The hottest affordable wedding dresses online

Last Updated on Monday, 15 February 2010 12:13 Written by aBeauty Monday, 15 February 2010 12:01

This last month I have seen literally hundreds, if not thousands, of wedding gowns featured with beautiful photos on web sites all over the Internet. Some are outrageously pricey, while others have been surprisingly inexpensive. I wanted to make a post about the hottest affordable wedding dresses online and gather links to inexpensive wedding gowns that I found the most attractive. But since I have been busy the post has had to wait until now. I hope you enjoy. 

First a recap of how I define an affordable wedding dress. It really doesn’t have that much to do with price as it has with how good the deal is. If you find a cheap wedding dress that is made of the worst of the worst fabrics, looks terrible, and is priced at $59, would you call that an affordable dress? Perhaps, but it wouldn’t fall in to the spirit of what I am trying to provide on this site, which is advice on how to find the best deals for the most beautiful wedding dresses out there. So price really isn’t an issue, especially if you can get a designer wedding dress at 50% off the retail price. 

Of course, affordable also means a price that fits the average wallet. This isn’t a site dedicated to the top “hollywood” wedding dress designers that create dresses that usually start at $3000 and above. But there are great deals out there, and you shouldn’t be surprised if you find affordable designer wedding dresses with prices cut in half, especially if you go hunting for older season’s collections. 

Ok, so lets start of with a great resource for inexpensive wedding gowns. This online shop is best known for their books, and is none other than Amazon. Bare with me, because yes, they do have several wonderfully looking wedding dresses, and their customer service and return policies are top notch. 

 

This first wedding dress is a Formal Evening Gown by Sean Collectionwhich is semi-simple, cheap, and very beautiful. I think it generally is a good idea to go for a less extravagant dress if you are looking for a sub $500 dress, because then most of the money doesn’t go to make all the details and different fabrics you often see on the more cinderella style dresses. At only $139 this Sean Collection wedding dress should be obtainable for just about any wallet. 

The next Amazon wedding dress is made by Lady Roi Bridals and I just find it gorgeous. It is a bit more pricey than the prior dress, but still not outlandishly pricy. 

 

Here is the product page: Lady Roi Bridals Gown. Style No. 8570 

This semi-inexpensive wedding gown goes for $349, but has a list price of almost $800, so I think it i a pretty good deal for this beautiful ball wedding dress. 

There are just so many great deals on the Internet if you do some looking that I can’t list them all here. But, I will try to get some more up on this site on a more regular basis. Now I want to shift focus to some of the designer wedding dress brands out there. Yes, they are extremely pricey, even at a steep discount, but I want to show you what you can get if you do some searching for affordable wedding dresses online. 

Let’s start with one of the top wedding dress designers. Monque Lhullier wedding dresses aren’t gowns you usually link with the word “affordable” or “inexpensive”, and certainly not “cheap”. And that holds true even when you find them at a discount, as prices normally start at around $3-4000 at list. Now, there are two ways of getting a Monique Lhullier wedding gown at a discount, either strike gold by finding an online shop that is running a sale of some kind, or go for a pre-owned wedding dress. I will give you examples of both. 

Bridecouture.com has two Lhullier wedding dresses at the moment at steep discounts. These are completely new wedding dresses: 

“Sydney” Beautiful Monique Lhuillier ivory silk organza gown with stunning butter sash with light gold beading; chapel length train. 

1. An Amy Chantilly lace gown from Monique Lhullier that is in ivory color, with a fit/flare shape. The list price for this dress is almost $4000 but they are selling it for $2290, almost a 50% discount.
2. A beautiful “Sydney” gown for Lhullier, made in ivory silk, with a chapel length train. The list price for this dress is $4100 and Bridecoutore sell it for $2010. That’s more than a 50% discount.

Both dresses can be found here. Both dresses are stunning, and I am sorry I can’t show you the pictures as they are copyrighted. I will see if I can get permission to put them up here, but you can always check them out at the link above. 

Another hot wedding dress designer is Vera Wang. Certainly, a Vera Wang wedding dress can’t be found at an affordable price? Yes they can! Bridepower.com lists a simple, princess, A-line, wedding gown by Vera Wang at only $499, with a list price of $2400. I haven’t been able to figure out if this is a used wedding dress or if it is new, because the description says that it has to be cleaned. This can be do to it being a pre-owned wedding dress, but it can also just mean that it has been in the warehouse for a long time and not been covered up properly. Take this dress to a dry cleaner and it might look as good as new. Here is the link to the dress. Be sure to check out their return policy before shopping their, or any other online wedding dress shop, because there are most likely fees involved if you need to return the dress. 

Now on to one of my favorite sources of cheap wedding dresses. These are used wedding dresses, mind you, but there are few better ways to get a fantastic deal than to buy someone else’s wedding dress. Remember, they have only been used once, and are usually in mint condition. The wedding dress shop I am referring to is preownedweddingdresses.com, and they have an extremely wide selection of affordable designer wedding dresses. 

At the moment their database has over 4000 dresses listed, and if you look at the designers they list, most of the big names are there. Reem Acra wedding dresses, as an example, can be found as low as $499 (the lowest I found, might find something even cheaper), with a list price of over $7000. 

 

There is no doubt that the pre owned wedding dresses shop is a great place to go if you can get past wearing a used dress. On that subject, who will actually know that it is used except you? Not your wedding guests! I think they will instead think to themselves “wow, she looks beautiful in that Reem Acra wedding dress, I want one of those for my OWN wedding”. 

Ok, I better wrap this post up so that I have something to write about in the future. I promise to post more often, as there are just too many beautiful and affordable wedding dresses out there that have to be talked about.

