 Hey everyone, I'm Bianca Renee and you're watching Bianca Renee Today and today we're talking all about wedding dresses and wedding dress shopping. Now I actually filmed my whole shopping experience of me finding my wedding dress so I'm going to show you that live footage and I'm going to give you some tips to keep in mind when you're shopping for your wedding dress. So let's start off with when should you start looking for your wedding dress. Now keeping in mind the average engagement time which is about a year so let's say you have 12 months until your wedding. So usually 12 months when we start to figure out your budget start saving and then by eight months you should start looking for your wedding dress. If you don't have a whole year you're going to have to start as soon as possible. Now when it came to my actual dress shopping experience I started off with going to downtown LA. If you live in California you know downtown has their little alleyways and their whole like fashion district and they have a bunch of little boutique shops, little no name places that will probably give you a good deal. If you are looking for a wedding dress on a budget they did have some dresses that were like a couple hundred dollars. There was some for a hundred dollars, four hundred dollars, there was actually one dress that I saw. This dress right here was four hundred dollars. I was very tempted because that was way under my budget and it was kind of like the mermaid style I was going for. But it did kind of have like a kind of a cheapy material bottom so I was really close to getting it but I decided not to. Now after my whole downtown shopping experience I decided to go look at some local bridal shops. Now this actually escalated very quickly because I found out that they actually have black Friday sales. So while everyone else is running the best buy to buy flat screen I was actually looking for my wedding dress on Black Friday and that's exactly what I did. So to make sure I was prepared for Black Friday I actually started my wedding dress shopping the week of. So I went to all my spots so I could make a decision and that way on Black Friday I could just go in, buy it, not try it on and we're good to go. So if you are engaged around the Black Friday time I definitely recommend you calling your local bridal shops and seeing if they're having a Black Friday sale. Another place to keep in mind is David's Bridal. David's Bridal has a ninety nine dollar dress sale that they do every so often and you can get your dress for a hundred bucks. They might not have you know the Vera Wings on sale for a hundred dollars but you might as well go peak. I do have some friends that actually did that and their dress was a hundred bucks. Now besides David's Bridal and Black Friday also keep in mind trunk sales and sample sales. This means that certain boutiques they have their actual dresses on the mannequins. They've been out of the bag. Some girls have tried them on but now they need to switch them out for their next season collection. But now that dress which has never actually been worn out of the store is going to be on sale. So you can get a huge discount because you're buying the one off the mannequin. The only thing about sample sales is that usually they're like a size 10 or up because they want the larger dresses that anybody could fit into and then they just use these large clips and they clip you in the back so you can kind of get an idea of how it would look fitted. So if you are a size 10 or above you might be able to fit into them perfectly. If not you will have to get alterations which may or may not work in your favorite. To give you like an estimate timeline I found my wedding dress on November 27th so that must have been Black Friday and then I actually ordered my dress and picked it up on March 8th. So that's about four months it took just to order my dress. After I picked up my dress I actually took two alterations about mid-May and then it was done being altered by June and then my wedding was in July. If you want to make sure that your dress is hidden from your spouse a lot of places do offer to hold on to the dress for you until maybe a couple of days before your wedding so you don't have to keep it in your closet taking up space and your fiance won't see it. Now when you do go to get your alterations and you're on your final fitting make sure you bring your actual wedding shoes that way you can try them on with the dress and make sure one they look good together and two that you're at the right length so once you put the heels on you want to make sure your dress is just slightly brushing the floor if there's a lot of fabric you could end up tripping and falling down the aisle and you don't want that happening at your wedding. Now I end up buying my wedding dress at a place called Carosa in Glendale and they actually had their Black Friday sale that made it 20% off. Now if you're thinking like at a normal store maybe forever 21% off is like double the tax not that big of a deal but if your wedding dress is $1,000 you just save $200 if it's $2,000 you just save $400 so that can add up real quick when the price tag is much larger. Now when you do go shopping as the bride what I like to wear I wore leggings and I make sure I had a strap with bra and an easy shirt that I can take off nothing with like straps and halterers and ties you want to be able to move move move through as many dresses as you can and when you have leggings on there will be an associate there helping you put on the dress so I just wore leggings so I was no still covered I didn't have my cheeks in her face and I was able to have the assistant help me put on all the dresses. Now before you walk into a wedding dress store it is very important to keep in mind the exact style you want to look for I might have went a little overboard and I made an entire spreadsheet of all of my favorite wedding dresses so I could email that to my bridesmaids so as soon as we walked in there they knew exactly what to look for they could pull the dresses for me bring to the dressing room and I would have to try them on. Now let's first talk about the style of the dress do you want a huge princess type of ball gown or do you want something tighter like a mermaid type trumpet shape or maybe you really want something that is off the shoulder maybe you wanted to cover your back whatever you want make sure you keep that in mind so it makes your shopping a lot easier. You also want to keep in your mind the season of your wedding if you're doing something outside you might want to do a short wedding dress or to something of a lighter material versus in the wintertime you could do the thicker materials and maybe even something with long sleeves now you have found the perfect dress you know it's the one now it's time to place the order you're going to have to put at least 50% down of a deposit sometimes 60 or more and then usually you pay the remainder of the balance once your dress is actually there you get to pick it up then they said for me to do resizing which would be all the alterations and to add some buttons so that the train would stick up because my dress didn't have like a built-in um section for the train to be pinned up that would be 300 dollars so I knew that I didn't really want to spend that much so this is what I did I found this little hole in the wall shop that my friend recommended and I got all my alterations for like 130 dollars 130 300 all right now let me tell you about my favorite part of wedding dress shopping you will quickly learn that yeah you're putting on wedding dresses but once you put on the veil it just puts everything into perspective and you actually start to feel like a bride now I did learn that veils come with a price there is the dress there is a veil that veil cost 600 dollars yes it was gorgeous it was long but that was kind of it and I just didn't understand why it would cost 600 dollars for a long piece of fabric no one really did anything special to it but they put on this little clip and that was about it now although I loved that 600 dollar veil I was not about to spend 600 dollars on a veil so guess where I got this beauty ebay and it cost me five dollars yes I was very surprised I went on ebay I typed in veils and I saw veils ranging from a dollar to like 20 dollars but I was like oh let me not be too cheap now and get the dollar one let me splurge and get that five dollar veil and here we are now if you do want to do this keep in mind that it's probably coming from china overseas and it's going to take at least a month to get it I knew that I was like look it's five dollars if I don't like it five dollars wasted you're going to wear the veil during the ceremony you're going to take some pictures after and then you're going to take it off and that's it and while I was on ebay I also found a petticoat for 25 dollars so I found a mermaid style petticoat that I got to keep for 25 dollars versus renting one from the actual bridal place for 40 dollars so those are all of my wedding dress shopping tips for you guys if you have some tips for some other upcoming brides make sure you leave me a comment and leave your wedding dress shopping experience and tips to help other brides out there watching if you like this video please give it a thumbs up and subscribe I post new videos every Sunday so i'll see you guys next week thanks for watching Bianca Renee today before you go make sure you watch my next video of the actual footage of me shopping for my wedding dress and you can see all the dress that I tried on before I found the one