Cheaper Wedding Dresses? This Startup Wants To Sweep You Away

Source: San Francisco Chronicle, Trisha Thadani and Isha Salian
Photo: Paul Kuroda, Special To The Chronicle

Inside a newly married couple’s Fillmore apartment are several wedding dresses waiting to go down the aisle. The gowns are elegantly crafted — some with beads, others with lace, a few with both.

But these gowns, created through the couple’s startup Anomalie, are for more than just a night of pictures: They are the beginning of a movement, the couple hope, to finally change a corner of the retail market that they say is continuously exploited for its sentimentality.

The idea to create a company that designs and sells custom bridal gowns came to Leslie Voorhees last year when she was shopping for her own wedding. The boutiques she went to would often hide the brands and prices, making it difficult to comparison shop.

“It is such an antiquated process,” said Voorhees, who quit her job at Apple to focus on Anomalie full time with her husband, Calley Means, who left a job at Zenefits.

The couple said they can offer customers a lower price on boutique-quality dresses because they handle factory operations themselves. Voorhees has spent much of the last few months at a factory in China where the dresses are made.

The wedding industry is often accused of price gouging. For a major life event fraught with emotion, it is easy for vendors to charge more for everything from gowns to caterers. While there are plenty of wedding-related websites, there is nothing that allows consumers to easily compare prices the way we check airfares on Expedia.

“It’s surprising that people haven’t come in and disrupted this market yet,” Voorhees said. “And we hope it will be us.”

Of course, Anomalie charges a considerable sum for their dresses — because even startups need to make money.

But once they get more customers and can order in bulk, they hope to bring their prices down. Means said an average dress from Anomalie with no embroidery could cost around $1,000, which he said is both cheaper and of better quality than what you could find at a bridal store. They also say they can get brides their dresses in about three months; wedding website the Knot says a wait of four to five months is typical.

The company has grown tremendously since quietly opening last summer. It has made hundreds of dresses, the founders said, but declined to be more specific. The typical customers are working women — venture capital partners, lawyers, executives — who can “afford to pay more, but just don’t want to,” Voorhees said.

Anomalie raised $1.5 million in seed funding in December. It probably gained extra attention this week because the wedding season is starting to pick up. Also, Voorhees said, many brides who wear Anomalie dresses have tagged the company on Instagram, creating a viral effect.

Voorhees and Means have about a dozen employees and are outgrowing their office (which doubles as their home) in the Fillmore district. On a recent afternoon, several young women sat around a table working on everything from customer service to managing orders. A bride would come in later that day to try on the dress she helped design — from the train to the neckline.

As the company continues to expand, Means said, maybe one day it will tackle Indian wedding sarees or the traditional red Chinese wedding dresses.

But, for now, he said, the white dresses will do.

Photo Caption: Julia Zhuang cuts fabric samples to mail out on Thursday, June 29, 2017 in San Francisco , CA.

http://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Cheaper-wedding-dresses-This-startup-wants-to-11261757.php?cmpid=sfc