Follow this topicHow to get a cheap wedding dress
Find out where to get a gorgeous wedding dress for under £300!
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According to that expensiveweddingdresses.net, the most expensive wedding dress cost $12 million and had real diamonds sewn onto it.
At the other end of the spectrum, there are brides who actually make wedding dresses out of toilet paper.
On average, however, most brides are prepared to hand over about £1,000.
Not me. But neither would I consider walking around in toilet paper. I set myself the highest budget I’d ever allowed myself for any dress in my entire life: £300. Personally I think that’s still pretty excessive for a dress I would only wear once, but trust me when I say wedding dress shop assistants are absolutely horrified when they hear that budget. Most couldn’t show me the door fast enough!
But I persevered. I nagged every married friend I had about how to save on costs as well as spending hours on the internet. Here’s what I discovered:
The best places to buy a wedding dress on the high street
Some high street chains have wedding departments and others simply have ‘any occasion’ dresses that work really well as wedding dresses. Here’s my pick of the best:
All offer beautiful 'off the shelf' bridalwear for £150 to £300. Personally, I think the dresses at Coast and Phase Eight are the most stunning.
The best places to buy a wedding dress online
There are some stunning, dirt-cheap wedding dresses if you don't mind ordering online (unless you can get to the US to try it on first) from top American retailer Nordstrom. You can also find some beautiful dress for around £300 from net-a-porter.com.
Alternatively, if you know which design you want and are happy to take the measurements yourself, you could consider getting a cheeky copycat version made in China or design your own and get it made cheaply. One of the best websites for this is myweddingdressforless.co.uk, also known as Milly's Bridal shop.
The best places to buy a secondhand wedding dress
Specialist wedding dress charity shops (such as Oxfam, Barnardo’s and St Ann's Hospice) are also well worth checking out if you’d like a bargain designer dress, as is the secondhand website sellmyweddingdress.co.uk.
If you live near a vintage clothes shop, it may also be worth popping in to see whether there are any dresses you like in stock. Here’s a list of London’s best vintage clothes shops or you could order a vintage dress online from a site called poshgirlvintage.com in the USA.
How to pay for your dress
I’ve discussed the best – and cheapest - ways to pay for the entire wedding in my last post, which I really hope you find time to read!
What I didn't mention, however, was that when you buy the dress you can get secret discounts if you buy from a high street shop like I did.
My wedding dress came from Coast and the price was £195 – so £105 below my budget. I tried it on in the shop, decided to buy it and went home empty-handed. Why? To search the internet for a valid online voucher code, of course. And luckily, I found one. At the time, Coast had hooked up with a wedding magazine and was offering a 15% off code. You didn’t even need to buy the magazine to use the code.
Finding this code and checking it would work took about five minutes to do, and saved me £29.84.
But that wasn’t enough for me! I then went onto a cashback website to see if there were any other discounts I could get. Sure enough, Quidco was offering 5% cashback when you visited Coast through their site. (To find out more about how cashback websites work, watch this video: Cash in on cashback websites). A few seconds and a single click later, I had saved myself another £8.45.
Then I bought the dress using my new American Express Platinum Cashback Card, that I’d taken out specifically for wedding purchases. This gave me another 5% off the total purchase price - so another £8.45.
I did, however, have to fork out a delivery fee of an additional £3.95 to buy it online. However, the £46.74 I saved using the various discounts more than made up for this, meaning my wedding dress cost me just £152.21 – almost half the amount I was prepared to pay for it.
Bargain!
More: How to have a cheap (but lovely) wedding | I sent the cheapest wedding invitations in the world | How to set up a free wedding website
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