Company Transforms Wedding Dresses into Other Items
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Stockbyte/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) — Lindsey Radoff didn’t mean to build a business while on her honeymoon. But one afternoon in 2010 while Radoff, 31, was strolling on the beach in Hawaii with her new husband, Jody, she got to thinking about her $3,500 Vera Wang wedding dress.
She loved it and wanted to preserve it. On the other hand, she wasn’t sure how, exactly. And then her mind drifted to her older sister, whose beautiful gown was stored in a trash bag in her parents’ home.
“I thought, ‘We spend so much time picking out a wedding dress or bridesmaid dress and we just let them sit in a closet,'” Radoff, an attorney in San Diego, told ABC News.
When she got home, she mentioned it to her identical twin sister, Jennifer Berman, who is also a lawyer. The more women they talked to, the more they realized that there was high demand for turning wedding and bridesmaid dresses into something else.
“We thought, why not turn them into a business where people send us their dressers and design something fabulous out of them?” said Radoff, who plans to turn her gown into two throw pillows (her sister is making a blanket).
By September, 2011, their company, Old New Borrowed Redo, was launched.
The idea is simple: Women send their dresses to the sisters, who then design a new item for them out of the old fabric.
“All of us hold onto these dresses; we have one girl who was a bridesmaid 10 years ago and she never parted with it,” she said. “We made a really cute throw pillow and picture frames. We’ve done lingerie from the dress. We’ve revamped their gown into a cocktail dress.”
The sisters will also take scraps and incorporate them into a larger piece.
Prices begin at about $145 for a pillow and $200 for a dress.
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