First of all, I will say that I think Southern Bride has a good selection of beautiful dresses for the prices that they offer. I was able to purchase a beautiful dress for a very reasonable price, and I can at least be grateful for this. However, the rest of my experience with them was absolutely abysmal.
When I first went into Southern Bride, I ended up falling in love with a dress that happened to be an excellent price, so I decided to go ahead and purchase it. I was told that if I purchased bridesmaids dresses and tuxes for my groomsmen here I would receive a discount. In the interest of simplicity, my fiancé and I decided that this would be the best choice. Since their selection of bridesmaids dresses was very limited I was told to go online and pick out a dress that they could order. When I gave them the information for the dresses I wanted, the lady working at the time asked me what fabric the dress was made out of, satin or chiffon. I told her that I was not sure, but that I THOUGHT it was satin. Instead of simply pulling the catalog and double-checking, she took this as fact and pulled out the color samples. For those of you that don't know this, because I didn't either, the color samples for these fabrics are very different. "Aubergine" for satin looks more like a lavender on chiffon fabric. I chose what I thought would be an eggplant color from the sample I was given. Now, let me stop here and inform you that right about this time my fiancé and I found out, quite unexpectedly, that I was pregnant. So, what would have already been a stressful time had just increased exponentially.
After working hard to move up dates on the venue, musician, photographer, etc., I was thrilled to hear that my bridesmaid's dresses were in! I went into the store, and while the dresses WERE beautiful, they were NOT aubergine. I was told that there was nothing that could be done. Nothing. They did not offer free, or even discounted, alterations for the dresses.
I then informed them that I had bridal portraits the following week and would need my dress and headpiece by a certain date. I picked up the dress several days early, but was told that they did not have the headpiece at the store. My bridal portraits were the following Saturday, forty-five minutes away from where I live. I also had to travel an hour in the opposite direction that day to pick up my bouquet. I explained this to them and was promised that my headpiece would be in the shop by a certain time. But... lo and behold, when I came to pick it up on Saturday they acted as if they did not even know what I was talking about. I was then told that after PROMISING to call the seamstress yesterday and make sure that she knew to bring the headpiece for me, the owner, Vicky, had forgotten and the seamstress had no idea that she was supposed to bring it, so it was still at her house and that the only way for me to have it in my bridal portraits was to wait at the shop while she drove home to get it. So, already running late for my appointment, I now have no time to even quickly stop and grab some lunch, and when you're pregnant... this REALLY sucks. I informed the owner that I was very upset that she had failed to do what she promised me that she would and her excuse was that she had been sick. Well, sorry lady... but I was pregnant, and for those of you with children, you understand that for the first couple of months, you're pretty much "sick" every day. Somehow I managed to deal with this and still adhere to the needs of my 120 students. Forgive me for not having sympathy that you can't make one phone call for one bride. The sickness you had must have been unbelievably debilitating.
After my bridal portraits, they took the dress to clean and steam it. When I went to get my dress I saw that there was a stain on the train of the dress. At this point, I am almost in meltdown mode. I pointed it out to the owner, and was told that since my mother had gone over the stains on the dress that needed to be cleaned from the bridal portrait session, it was her fault. And let me set the stage for this conversation... why I expected it to be in any way rational, I have no idea. The bridal associate that I am speaking to about this literally has BLACK, wet, hair dye in her hair, in a store full of white dresses... with no wrap or anything covering it. There aren't many things I can think of that would be any less professional in this line of work. They finally offered me a second free cleaning. And ironically, after they had argued that the stain was there before (although had not been marked for cleaning) and that some stains "just could not be gotten out", the second cleaning did the trick.
On top of all this, I later found out that the bridesmaids dresses had not been steamed, and my bridesmaids all had to take their dresses elsewhere and PAY to have them steamed.
So. That is, in full, my experience with Southern Bride in Yadkinville. read more
