after adjustments to the dresses have been made to ensure a proper fit. It may take several sessions to get the fit of all of the dresses just right, with each follow-up being scheduled to best accommodate the bride-to-be or the bridesmaid whose dress is being altered.

Bridal Salon Jewelry and Accessories

The appointments at the bridal salon can also be used to choose jewelry and accessories that will perfectly accentuate the look of both the bride and the bridesmaids. You may find a variety of earrings, necklace, and hairpiece options at the bridal salon, ranging from small and relatively simple to significantly more extravagant.

Earrings may feature basic colors that match the wedding party, or a variety of diamond or gemstone designs. Necklaces can be simple silver or gold chains, tasteful chokers, or extravagant diamond pieces that feature a number of stones in different sizes. Hats, veils, and other hairpieces can be coordinated with both wedding dresses and bridesmaids dresses, and are often available in a wide range of colors. Shoes can also be found at bridal salons, both in specific colors and dyeable options that can be coordinated with any color.

by Victoria Snead, a freelance writer who writes about fashion, often focusing on one kind of garment such as wedding dresses.