Picture a bride, and you’ll probably picture some version of the same woman: a skinny model, a large diamond, a six-figure wedding, and a $10K+ dress.
That’s the bride we so often see online, so it’s hard to picture anyone else. We’re constantly inundated with images of this young, thin, wealthy woman who represents the ideal bride. And designers in the bridal industry are some of the most egregious reinforcers of this image.
Sample sizes are made for her size 4, 5’8” frame. Dresses are made for her unlimited budget. And the shopping experience is designed for her someone who can easily shop Monday through Friday, 9 AM to 5 PM and has no qualms about flying across the country just to try on a dress.
The problem with all of this is that she hardly exists.
Because most brides look like me and you.
The ideal bride isn’t a real bride
If you’re a bride shopping for a wedding dress and you don’t fit all the characteristics of the “ideal” bride, I’m sure you’ve felt it at some point during your shopping journey.
Maybe it’s a bridal boutique charging you more to try on dresses on the weekend because you have a job. Maybe it’s being squeezed into a sample gown several sizes too small. Maybe it’s being told that unless you pay a rush fee, you’ll be out of options in time for your wedding, even though you’re shopping more than six months before your wedding date.
When the entire system is built around a customer who doesn’t exist, anyone who falls outside those narrow characteristics is treated like an exception. And being treated like an exception often comes with shame, judgment, and the feeling that you’re the problem.
But the irony is that the “ideal” bride isn’t an ideal customer at all. She’s an unrealistic one.
Because in this day and age, most women work Monday through Friday. Most of us have real wedding budgets. Most of us are not a size 4. And most of us aren’t willing or able to fly across the country just to find a wedding dress.
Why my experience led me to launching The Real Bride
I was a customer long before I ever thought about designing a wedding dress or launching a bridal brand.
Twelve months before my wedding, I went wedding dress shopping with so much optimism. I’d dreamed about this moment since I was a kid, and I thought it was going to be fun and magical. I couldn’t wait to feel beautiful in a gown...I mean, how often do we actually get to wear one?!
But I quickly learned that the experience wasn’t designed for women like me.
For starters, I went into wedding planning thinking I had an unlimited dress budget. After years of watching Say Yes to the Dress and developing some unrealistic expectations about what weddings cost, I thought, Of course I’ll spare no expense to look and feel my absolute best.
But wedding planning will quickly humble you! I realized that spending $10,000 on a dress meant taking $10,000 away from something else my fiancé and I, along with our family and friends, might enjoy more.
So spending that much on a dress became more and more difficult to justify… unless I absolutely loved it.
And it turns out…that was easier said than done.
Because I hated wedding dress shopping.
I didn’t realize you were expected to buy 9–12 months before your wedding, often before you even knew your wedding colors, overall vision, or total budget. I also didn’t know that many boutiques carried only one or two sample sizes, and that those samples were often very small.
Because of some health issues, my body had changed dramatically in a short amount of time, and I was already struggling to feel comfortable in my new body. Then I walked into a bridal boutique and was put into the only sample size they had on hand: a streetwear size 4 gown, roughly a bridal size 6 or 8.
I was bursting out of a $5,000 gown, and I was somehow expected to decide whether I loved how I looked in it.
This happened again and again at the high-end boutiques I visited, and I was devastated. Even while wearing the most expensive piece of clothing I had ever put on, I didn’t feel beautiful, and I certainly didn’t feel like these dresses were made for anyone who looked like me.
Then came the pressure.
As I left these boutiques, I was repeatedly reminded that I needed to make a decision soon or risk paying a rush fee. Dresses costing $3,000 to $5,000+ couldn’t be made within nine months without an added incentive, and it was getting “late” for me. (Mind you, I still had a year until my wedding.)
So now I wasn’t just discouraged. I was panicking.
Maybe I was too late. Maybe I was too picky. Maybe something was wrong with my body. Maybe I needed to fly to New York or Los Angeles and try on more dresses.
After enough venting to my fiancé and questioning whether I was somehow the problem, I finally had a moment of clarity:
Why was I putting myself through all of this?
I had spent more than eight years working in corporate retail, developing retail strategy for Fortune 500 brands. I knew that the customer ultimately determines whether a business succeeds or fails. I knew that if you’re asking someone to spend money with you, you have to give them real value in return.
So what value was I getting from this experience?
And why was I, the customer, expected to completely change my life to accommodate the inflexible rules of these bridal brands?
So I quit wedding dress shopping, made my own dress, and started The Real Bride instead.
Why I named this brand The Real Bride
It’s who I built this brand for.
It’s for the brides with busy lives, jobs, wedding budgets, and diverse bodies.
After my own experience wedding dress shopping, I wanted to build something I would have loved to find when I was a bride. I wanted to see more bodies like mine, more diverse models, and a shopping experience that offered more flexibility, convenience, and fewer upcharges.
That’s why our pieces are featured on both straight and plus sizes, and why we intentionally feature women of color throughout our brand. It’s why we fit every piece on two different fit models rather than designing around a single “ideal” body type.
It’s why we offer Try On At Home, so you can try on our pieces anywhere in the U.S. and fit wedding dress shopping into your schedule, rather than having to rearrange your life around a bridal appointment.
I built The Real Bride because I believe the bridal experience should be designed around real brides, not the other way around.
I built this brand for you.
You are not the problem
If wedding dress shopping has made you feel huge, broke, or invisible, I want to be the one to tell you that the process is broken, not you. I lived it, and then I built a different one.
You are The Real Bride.
