As a bride-to-be, you are most likely looking at wedding dresses and if you’ve seen the numbers on them, most are very expensive.

Today on our QBLOG (that’s a quick blog for short) we will show you how much the true ownership cost of that dress will set you back and where you should look to get one that looks great and is affordable too.

True Cost of Wedding Dress Ownership

Most wedding dresses come from China, in fact, nearly 79% of them on the market come from that region of the world according to a recent article on CNN.

When you purchase a dress, you’re making an expensive purchase, even if the dress was a ‘David’s Bridal’ special on the rack.

I’m sure many of you have seen the $99 wedding dress’s advertised, we’ll there is a bit of sneaky sales tactic behind that, in fact, many places do this.

While the dress is $99, they force you to alter it in the shop which costs hundreds of dollars, and buying the accessories like shoes, hairpieces and other essentials is where they make their money. Furthermore, most of their sales dress’s are odd or large sizes, again it’s done on purpose to get you to pay to alter them.

Most brides will not think about what it truly costs to purchase, wear and then resell the dress.

Fortunately, we developed a new online tool that can help with that.

Simply input the price of the dress and how many hours you will be wearing it at the wedding.

From there, the calculator will show you the cost per hour to wear it along with an estimated resell value that you may be able to recoup shortly after the wedding.

Resell Value of a Wedding Dress

Most couples will want to resell the wedding dress after the wedding as long as it’s still usable. Name brands like Vera Wang for example can retain 60-70% of the retail value once worn while every day or in-house brands retail for 45-50% once worn.

Many couples will donate the dress for a tax write-off to places like Brides Against Brest Cancer, a 501c3 non-profit that resells them and uses proceeds to fight breast cancer.

The best places to find a wedding dress

We tell couples to look to Etsy for finding a new wedding dress or Brides Against Breast Cancer if looking on the secondary marketplace.

The great thing about Etsy is that many of the independent dressmakers will have pages on the website and sell direct, much cheaper than buying the same dress/dressmaker retail.