After selling her own wedding dress online, Irish stylist Isabel Gleeson set up a business giving brides the opportunity to do the same.
Returning home from London after six years, she married in 2021. After the wedding, she received messages on Instagram seeing if she was planning on selling her wedding dress.
“Basically, within a week or so I met up with someone, and she tried on the dress. I got about 50 per cent back of what I paid for the dress.”
“I popped something up on my Instagram, saying that I had sold my dress, I got probably more messages than I have ever received, asking where I sold it”.
After that real world experience, she decided to set up the business.
“It is obviously a lot of money and weddings are obviously so expensive as it is, so it feels like it is one place where you can get a tiny bit of the money back is the dress," she says.
Sellers can pay a one-time fee of €20 to list their dress online for whatever price they deem suitable. Buyers can peruse images of the dress and the seller keeps 100 per cent of the commission once it is sold.
“I popped something up on my Instagram, saying that I had sold my dress, I got probably more messages than I have ever received, asking where I sold it”
With her experience in the fashion industry, Gleeson was also aware of the growing trend of reselling clothes.
“My main point is about sustainability; it is such a waste having a dress just tucked away under your bed for years.
“I just feel like it is not such a necessary to have it around when you have all the professional photographs to look back on.
“It is also a great selling point because when people are uploading their dresses to my site they have all of their professional photos ready to go. They are not putting up pictures of it in the wardrobe," she says.
It is not just about saving money, Ms Gleeson says, you are passing a little piece of history and making someone’s special day that bit more special.
