Hi Brides-to-be,

Accapella Bridal Boutique is excited to announce that we will be hosting the Madi Lane Spring 2021 Collection - Aphrodite - at a pre-release Trunk Show on 25-26th September. This will be an exclusive event open to Accapella Brides before the collection launches for online viewing on the 16th November.

Suitable for brides getting married from April 2021-April 2022.

The gowns will only be available for these two days, so there will be two consultations running at once, with my preferred stylists Coco and Paige assisting.

Unfortunately this means guests will be limited to one guest per bride so that we do not breach COVID regulations for our boutique space. Book now to avoid disappointment!

http://www.accapellabridal.com.au/event

Connie xo

Accapella Bridal is delighted to be hosting a Trunk Show for the release of the first collection by new designer Evie Young.

Evie Young designs are for the bride who stands boldly and who confidently lives as she is. She is all about writing her own rules, walking her own runway, and being the author of her many adventures. She seeks the extraordinary in her dress — a design that is worthy of her soul’s expression.

These beautiful gowns are made from textural layered laces, with comfort as the most important design feature. Sizes are inclusive, and the dresses are designed by our Australian team on the Gold Coast.

The Trunk Show will be held on Saturday 4th July, and is suitable for brides getting married from November 2020 through to the end of 2021. Bookings must be made via my website booking platform.

By Appointment Only Book your appointment here.

Hi Brides

So, while I was cleaning, and waiting for deliveries, and seeing the other last-minute consult from today, I had yet another call from a bride.

She was coming from Nowra and had a wedding date in November.

She was THRILLED to find out she’d have access to a few of the Madi Lane trunk show dresses that had just been delivered!

She had done some research and was interested in the Harper and Aubrey designs. She tried on Harper, but I knew straight away that the bride didn’t feel like it was The One. I looked in the box of dresses I had opened at my previous consultation, and Aubrey was in there too! What are the chances? I should buy a lotto ticket.

The bride didn’t buy Harper or Aubrey, but she did buy a dress from that box - and I can tell you that it suited the bride SO much more.

Congratulations Emily 🥳

Connie xo

Hi Brides 

Hi Brides-to-Be,

Sorry you haven’t heard from me much during this stressful time - it’s taken me a while to gather my thoughts as I’ve been feeling so emotional about all my lovely brides that have postponed their weddings this week. As you all know, I alter all of my brides' dresses here in the boutique, so I’ve been by the bride’s side through the whole process of finding and ordering a dress, coming in for fittings and altering their dresses. To find out their wedding wasn’t going ahead just saddened me so deeply. Some gowns haven’t been altered yet and will be able to be postponed until three weeks before their new wedding date.

~ HOUSEKEEPING NOTICE ~

* I AM open, but as always it is by appointment only.

* Your appointment is for a total of Two attendees - the bride plus One guest. There will be no in-and-out swapping of guests, so please leave everyone else at home. This is unfortunate, but the best way for us to manage the total number of people we come in contact with during the week.

* If you are not well, or have ANY signs of a cold, even just a sniffly - PLEASE CANCEL. If you come into the store and you, or one of your guests, show signs of being unwell, I will ask you all to leave.

* Wedding dresses are still requiring 20 weeks for turnaround - nothing has changed, so there is no need to rush in and buy.

We can still look forward for more weddings to come - we will get through this together!

Best wishes, and stay well!

Connie 😊

Alteration of the week

Essense of Australia D2771

Removing the back underlining so it doesn’t come out on the sides. I felt it looked messy

Hi Brides-to-Be,

I know that I’ve written about this a few times, but I feel like it’s time to quickly touch on it again.

So, Saturday’s appointments...

Saturday appointments are always in high demand. I usually have a wait-list of about 10 girls each week, waiting to hear if there has been a cancellation. So when you make a Saturday appointment, I will always confirm your slot on the Thursday immediately before. I do this via text message, and I ask that you respond.

If you don’t reply by Friday, I resend the text message and send an extra email, just in case something is wrong with your phone. If I don’t hear from you after a few hours, I give you a quick call to check in. This confirmation process understandably takes me a number of hours in admin times

If there is still no response, I assume you’re not planning on attending. Your appointment is cancelled and replaced by another bride from the waitlist.

