Our Empowered bride : Hayley
This is by far one of the proudest blogs that we have made to date! As you may know, at Dotty, the heart of our brand is supporting brides to feel their absolute best on their special day. We strive to take away the unnecessary pressure that wedding dress shopping can have on brides to be.
There is no better feeling for us than to see full circle the impact that visiting Dotty has had on our brides.
We received the most heart warming feedback from one of our gorgeous Dotty brides, Hayley Brooks who got married in 2022!! Congratulations Hayley!
When Hayley began her wedding dress shopping experience a few years ago, she was worried, like many of our brides are before visiting us, about feeling judged when she came to try dresses on. Hayley feared her wedding dress journey would be filled with anxiety but here she explains how her journey was flipped to be an amazing and unforgettable one instead.
“We married in Ibiza, it was amazing, it’s our happy place so we thought why not get married there. We had 50 guests. Everyone we wanted was there.
I’m a plus size girl. In some shops I went in, they had nothing in my size and so you just feel crap and it’s not a nice experience. I went to two bridal shops before Dotty Bridal and everything they had on display was size 8-10 and it made me feel so rubbish about myself, there was nothing for me to try on. Everything they had for my size was frumpy, like one of those dolls that’s a toilet roll holder.
As soon as I walked in the shops it was like ‘we haven’t got anything for you’. They asked
what I was looking for and I said I didn’t know, as I’d just got engaged. I was told to come back when I had an idea, it was just like they couldn’t be bothered. They looked me up and down as if to say, ‘you’re not going to fit in anything in here’.
The Pretty Woman scenario is rife in the wedding industry, it makes you feel so anxious and gives you butterflies walking into those kinds of bridal shops. The average size in the UK is 16-18, and going into clothes shops, those sizes are always sold out. But you go into a bridal shop and there’s nothing larger than a size 12. It makes you feel like crap when there’s nothing for you. They need to start catering for the average woman.
I found out about Dotty Bridal on social media and they just seemed so friendly. Bridal shops can be daunting, especially if you haven’t got the perfect body, but they showed all different sizes and shapes on their website and they had such a massive range of dresses that I decided to make an appointment. I just felt so comfortable, they were so friendly and so nice and did everything to find me the right dress, they were unbelievable.
I wanted something light, as I was getting married on a beach, so I didn’t want a big ball-gown, I wanted something floaty and comfortable and not too heavy, also something quite simple. I didn’t want the big diamante dress.
Emma at Dotty made me try absolutely everything and in the end I went for something completely different.
And it had pockets! That was a game changer for me.
Dotty caters for all different bodies and made me feel so comfortable. They did everything to make me feel good about myself. I was actually welling up as the experience was so amazing. I was looked after so well, it didn’t matter what size I was, they didn’t look at me any differently, I was just a bride. They made me feel like a million dollars.
It’s such a special time when you’re looking for your dress, and you should enjoy the experience just as much as your wedding day.
Emma at Dotty took the time to talk to me about what I wanted and there were plenty of
options and they didn’t make me feel as if I needed to be smaller.
I got a personal trainer, and I think I did look really well on my wedding day but I was so
stressed and looking back I wonder why I did that to myself. I’d panic if I didn’t do 10,000
steps a day, I was eating clean, I wouldn’t have any bread. I put myself under a lot of
pressure, while organizing everything about the wedding, working full time, and looking
after my son.
There is so much stress around organising a wedding anyway, the last thing you need to be worrying about is losing weight. I was even dieting just to try dresses on, it’s not nice. All the comments on the day was how gorgeous my dress was, how beautiful the food was, the sunset as we had drinks on the each- not about how much weight I had or hadn’t lost.
Nobody even notices. People are just there to enjoy your day and have a good time, they
don’t think ‘oh she’s too big for that dress.’
What Shannon is doing with the Empowerment campaign is such an important message.
Similarly, some girls are worrying about needing to put weight on for their weddings, we put too much stress on ourselves.
Social media and magazines give us this image that everything has to be picture perfect, and it’s just unnecessary worry.”
Photography by Natasha Marshall Photography
Reading Hayley’s feedback is so rewarding for us. Wedding dress shopping can get so over complicated, what we care about at Dotty is how we make our Brides FEEL. Our stylists are highly trained on how to find the right style to suit each bride but in the end it’s the emotion and experience the bride has that matters to us most.
At the end of 2023 we launched our Empowerment campaign alongside releasing a range of beautiful gowns exclusive to Dotty to encapsulate these values that we pride ourselves on at Dotty. We want to show brides that they don’t need to change anything about themselves or have to look a certain way to feel amazing on their wedding day.
We are a team made up of real women who understand how exclusive the bridal industry can be. Therefore, we won’t stop supporting and empowering women as it’s stories like these that remind us how much of a difference we can make to bride’s wedding journeys and their overall confidence going forward too.
Thanks again to Hayley for her lovely feedback and her gorgeous wedding photos! You looked unbelievable!
Lots of love always
Team Dotty
xxx