Wedding dress from China - Confessions of an online-shopaholic, pt II

Our first wedding was organized with a very small budget, since my husband was unemployed and I'm a student/homemaker. The budget for my wedding dress was super-small as well. Most store-sold dressed here in Finland were wayyyy too expensive. To make things worse I have a very annoying body shape (wide hips, very narrow waist, broader shoulders), which means most store-sold dresses would have to be altered and I would end up spending even more money. While in the U.S I bought one wedding dress online through Amazon and the dress itself was gorgeous. The problem was again that I would have had to have it altered to fit my small-ish waist. I ended up selling the dress when I got to Finland. After that I decided to get a custom made dress to solve this problem. Considering the minuscule budget, I basically had no choice, but to order my wedding dress from China.

I had my doubts about ordering a wedding dress from China: would it be the right size, would it be like the description/photo, would it be acceptable quality, would my credit card be charged more than promised, would the dress ever even arrive? Those were the obvious questions. The other things I wondered were if it was ethically responsible to order the wedding dress from China, when I have no idea who made it? I pondered this for quite some time until I had to accept the fact that I never really know who makes the clothes I wear, unless I have them made at a local shop and even then I don't know who made the fabric etc.

Next step was to search a good site to order the dress from. I read a ton of reviews and looked at even more photos of gorgeous dresses. Based on the dresses, the reviews and the price I finally chose Lilywedding.com. And I wasn't disappointed; the dress was gorgeous, just the right size and the best part was it totally fit my budget! For the price of little over $200 I got the custom made dress, a pretty veil, an okay two-hoop petticoat and all this delivered to my door on time. All in all a very good experience! The only slightly negative thing was that Lilywedding forgot to add the spaghetti straps I asked for, but they did send them in a letter afterwards. The original dress did not have straps. I actually ended up not using the straps since the dress was just perfect without them!

The dress on Lilywedding.com

And on me :)

I've also ordered some cocktail dresses from dinodirect.com, which is even cheaper. They have a ton of different wedding and other dresses, some of them custom made. The three dresses I've ordered have been good for the price, but the quality hasn't been as good as Lilywedding. For example one the dresses was way too big and didn't have a lace-up back as promised, but a zipper. The two other dresses have been great, but not exactly as in the description/photo. But like I said, for the price they have been awesome. Also, dinodirect.com delivers really fast. All my dresses were here in less than a month from when I ordered them!

I just ordered a dress for our second wedding (the first one was in Finland and the second one will be in the U.S) and this time I used 1luckybride.com. Judging from the reviews they seemed to be pretty good at delivering what they promised. I guess I'll find out in two months :)