What should you do with your wedding dress after you get married? For a long time, it was traditional for brides to keep their dresses. Often, they would put them away in hopes that their future daughter would wear it, or at least try it on, but in many cases women’s dresses wound up sitting in mothballs for decades, and never worn again. It was a sentimental choice, but ultimately an impractical one, and it raises the question: what should you do instead?
While there are a number of different things you might do with your wedding dress after saying “I do,” one thing that many women choose to do today is to sell their wedding dresses. Why? These are just 3 of the many reasons selling your dress can be a smart choice.
The Money Motive
One of the most straightforward reasons to sell your wedding dress is because of the financial return. After all, planning a wedding is expensive, and your dress is likely to be quite costly all on its own. By selling your dress, you not only can recover a little bit of the money that you spent on your ceremony, but also make your dream dress a little more affordable for someone else. Many dresses sold secondhand are only marked down about 10%, but some pricy designer gowns can be as little as half their original price.
An Eco-Friendly Option
In recent years, a growing number of brides are choosing to celebrate their weddings in more sustainable ways, finding ways to reduce travel, minimize food waste, and reuse items from the celebration. Selling your dress is also an eco-friendly choice, so if sustainability is one of your main concerns as a bride, this is a good choice. So much water and energy goes into producing a wedding gown, and it just doesn’t make sense for it to only be worn once.
A Practical Option
As mentioned above, it’s long been common for women to save their gowns in hopes of passing them on, but styles change, people are different sizes, and there’s no way of knowing this will ever actually happen. So, while you can save or preserve your dress after your wedding, you’re then faced with storing or displaying a cumbersome item for years – decades, even – and that can be impractical. Saving your dress makes even less sense if you live in an apartment without much space, and the reality is that no one else will really want to take the dress off your hands later on.
Today, the secondhand wedding dress market is big business and, while it does include many dresses actually used by brides, the marketplace also includes many new dresses that simply didn’t sell at bridal shops during the season they were “in style.” Additionally, just as you might choose to sell your dress because you believe in making more sustainable choices, there are many brides looking for secondhand dresses because they are committed to the same principles. These markets are booming, so why fret about what to do with your gown when there’s a practical option immediately at hand.
