Virtual bridesmaids dress shopping
So for once, a targeted Facebook ad was actually useful. A few months ago I saw an ad for Weddington Way‘s “Simple and Social Bridesmaids Dress Shopping” and, as they chose a nice photo for the ad and mentioned bridesmaid’s dresses which I had recently started pondering, I clicked on it.
Turns out Weddington Way is a really great, useful, and simple site. The idea is this: the bride browses through hundreds of dresses (which you can filter by style, fabric, color or designer) and picks her favorites. These favorites are then emailed to each bridesmaid and they choose their top five that they’d like to wear. In my case, I wanted each bridesmaid to have a different dress, just in a matching fabric and color; and luckily Meghan, Amy and Arielle each picked a different dress for their first choice that all work great together (all are also reasonably priced). Next, I ordered a swatch of the fabric so I could see in person exactly what color the fabric it was (you never know how different it will be compared to what you see online). The swatch arrived in the mail this week and is a beautiful deep turquoise that I think will go great with the fall color scheme (being planned out on my wedding Pinterest board, this is also where you can see the three bridesmaid dress styles that were 
chosen). What really set things apart though was that the envelope the fabric swatch arrived in was really nice iridescent paper, was hand addressed, and the note inside had a hand written greeting along with the printed card, a very nice personal touch that really made it feel that I was dealing not with some far-distant internet company, but a little local shop (that happens to be based in California).
I also received a personalized email from Carmella, a Weddington Way stylist, asking if I had any questions and outlining what she could help with (sizing, timely orders, making sure the order goes in to the designer in one batch so all the dresses are cut from the same fabric and dye lot). So now my next step is getting the orders in! This site made selecting bridesmaids dresses incredibly easy and saved a lot of travel and trips around to countless bridal and dress stores trying to find something that would suit all of my bridesmaids, plus, yay for social media and “new” ways of doing traditional things.