Well...where do I start, the reason I wanted to write this down just wanted to help other budgeted bride, calm down before you buy it, other wise you will end up spending more than you pictured.
So several months ago when I first got engaged, I started to plan everything, including the dress part, and because my wedding is a little rush (6 months later after I engaged), it was a little rush for me to run all over town to schedule dress fitting and find the perfect one, so I decided to do an online shopping for my gown. There is nothing wrong with online shopping on gowns, to be honest, especially if you go with the one that you can return (BHLDN, shopbob, jcrew..etc), but, be careful when you step to Etsy. When I first set my gown budget, I wanted a non-traditional dress, in fact I'm actually looking for one that can be wear as wedding dress and a vacation dress, so I look around pinterest and wedding blogs, and decided to go with an individual designer dress from Etsy because the style is very clean and simple. Without doing any research, I contacted her, pay the entire payment, but oh my, what was I thinking, what a mistake, especially this girl is oversea.
Not to mention the whole process after I paid off the payment was horrible. She first told me the due date would be two months later, but it went up to 3 months. She never get in contact with her client until I reach for her, she never post any process picture during the process, fabric samples? hell no. Slow on reply? Oh yes. After she was late for the due date, and I kept pushing her everyday and finally got the dress, the moment I took it out of the dirty box (it was an international order, and when the box arrive it was all dirt and partly broken), unwrapped from a grandma looking, yellow toned fabric bag, there is the most forever 21 style dress I've ever seen before, and can't believe I actually paid over 1k for it. The fabric is not too bad, it's very soft and light, but only on the bottom half, and even it's soft, it still not worth the price. The top--from the model picture--I originally thought it was a lace fabric, but it turns out it was put together by individual small lace fabric. This might sound like the the designer did hard work on the piece, but think this way like you are wearing a heavy thick amount of fabric on your upper body (at least I felt like I was wearing a duvet), especially I have very little boobs, there is no figure shown on the dress, even my waist, the whole dress was like a...barrel (I'm 103bl and 5'2 btw). Well, what can I do, I can't even return it. I've been trying to sell it online for months now but for the price, it really sound like a joke (even I marked down the price but personally I think the most it could cost would be $200).
At the end I bought a new dress, found a right tailor to alter the new one, and pretty happy with it so far (my wedding is in two weeks). But my entire cost for the wedding dress right now has run up to 3K, which I should of just buy a designer gown at the beginning. Lastly, think when you sell your dress, less people will pay attention to it if it's not a designer one, unless you are selling one for less than $500. If you sell a designer gown, you will probably get half of the price back; if you are selling an individual designer dress like me...emm, most likely it won't sold even it's brand new.