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Affordable wedding dress

Last Updated on Monday, 15 February 2010 12:02 Written by aBeauty Saturday, 16 January 2010 05:20

What is an affordable wedding dress you might ask, or at least that is the question I asked myself today. It really is a question that must be answered with a non-specific answer. Candidate answers could be it depends on your wedding dress budget. Another answer is that it depends on what you make for a living. But I don’t really like those answers to the question of what constitutes an affordable wedding dress.

You could of course give a more hard cash kind of answer. If the wedding dress costs under $1000 or just looks like a simple wedding gown, is it affordable? Or are consignment wedding dresses or wedding gown rentals a good answer to the question? I really don’t like those answers either.

In my book affordable wedding dresses are wedding dresses that you have picked out because they are what you want, and then you proceed to purchase it at a discount. I know, I know, look up the word affordable, because that isn’t what it means you might say. Well, I did, and the definition of affordable wedding dresses is that they are “believed to be within one’s financial means” source Dictionary.com

 
So my definition of an affordable wedding gown is slightly different than the dictionaries. That fine by me as long as I get my point across. And my point will soon be explained in detail.

Too many brides to be focus solely on the wedding dress it self and do not take the time to educate themselves about the process of buying an affordable wedding dress. If you simply start looking for the dress without knowing your options on where or how to buy it, you will end up purchasing it a retail price.There is nothing wrong with retail priced wedding dress, except that you most probably could have bought it a lot cheaper. Perhaps I am mixing the cheap wedding dresses with affordable wedding dresses, but for me they are almost the same.

There we are back to my definition of an affordable wedding dress, as I personally think there are differences to a cheap wedding dress. The difference is that cheap sounds cheap, is cheap and only cheap. The word doesn’t imply any quality, only quantity. In this context I define “Affordable” more qualitatively in that you get the most perfect wedding dress you can for your money.

As an example, “cheap wedding dresses” is to buy a low priced wedding dress at retail price, while “affordable wedding dresses” is to buy a dress that at retail is over your budget, perhaps way over, but by knowing where, when, and how, you are able to buy the dress at a lower price. THAT is an affordable wedding dress in my book!

Say you would die for a Christian Lacroix or Monique Lhuillier wedding dress. These can be pretty expensive, and most women would probably give up owning one of these on their wedding day if they couldn’t afford the retail price. But do you really have to buy these at the most expensive stores, and at retail when there are so many other options?

I have written about several ways to get a hold of the perfect wedding dress at an affordable price in the past. In my most affordable wedding dresses list I give you the top 10 tips for buying affordable wedding dresses, but will give you a couple of the best here right now.

Back to the Monique Lhuillier and Christian Lacroix wedding dresses. Yes, they are expensive, but with just a little look see on the Internet you will see dresses from these designer discounted hugely. The Internet is a wonderful place to find an affordable wedding dress because the online shops don’t have to rent expensive brick and mortar showrooms, usually meaning lower prices for you. One site I was on listed an assortment of one of these designers’ dresses at up to 50% discounts from retail. And that is if you have to have a new dress.

Consignment wedding dresses, which I often talk positively about on this site, sell even more affordable wedding dresses. It isn’t out of the question to see wedding dresses discounted +50% off retail.

The whole point of this post is to get across the notion that women get a lot more for their money than they think. Getting the most for your money isn’t a worthy goal in it self for such an important decision as a wedding dress. I am talking about the women that have a perfect wedding dress in mind, but can’t afford it at retail. And that is my point, there are options, and these options must be understood.

I better wrap up this post before it gets epic, but hope my message came across. In my book, an affordable wedding dress does have a low price relative to your income or budget. But more importantly, they are more beautiful than what you could afford at retail.

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Top 10 most affordable wedding dresses

Last Updated on Saturday, 30 January 2010 03:42 Written by aBeauty Sunday, 10 January 2010 10:02

So you are getting married and want to save a bundle on your wedding dress? Then you have come to the right place, because this is the Top 10 Affordable Wedding Dress list! The focus of this list is to show you the best ideas for buying the perfect wedding dress at an affordable price. It really doesn’t matter if it is a cheap wedding dress or an expensive wedding dress, as many of these tips will work for both.

Now, let’s see the list already!

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Consignment wedding dresses

Last Updated on Tuesday, 26 January 2010 06:31 Written by aBeauty Thursday, 7 January 2010 11:58

I touched upon the topic of consignment wedding dresses in the article Buy wedding dress online and want to talk a little more about the topic. It is just such a great opportunity to get a hold of affordable wedding dresses, so I thought I would write a “beginners guide”, and here we go!

Consignment means that a dress is put up for sale on behalf of the owner, usually through third party, like a consignment store. If the item is purchased, the middle man gets a percentage of the sales sum, and the owner gets the rest. This means that the owner of the dress doesn’t lose possession of the item until the wedding dress is actually sold. The consignment shop simply agrees to display and sell the dress for a fee. If the dress isn’t sold it goes back to the original owner. Consignment wedding dresses have been around for a long time, but are gaining popularity as a means to being able to buy beautiful, yet affordable, wedding dresses.

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Buy wedding dress online

Last Updated on Sunday, 24 January 2010 03:39 Written by aBeauty Sunday, 3 January 2009 03:24

Online shopping revolutionized business by bringing business to the web, where shoppers previously had to purchase products in person. It was really only a matter of time before shopping went cyber. The question that remains is if it is smart to buy a wedding dress online?

Though it perfectly complemented the use of credit cards and the desire to perform actions easily with as little effort as possible, there is still some reluctance to buying items that need to fit properly to be of use. Buying a CD or books online is relatively risk free, and you are certain that what you get is what you want. But, to buy wedding dresses online is a completely different matter. Here are some tips that can help you buy a wedding dress online and be happy with the choice to do so.

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