Another Rant, Why your dress does cost that much.

In my FB news feed today I saw a link to an NPR story called, Why Did My Wedding Dress Cost So Much?, as a wedding dress designer, I clicked on it and watched the 5 min video of the story.

In full disclosure I am a bit of an NPR addict. I wake up to WNYC and listen pretty much everyday, I'm a sustaining member of WNYC. And I loove Planet Money. Well, I was shocked and disappointed by now disappointing her story was and shocked and disappointed by the lack of actual reporting that she did.

She took her wedding dress to B & J (one of my favorite fabric stores) to research the cost of the materials and then she took it to a tailor to investigate the estimated cost of the dress construction in China. What she learned was the wholesale of the fabric likely cost about $500 and the making of the garment (what we call Cut, Make and Trim or CMT for short) was likely about $200.

From my experience her experts were right, I would totally agree. But that's when she decided that the dress should have cost about $1500 instead of the $2800 it did cost. And she felt ripped off.

I object.

There is so much that goes into a garment then just the materials and the CMT.

There is a person sitting at a desk somewhere that has an idea and sketches it out and edits it with a design team. There is a team of people that work to get the garment produced, and a different team that makes sure the dress fits. All this likely happens in an office, that pays rent. And all this happens before that dress even makes it to the Shop where she tried it on. Keep in mind that this dress was likely designed not in China and then manufactured in China and shipped on a boat to the states. None of that is free.

In that shop where she tried it on, there are people that work there, someone that owes the store and rents the space and picks what they will carry for the season. There was the salesperson that showed her the dress and helped her pick it out.

All these people are working. All these people are contributing to the design, production, sale of the dress and her experience. And instead of including that into the cost of her dress, she equated the cost of her dress as people selling her a beautiful memory.

While it may be true that many people make money in the wedding industry, and it may be true that some people over price things because they think they can, "say the W word and the price triples". In this case, it actually sounds like she got a bargain. Not ripped off.

There are no shortage of options for wedding attire, but someone designed a dress she wanted. And then a bazillion people brought that idea to fruition. (I didn't even mention the designer that designed the lace fabric that the dress designers picked out for that dress.) Maybe instead of making an article about how the industry trespassed on her emotions and sold her memories, she could write an article about how many people she actually helped to support in a struggling to recover world economy. Because that is what she actually did.

Rant over. Thank you.