'We didn't want any of our brides to suffer': Bridal stores band together after dress designer goes bankrupt

When the American wedding dress designer Alfred Angelo declared bankruptcy last month, a Calgary store was among the many left scrambling to make sure brides were dressed to impress on their big day.

Jessalyn Thomson, owner of Calgary-based bridal store Cameo and Cufflinks, told the Calgary Eyeopener how Alfred Angelo Bridal going out of business brought brides and retailers together to make the best out of a bad situation.

An excerpt of that interview follows:

Q: Can you walk us through what happened?

A: In July, we got an e-mail from our rep just saying that the bankruptcy had happened. This was July 13.

So we were kind of told over the course of two weeks that the dresses were going to be getting shipped to us…. There were going to be some orders that we wouldn't get, but the majority would come.

And then the message drastically changed on July 25…. The new bankruptcy trustee that they got and lawyer decided that nothing was going to end up getting shipped to Canada.

Q: How popular are these Alfred Angelo wedding dresses?

A: Even though they are such a major supplier, we are very fortunate. We diversify our brands so they were not a major contributor of ours.

But we did have about eight bridal gowns outstanding, plus the equivalent in bridesmaids' dresses. So although we were affected, we definitely weren't affected as much as some other stores out there.

Q: How expensive are these Alfred Angelo dresses?

A: Alfred Angelo gowns typically range from about $700 to $2,000, so they definitely do hit the market of the brides that are, I would say, a bit more price conscious.

So the fact that you're hearing these stories from the U.S. of girls just losing their money, losing their property of what they spent their money on, is definitely devastating and caused a widespread panic.

Q: What are you doing to help out the brides?

A: In Canada … we have our own inventory. We're self-contained stores and not Alfred Angelo stores, so we were working with stores from B.C. all the way to Nova Scotia.

All the bridal stores kind of had this common goal … we're all just going to sell our inventory to each other at cost because in the end we didn't want any of our brides to suffer.

So because of that, we were able to get about half of our customers orders fulfilled just from essentially trading inventory with different stores across Canada.

Q: Are you taking a financial hit? 

A: Oh, yes. Definitely the people we did refunds to impacts the bottom line.

A seamstress can tailor down [a dress by as much as four sizes] … so in order to have the girls accept that, we're taking on the costs of the alterations. 

If it's a gown that had been previously tried on … even offering 30 per cent off the gown, too.

…We've had some girls who we weren't able to find replacement dresses for, so we've had to do refunds.

• MORE CALGARY NEWS | Beaver buddies 'doing really well together' as they recover from injuries at wildlife centre
• MORE CALGARY NEWS | Calgary businessman fed up by U.S. politics urges others to buy Canadian

• With files from the Calgary Eyeopener