I still want to believe that people are honest and courteous and will let me know in advance if they can’t make it.

Please read your confirmation text closely so you’re sure of your appointment time. Please be punctual. Please - if an emergency crops up (and we all know they do, from time to time) call me straight away.

I don’t charge booking fees for my consults, but I can understand why some city boutiques do!

Connie

GREAT WARNING IF YOU’RE LOOKING FOR A DRESS!

I had a bride from the Blue Mountains pay me a visit on Tuesday. She came by herself, after having dragged her whole host of guests to many other Sydney appointments previously. She’d heard about me on social media.

She tried on a few dresses, and she commented that she loves the look of a high neckline paired with plain skirt. I said that I had a size 10 Martina Liana style 823, but it was discontinued and she would need to take my sample dress. She was happy with that arrangement and tried it on - she loved it! She said, “I like this better than all the other dresses I have tried on!” I asked her if it bothered her that it was off the rack, and she said that, compared to her shopping experience in Sydney, the condition of my gowns were immaculate.

I took some video footage of her in it, as she wore it so well and her body language showed that she loved it. I told her that I would put it on facebook and Instagram in case she decides not to buy it.

The bride wanted to have some time to think about it, and as with all my brides I was quick to encourage this. I explained that it was the only one of these gowns I had, but that my Wednesday bride appointment was buying a specific dress and that I didn’t have any appointments on Thursday. She wanted to make an appointment for Saturday to bring along her mother, but the best I could offer her was a spot on my cancellations list.

Thursday morning I came into the boutique and I get a phone call from an anxious bride in the UK! She had tried on - AND LOVED - the ML 823 in the UK but the sample dress had a black mark on it. The bridal shop told her it would come out, but that the stain actually looked worse after they dry cleaned it. The bridal store didn’t tell her immediately, and let her know 6 weeks later AFTER it had been discontinued! She had seen that I had a size 10 on my social media and she had a friend in Sydney that was travelling over for the wedding. I explained that I already had a bride interested in the dress, but that I would call her first and get back to the second bride as soon as I could. I sell it to you there was a bride interested in it.

I rang the first bride and left a message, but got no reply or call back. I called the second bride and explained that I had no reply from the other bride and that the dress was hers as soon as it was paid for. Within twenty minutes everything was done and paid for in full! She was so excited - 12am in the UK and she couldn’t take the grin off her face - so happy!

I was so sad to email the first bride to let her know that the dress had sold. I feel awful, but I can’t allow my emotions to cloud my judgement when something is on sale. If a dress DOESN’T sell just after it’s discontinued, it usually means I am stuck with it and it’s an outlay I can’t recoup.

What I want to express is that if you’ve found a dress that you LOVE, and you still love it after sleeping on it, don’t wait to commit! I NEVER pressure my brides to buy, but sometimes a little bit of pressure would have been a good thing.

Connie xo

Hi Brides-to-be,

I had a new bride come in , with her friend who was getting married on the weekend.This newly engaged bride wanted a sale dress, as she had a very strict budget. This is always totally fine by me! But it also meant that I would need to find her a dress that was as close to her size as possible so that the alterations are of a minimal cost.

While the bride was trying on a dress she loved, she asked for an approximate price for the necessary alterations. I gave her a price, and her friend immediately said ‘Wow! I paid $600!’ I was shocked and asked her what she had done. She said that the dress was a size 14 - I looked at her and to me she looked like a size 6/8. I said, ‘Fair enough, but there’s no way I would have sold you an off-the-rack dress that was way to big for you. But I don’t want to bag any shop.’

And THEN she said it arrived late! I looked at her in horror. ‘They ORDERED you a size 14?!’ She said that dress arrived late, and when she tried it on it fell down. She had seven fittings in all, and didn’t know any better to question the sizing.

