The Wedding Shoppe Review

The trip to the Wedding Shoppe was a spur-of-the-moment adventure with my maid of honor, Jessie. She and I had a Saturday free, and we decided to go try on some dresses. She and I had been to the Wedding Shoppe once before to help another find a dress, and we had a good experience then. I also liked the setting: a neat old historic house on Grand Ave.
So, off we set.

First recommendation: Make an appointment, especially if you go on a Saturday!!

You can go without an appointment, but you get on a "waitlist", and then when a spot opens up, they will call you. When we got on the waitlist, we were told it might be up to three hours before there was space for us. Unfortunately, all the dresses are upstairs with the fitting rooms, so you can't even look at the dresses while you wait. You can, however, look at invitations and other wedding accessories on the first floor- they bill themselves as a "one-stop wedding shop".
Since we had nothing better to do, we put our name on the list and went shopping for other things. There's no shortage of places to shop or eat on Grand Ave, so we passed the time quickly.

Once called upstairs, we removed our shoes and were introduced to our clerk. I brought some pictures to give her ideas of styles I liked- that helped her bring me specific dresses. You can look through all of their dresses yourself, and they do have a very good selection. They also had a fairly big price range, and they ask you for a dress budget right up front, so they won't bring you something to fall in love with that you can't afford.
The shoppe was pretty busy, so I was glad to have Jessie as my helper in getting in and out of dresses- it made the process much faster. The clerk spent most of her time returning my rejects and bringing me more to try on. She seemed to be helping several of us.
So, if you want to be "waited on hand-and-foot", don't go on a Saturday!

When it gets down to decision time, they ask you to limit yourself to three choices for them to write down. They don't allow photos, but the prices and some designers are available right on the tags.

It wasn't a high-pressure selling situation, I was able to try on as many dresses as I wanted, and I didn't feel rushed at all. They followed up with me once, but didn't bombard me with phone calls later. So, overall, I would say it was a pretty good experience.