David's Bridal is an Affordable Option

When I started looking for my wedding dress I knew I would probably end up at David's Bridal since it is pretty much the only affordable option in my neck of the woods. Most Bride's in my area shop there unless they are fortunate enough to have the money to go to Demetrios.

I started by looking at their website to see what kind of gowns they had. One nice thing about David's is that all of the dresses they have in their store are available to view on their website. I kind of knew what I wanted, a strapless ballgown style dress with a pickup skirt. Also, I did not want a train or else a very short one if I had one. I also had a budget of 500.00. I found quite a few gowns that I really liked and was getting excited about going to try them on.

Finally the day of my appointment arrived and my excitement faded pretty fast. 99% of the beautiful dresses I had viewed online said that they came in plus sizes but when I got to the store they didn't have ANY of them in plus sizes to try on. You can only special order them. Sorry but I'm not ordering anything that expensive if I haven't been able to try it on first so I was sad now.

In fact my consultant could only find like 3 dresses in my size for me to try on, which was pretty depressing. My size is not some off the wall size, I'm a misses size 16/18 just like billions of other women. I knew going into it that even though I don't have to shop in the plus size department for my regular clothes that I would be in that department when it came to a wedding dress just because they tend to run 2 sizes smaller than regular clothing. I didn't think an 18W wedding dress would be that hard to come by. Since 90% of their plus size options (and all the ones I had liked) were special order only that left me with a very limited choice.

The dress in the picture above is the one I chose, it was the first one I tried on and I did love it but I wanted more options and there just weren't any. I almost cried during my appointment and it wasn't happy tears, it was tears of frustration. I tried on the two other dresses she found and I didn't like them as much as the first one. I think the consultant knew that I was really sad so she went to try and find something else and managed to find a beautiful gown that was being discontinued. I put it on and I loved the way it looked but I didn't feel like it was as flattering to me as the first dress was.

I am for the most part happy with my dress, I feel very beautiful in it, it just isn't what I had in mind and I wish there had been more options available for trying on. It seemed they catered to those who could fit into the regular sizes and then those were much larger but those at the lower end of the plus size scale were kind of left out. Why offer so many gowns in plus size if people can't even try them on?

I will say though that the staff was very nice and when I went back recently to pick something up my consultant even remembered me. It's been a few months since I purchased my dress so I was impressed by that.

I know I will be beautiful on my wedding day I just want others to be aware not to get your hopes up too high that you'll have a lot of options if you go to David's and have a certain style in mind. I shouldn't complain too much, I got everything I wanted aside from it being strapless I was just a bit disappointed with the in store selection.