I turned back to my bride, and showed her how the alterations would work. As I was putting bust cups in to show them what a difference it makes, her friend asked where she could buy them from. I replied ‘Didn’t you get it altered with the bra cups in?’ She complained that her dress was still not fitting well, and I explained that was because it was too big a size to make smaller, unless it was unpicked and completely regraded. I felt so sorry for her and gave her a pair of cups from my boutique. I just don’t know how people sleep selling a dress that’s so completely the wrong size.

The bride who was buying her dress said ‘I have been following Connie for 18 months and I know I can trust her to find and fit my dress.’

Connie xo

This is a story about a bride having trust in me.

This bride was back in for a second consultation. She wanted to try on the dresses she had already tried on, but also wanted to know if there was anything new - she’d liked the previous dresses but none had really spoken to her heart.

As we get to about half way through the consult, I start to get a very clear idea of what it was she was looking for!

I said to her “I have the perfect dress for you, but I don’t have it in your size so you are going to have to trust me.”

I held the Martina Liana 984 against her, and explained how Martina Liana accept custom changes to dresses at the time of ordering. For this bride, I suggested we continue the lace up over the shoulder so we can insert a bra, and sent a diagram to the designer showing where I wanted extra boning put in. We also requested no netting in the underskirt, because the bride wanted a softer look the the skirt drape.

The bride had so much trust in me and could visualise what it was I was suggesting so said ‘Let’s do it!’

The bride is a size 28 and this dress has the Wow Factor that the other dresses didn’t have.

Connie xo

This dress is a great example of some of the small changes we can make in the boutique.

Sometimes the volume of a skirt is too much for the height of the bride. An easy way to fix this is to remove some of the lower layers of netting from the underlay. This makes the skirt lighter and more drapey.

To help you visualise what it could look like without the netting, I get you to tuck it all between your legs. This then shows how the skirt would fall at the front and sides.

Hi Brides.

We had a bit of a state of emergency in the boutique a few weeks ago. I had a bride who had ordered a custom design gown - a design from a designer with a bunch of agreed-upon changes made at the cutting stage. She came in for her fitting to see what alterations to bust and hem-length would need to be done, and we could both immediately see that the dress was significantly too big for her. Her weight loss had been minimal since ordering the dress (she didn’t need to lose weight!) but I thought I had better take her measurements and compare them to the measurements I had recorded and provided to the designer. Yes, just as I thought, only an inch off her waist and and inch and a half off her hips - not enough to impact the dress sizing this dramatically.

I could tell we were both getting worried at this stage, so I suggested we hold the size 12 dress up against a size 14 we had in the store. Lo and behold, it had been cut at a size 14! No wonder it was so big.

I took photos and videos and immediately contacted the designer - her wedding was just five weeks away. At first the designer hinted at grading the dress - this is where you recut the dress from the existing fabric, running it in here and there, to ‘make it fit’. It’s never going to give a perfect fit. I refused to consider that and express shipped the dress that afternoon so that they could confirm that it was, in fact, incorrect.

The got to making the new dress immediately, and with a bit of trust in the couriers, we were able to have it ready *just* in time for her wedding! It was very stressful for both my bride and myself, because I really hate seeing my brides upset.

Now that it’s all sorted, I can definitely sit back and say that yes, we are all human and it was just a mistake in the cutting room. The designers were very helpful in getting it remade in time. But what DOES worry me is if I hadn’t been a seamstress in my former life, there’s every chance that the mistake wouldn’t have been picked up on and the bride’s weightloss would have been to blame for the poorly fitting gown. Definitely make sure you know what and who you are buying from before you commit all that money!

Connie xo

Hi Brides

One thing that seems to be very common in the bridal industry is the idea of having to wait such a long time for the dress of your dreams or the one that fits you. As a lot of my gowns are imported from Europe,and local designers,these dresses I have in store at Accapella Bridal ready to be purchased off the rack or for budget concise I have a sale rack These gowns are hand selected by me, so whether your wedding is in two years, two months, or two weeks, you can be assured they are of the highest quality and that you will not be compromising on design.After 28 years of fitting gowns for brides, I can help you choose a gown that will be the perfect fit in every way. Looking forward to seeing you soon,Connie xx