HANNA SLOAN
FRAUD charges have been laid against a Beaudesert woman relating to a Cairns wedding dress shop which closed suddenly in July last year, leaving dozens of brides without their dresses and out of pocket.
Katie Lis, who was married in Malanda in 2021, ordered two dresses through the store, whose owner promised to order both and combine the bodice of one with the skirt of the other to customise her chosen look.
After months of waiting, Mrs Lis had not heard from the store. When she contacted them to ask, they said the dresses were lost in transit.
Mrs Lis was one of the lucky ones, as she was never charged for the lost dresses.
Other brides weren’t so lucky.
Felicia Busch, whose Cairns wedding was in July 2023, grew nervous when it was three weeks before her wedding and she hadn’t heard from the store whether her dress had arrived.
As emails went unanswered and phone calls reached a full voicemail, Mrs Busch decided to visit the store – only to find it empty and locked up.
She lost a $2000 deposit and had to find a new dress with less than a month to go before the big day.
“They ghosted everyone,” she said of the original store.
I was just lucky enough to find myself the perfect dress in another store right before my wedding
Felicia Busch
A third bride, who wishes to remain anonymous, came forward to share her story.
After attending a friend’s try-on appointment at the store in January of 2022, the woman made her own appointment, finding staff to be “lovely and reassuring”.
“At my friend’s appointment there was not much stock on the floor,” the bride said.
“They stated that they were doing a trunk show in Sydney, so a lot of their gowns were down there.”
A trunk show is an event where vendors present merchandise directly to businesses and customers.
After speaking to staff in person about wait times, the bride made an appointment for late January 2022, believing that the gowns would be back in stock and that she would have plenty of time to order hers in before her August wedding.
“I clarified via email whether there would be enough time to order and alter my dress, and I got the response, ‘Yes, plenty of time for your gown to arrive and also be altered’.”
The bride chose and paid for a dress during her appointment.
As they claimed all their dresses were custom-made, I was measured to fit
Anonymous bride
“The style I chose was a mix between two – the bodice from one style, and the skirt of another.
“I took a photo holding the two dresses together so that we were all on the same page and knew what to expect.”
The bride’s mother, in attendance at the appointment, checked the written-down order and noticed the staff had mixed up the bride’s chest and waist measurements; they fixed these, she paid, and was told her gown would be in the store by June of that year.
In early June, the bride called the store to see if her dress had arrived yet, and there was no answer.
She sent a follow-up email, receiving a reply a week later saying one of the team was out of the country and that they would respond to her in another week.
There followed several attempts at communication which were ignored or met with excuses.
“They called to tell me my dress was arriving the week before my wedding,” the bride said.
I called them that day and they told me that they were out the back heating up their lunch when the postman came, so they missed the delivery
Anonymous bride
Four days before her wedding, the bride was told her dress had arrived, so she went in for a fitting that same day.
“When I arrived for my appointment, the gown was not what I ordered,” she said.
The lace, not yet attached to the dress, was not the lace she had ordered – the staff told her this was because of the war in Ukraine, where the dress was ordered from, limiting availability of fabrics.
“This was not communicated to me prior to this day.”
The dress was unfinished, the wrong colour, and significantly oversized despite the custom measurements taken at the initial appointment months earlier.
“When I went for another try-on two days before the wedding it still was nowhere near fitting, nowhere near the fabric I chose, and honestly just a disaster,” she said.
After going to an external alterations company, the bride felt that the dressmaker made the best of a bad situation.
“If it wasn’t for this dressmaker, I wouldn’t have had a dress to wear – she practically had to remake my dress,” she said.
“She cried when I tried my dress on because of how bad it was.
“Because it was so big and completely wrong, she couldn’t get it to fit me correctly.
“She told me how sorry she was and how she had never let a dress leave her shop without it fitting properly.”
By this stage, it was the day before the wedding and the bride had run out of time for further alterations. She had already missed her own wedding rehearsal.
The dressmaker had the original order form attached to the garment bag, and when she looked at it to process the payment, she told the bride, “This is not the dress that you ordered.”
The wedding dress store did admit fault, but they kept the deposit the bride had paid.
The bride thought she had simply been unlucky, as she had read many positive reviews for the store on social media.
However, as time went on, more and more stories began to emerge of similar experiences, with some brides even claiming they had brought their gowns in for dry-cleaning only to find out later that they had been sold to someone else, and others ordered and paid for designer gowns only to receive replicas.
The owner of the bridal store has been charged with 70 counts of fraud after a six-month police investigation.
Keep up with the latest news in Cairns and the Far North, and check out some of our top stories this week: Mareeba residents asked to contain animals and Les Misérables ends a sold-out season.
