How technology will revolutionize the bridalwear industry

“Bottom line, I believe the wedding industry is broken for brides,” Leslie Voorhees Means told FashionUnited upon the launch of her company’s new digital bridal gown customization tool.

Means is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Anomalie, a made-to-order bridal brand that allows any bride the opportunity to fully customize her ideal gown at an affordable price. Last week, Anomalie launched DressBuilder to serve as a digital resource for all brides to visualize the wedding gown she wants through a series of questions that lead to a highly customized sketch.

DressBuilder was born out of an industry need for an accessible solution to all brides, regardless of size, geography design preference or price point.

“There are so many changes and evolutions within fashion, but just look at bridal boutiques,” Means continued. “We are hearing from brides that when they shop in traditional boutiques, they are confronted with the tough realities of the traditional bridal industry's lack of accessibility. The journey to find your perfect wedding dress has become at best, an inconvenient process for a lot of women and at worst, an exasperating experience.”

Means lists limited inventory in brick-and-mortar boutiques as the most prevalent issue, though behind it is a lack of size diversity for brides who fall too high or too low on the traditional womenswear sizing scale. “Location can also play a role as there may not be as many brick-and-mortar options for each bride,” she added.

With DressBuilder, Anomalie is easily equipped to deliver any bride, sized 00 to 30+, with the exact dress she wants even if she can’t find it in a store. The service aims to shift the bridal industry into an online-first model so as to not limit consumers by what is or is not available in stores.

The process begins with a data-backed survey, for which brides answer a number of questions and then are immediately shown a highly-customized sketch of a design with personalized recommendations for fabric and lengths. She can then alternate and browse through options and customizations, receiving suggestions as she wants them. The next step would be speaking to a stylist from Anomalie’s customer service team, who are made available to the shopper whenever she is ready to move forward.

DressBuilder was created with insights from 30,000 hours of expert dressmaker knowledge. No matter how customized, each sketch is tied to specific attributes and instructions for Anomalie’s workshops for constructing each dress when the time comes.

Before the dress can go into production, each bride spends time discussing with a design consultant to go through every specific attribute to ensure she is satisfied with every detail and specification of the dress concept. Fabric swatches and measurement instructions are also sent to each bride in this stage. It typically takes four months to produce and deliver once the bride is ready to move forward.

Custom-made technology lowers retail cost of wedding gowns

While the average wedding dress costs around 3,000 dollars, pricing within the bridal industry has just slowly started to revolutionize as fast fashion retailers like Asos and H&M introduce bridal lines. However, Anomalie’s system brings brides the option of a more accessible middle ground.

Anomalie dresses fall at an average price point of 1,600 dollars, with the majority of dresses falling between 1,000 and 2,000 dollars. The reason for this drastic difference in pricing is the abilities of the company’s technology, which allows Anomalie to function without the cost of operating a brick-and-mortar store or stock inventory.

“We're able to scale our knowledge with technology, a dedicated team and designers so we can offer a digital experience that usually wouldn’t be possible without the traditional store,” Means said. She also noted that Anomalie’s direct communication with its workshops in China and centralized customer service operations in two locations help keep costs low.

The next technological advancement Means hopes to offer the bridal industry is to provide customers with a perfectly fitted dress, right out of the box. “It is ambitious, though it is our longer term goal because it is something we believe women would really love,” she said. “We're investing a lot in this area through hundreds of thousands of custom measurements at this point using highly skilled people on our team to pour into the data and analytics around custom fit to ultimately determine how can deliver a perfect fit to every bride right out of the box.”

As it stands now, most of Anomalie’s customers need little to no alterations on their gowns as they are made-to-measure and offer a truer fit than off-the-rack clothing. Means guessed that it would take at least a year before this goal could be met. The company is using consumer insights and feedback to help improve its true-fit sizing goal, along with its tailor-made styling recommendations. The more Anomalie and its technology learns about consumer preferences, the more it can offer brides a perfect vision of what they are looking for.

Image: Pixabay