TOGA! TOGA! TOGA!

I decided on a wedding dress!  If you are a boy and want to stop reading because I just said that, that's not really what this post is about though so don't tune out just yet.

The thing I want to talk about, which is the thing that helped me to decide on a dress the most, is taking pictures in bridal shops.

If you have ever watched Say Yes to the Dress, and you probably have even if you are a manly man, you might have noticed that in that store they don't allow you to take pictures.  I guess I can understand their reasoning, because they actually do carry a lot of exclusive, custom dresses that you can't find anywhere else, and they also have a lot of extremely rich (or more likely, in debt) clients who may very well take a picture of one of those custom $30k dresses and then have someone copy it for $2k or something.  So I guess I understand.

But what I DON'T understand is when a hick-town, stuck-in-the-80's Saskatoon bridal shop (cough Debra Dee cough) does not allow pictures.  No offense Debra Dee, but you do not have any exclusive, custom designs in your store.  Further, we are living in the age of the interwebs, so when you write down the style of the dress that someone likes and give it to them on your business card, GUESS WHAT NEWSFLASH they can look up the exact dress on the internet and have someone copy it for cheaper anyway.  So you are not keeping any business by not allowing pictures, in fact you are doing the opposite.

Because GUESS WHAT NEWSFLASH - I found a dress I really liked in Debra Dee and they would not let me take a picture of it.  Um, also, it was a BRIDESMAID DRESS that cost less than $250, so seriously - what am I going to do with the picture, pay someone $400 to make the same dress???  So I walked across the street to The Dress (which does not play midi files of Canon in D on their website, extra bonus), found the exact same dress, took a picture of it, took a picture of a bunch of other dresses I liked, looked at all of those pictures for a couple months, showed the pictures to my friends and asked their opinions, and decided I wanted to buy that dress.  From The Dress, not Debra Dee, for the straight-up reason that THEY LET ME TAKE PICTURES.

Debra Dee - if you'd let me take pictures in your store, it's honestly very possible that I might have chosen one of the dresses I tried on and forked over the $250 to you.  However, because all I had from you was the memory of those dresses, and I had a bunch of pictures from The Dress, it was a lot easier to look through those and start picturing myself wearing one of them on my wedding day.  And Debra Dee, if you had a clue at all, you would realize that that's probably the most effective way to sell a wedding dress in this day and age.  There are 4 bridal stores in Saskatoon, and many women also make trips out to Edmonton or further to go dress shopping - hardly anyone makes a split-second decision and if some stores let you take pictures and others don't, it's the pictures that are going to help you remember the dress that you liked, and ultimately the pictures that are going to make the sale.

This picture reinforced that I did not want to buy this particular dress, because it was not flattering in the stomachular area and also looks like a toga.