Boutique Shopping

12th July 2008

Darren and I spent the last 2 days shopping for our bridal package. I was reading through most forums and realised that many bride-to-be usually sign on the dotted lines on the first bridal company they enquire with. Not wise I decided.

But well, after the first encounter with a bridal boutique, I understood why.

Firstly, when we step into the bridal boutique, the salesperson would really put in a lot of effort sharing how the package works. Then they will show you the albums which will make you imagine, how pretty you would look in the albums. Lastly, they will start throwing in a little bit of discounts and stuff, telling you that this discount ‘especially’ for you! Voila, the bride to be gets hooked and the groom to be pays for it! LOL!

Each session can take quite some time and can drain quite a bit of energy. Thats probably why many brides just decided to sign on the dotted lines and then later start checking out forums on what is good / bad about the boutiques. Not very wise again, but I guess its human nature.

Darren and I went to 3 boutiques – French Bridal, My Dream Wedding and D’sire, before coming to a decision. It was not easy because, what we fall in love with often requires huge monetary sacrifice!

Usually the basic packages would include the wedding gown, the evening gown, the ROM dress or teadress, a trial makeup and hair session and also another session for the actual day. They will also be indoor and outdoor photo shoot, with an album of about 30 shots. Usually any additional shots are chargeable at about $75 to $80 – not sure why, but its pretty steep for an image yea!

French Bridal offers quite a comprehensive package for a quite an affordable budget – $3288. I think there isn’t anything that tugged my heart when the lady explained the package to me. To me, its just like any normal package you’d fine elsewhere. So Darren and I decided this will be a good backup boutique to go to, if all other boutique are beyond us – which really means its our second choice.

The next place we went was My Dream Wedding. This place really swept me away!! This is a pretty new boutique, which opened a month ago. Very comfortable interiors. The gowns are fabulous too! This boutique’s specialty is that for a package of $5688, you can get a basic package and 2 lovely albums. But this photoshoot will be done in the main headquarters in Hong Kong! The photos really swept us away, but after much deliberation we decided there will be a lot of additional costs, such as airplane tix, accomodation in HK, travelling expenses and so on. While the package is pretty basic, any other requests are really chargeable. Finally, Darren and I decided to make a rational decision, because this place will definitely blow our budget big time!! Signing on the dotted lines will make us bleed big time throughout the whole wedding preparations.

Finally we went to D’sire. Darren and I had friends who were clients of D’sire, and during their weddings, we were so amazed by how fabulous our friends looked! The gowns were simply lovely! And the photos were great too. We made D’sire our last stop because we do not want to fall into the trap of engaging the first boutique we visit. So when we were at D’sire, the lady there went through the package with us which fits our budget nicely at $3288, and showed us the studio which was really cool! And she allowed me to try some of the gowns, and I guess this was it! She has captured the bride’s heart, I guess. She was very accommodating too, throwing in some items for us which we needed.

Although, my mind still lingered around My Dream Wedding, which we went to earlier, D’sire was THE place to engage for us! It is simple and beautiful enough to make me a lovely bride and to immortalize this wonderful memory for a long time come!