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BBEH Wedding Show, 11th to 13th September, Harrogate, Yorkshire.
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Bridal expert gives her name away to dresses
Bristol-based Just For You Bridal has just launched its own collection of wedding dresses. Suzanne Savill discovers more about the dresses – and the story behind the name on the label. Pictures: Jon Kent
Each of the cream and white wedding dresses hanging from the rail have unique features such as glittering crystal detailing, detailed embroidery and immaculate pleating.
However, all of them bear the same label from the Grace Harrington Couture collection entitled “Something Blue”.
This designer name sounds like something that could belong to the heroine of a Catherine Cookson novel, and yet also wouldn’t seem out of place in a soap opera such as Dynasty or Dallas.
A perfect name, then, for the couture wedding dress collection that has just been launched by Bristol-based Just for You Bridal.
But this name is not some fictional creation for the benefit of the collection.
It belongs to a real person – Grace Harrington, who is more widely known as Mandy, and has worked in fashion for some 50 years, a decade of which has been with Just For You Bridal in Bristol’s Bond Street.
The name with which she was christened has now been trademarked for the store’s own bridal range, so she can no longer use it.
This has not caused her too much difficulty, however, as she has rarely used her real name for decades.
Mandy explains: “When I first started working in ladies fashions you had to have your name in a book for the sales. This was in the Sixties, you see, darling!
“I’d started at a new shop, it was in Kingston-upon-Thames, I can’t remember the name but it was like something out of ‘Are You Being Served?’.
“The supervisor scrubbed out my name in the book because Grace was also her name.
“She said I had to be called something else, and she wrote down ‘Mandy’ as my name. One of the other girls explained to me that was because the assistant I replaced had been called Mandy.
“That became the name people knew me by at work, although if I’m on the phone to one of my brothers then I’m Grace, and if my father came back to life then he would certainly be calling me Grace, after choosing that name for me because it was the name of one of my aunties.”
Mandy – or Grace – is a whirlwind of energy, charm and glamour, always smiling, and always calling everyone “darling”.
Susan Byron, who runs Just For You Bridal with her son Walter, says: “She’s a great character with so much enthusiasm. Mandy makes people feel special, and we’re very lucky to have her.”
Before we start our interview, Mandy rushes to find me a chair, and then lugs across a heavy stool to sit on herself.
Her energy is that of a women a fraction of her age – which given the number of years she has worked in retail must be around seven decades – but Mandy doesn’t dwell on how many birthdays she has had.
“I’m 21, darling!” she declares playfully, when I ask her age. “I’ve always been 21. I did go up to 23 for a while, but people didn’t believe me!”
Walter, the youngest of Susan’s two sons – who used to manage nightclubs in the Middle East, and worked in South Korea for five years before returning to the UK with his fiance Hyunju, who is now his wife – says: “When I found out that Mandy’s real name was Grace Harrington, I asked if I could trademark it for our bridal collection.
“I said to her that it would mean she wouldn’t be able to use it again, but she said she didn’t mind because she didn’t use that name anyway.”
Senior assistant Suzanne Bishop adds: “It’s really appropriate that there should be Grace Harrington wedding dresses, because she’s had so much input into the lives of so many brides over the years.”
Mandy jokes: “It seems a bit strange to keep hearing my name every two minutes when someone is talking about the collection!”
Mandy and Suzanne both played a key role in designing the dresses in the Grace Harrington Couture collection, which was launched earlier this month at the British Bridal Exhibition in Harrogate, the biggest bridal fair in Europe.
“We’ve been going there as buyers for about 10 years, but this was the first time we attended with our own wedding dresses,” says Susan.
So why did they decide to go to the trouble of producing their own bridal collection?
Walter replies: “We saw a gap in the market – a big gap.
“It became clear to me that a lot of bridal designers weren’t providing the sort of products that our customers were asking for.
“With the way the economy is at the moment, they were mainly looking for a beautiful wedding dress that they wouldn’t have to pay in excess of £1,500 for.
“We couldn’t see what we knew they were looking for at many of the trade shows, so we decided to create our own brand.
Most of the dresses in our range cost about £700, and they are cheaper because we deal direct with the manufacturers.
“For a comparative dress, if I were to use a middle man, the ultimate cost to the customer would be far more.”
The same cost-effective approach applied to the photoshoot for publicity pictures.
Walter reveals: “We hired one professional model and got the other two to copy the sort of poses she was doing.
“One of the models is my wife, Hyunju, and the other is Izabella Leszek, a student from Poland who was working across the road in McDonalds.”
The overheads may have been kept low but the Grace Harrington dresses certainly don’t look cheap.
Most look like the more expensive dresses on the rails, with beautifully boned bodices, sequins and embroidery.
Others are in less classic styles, often with colourful embroidery, or in a shorter style that could be worn for a wedding on a beach. But again, they don’t look cheap.
“In the last few months we’ve been test-marketing them with great success – they’ve been doing well against well-known designer wedding dress names,” says Walter.
“Girls have been coming in looking for a Maggie Sotteri and walking out with a Grace Harrington!”
For further information on the Grace Harrington Couture collection visit the website www.graceharrington.co.uk.
Susan Byron got into the wedding dress business about 20 years ago, when she began selling bridesmaid dresses from her home in Weston- super-Mare in the mid-Eighties.
“I decided to start doing it after going shopping for my own wedding dress. The one I bought in the end was fine, but as I went around the stores I became aware there was an attitude at some which wasn’t very customer-friendly,” she recalls.
“They had a lot of the dresses under plastic so you couldn’t touch them, and some of them came across as quite aloof.
“I’d been working in a plastics moulding factory and wanted to do something better, so I decided to put the sewing skills I’d learned at school to use and started selling some bridesmaids’ dresses from home.
“Within three of four months I’d expanded out of the house and got my first shop in Weston-super-Mare. I called it Just For You Bridal, and that’s been the name of my shops ever since.
“Then I moved into Bristol and had a shop on College Green, and after that I came to Bond Street and had this shop plus a menswear shop across the road, until we decided it made more sense to concentrate the business here in one shop, and now we’ve got about 750 wedding dresses here.
“We get quite a few repeat customers. We’ve just had one girl in who first came to us when she was a flower girl.
“Then about three years ago she came to us for a bridesmaid’s dress – and about a month ago she came to us for her wedding dress.
“Sometimes you get girls coming back for their second or third wedding dress! Their marriage might not have lasted, but at least they’ve been happy with the service they got from us!”
Just For You Bridal is at York House, Bond Street, Bristol, BS1 3LQ. Tel: 0117 942 8900. For further information go to www.justforyoubridal.co.uk.