ONE STOP WEDDING SHOP
We have been so excited to finally be able to reveal that in August 2021 we appeared in the filming of a new wedding show ‘One Stop Wedding Shop’ for E4. The show was aired on Wednesday 22nd September and is now available on More4. It features a bespoke boutique created especially for the show which houses dresses from our boutiques. We work alongside an elite team of expert designers and stylists to make the style dreams of brides a reality. The brides are real and the dresses are our from our current collection and available to try on in our stores this season. We are so excited to share the show and a bit of the backstory as to how we became involved…
It started back in June with a phone call from a casting agent asking if we’d be interested in being involved in a new wedding show. We of course were honoured to be asked and jumped at the chance to find out more. Completing a casting call on Zoom a couple of weeks later was nerve wracking but we felt we were ourselves and just chatted about what we do best – putting brides at ease and finding them their perfect dress. A few weeks later we received the good news that we were to feature as bridal experts on the show! Filming would take place in London during the first week of August.
There wasn’t much time to get prepared and even less time to feel nervous! We learnt that the show would feature 5 or 6 brides all with different visions about their dream look. With the average bride trying on 8-10 dresses during appointments at The White Collection we knew this would mean transporting around 60 dresses to London along with veils, accessories and all our must have styling tools. If we forgot something there was no nipping back!
August at The White Collection boutiques is always one of our busiest months of the year so we also faced a challenge of taking all the dress stock we needed with us whilst keeping our two luxury White Collection stores and our White Outlet store open at the same time! The is where our amazing team came in – helping us to choose which dresses to take, prepare the boutiques, pack the dresses for transport and keep our boutiques running in our absence – we couldn’t have done it without them!
With all the dresses sent ahead of us we eagerly boarded the train to London and for the first time we able to think about the filming itself! Bar a couple of news appearances when our window display went viral, neither of us had ever done this type of thing before. We were apprehensive but confident about the task in hand. We knew from a bridal styling perspective and the feedback we’ve had from our lovely brides over the past three years that we were good at what we did. All we had to do was do this on screen!
As it turned out a bridal appointment on screen in One Stop Wedding Shop isn’t quite the same as the appointments we run at The White Collection. All the aspects of filming needed to be factored in so there was a bit of stop starting especially from a sound perspective when a truck rolled past outside or a dog started barking! Furthermore as we learnt, shows evolve when filming starts so what might have worked on paper was sometimes changed completely during filming. This meant we were in for a very long first day. We quickly realised that the plans we had for early nights with Netflix and magazines were not going to happen!
Needless to say by the morning of the second day everything was so slick and we actually ended up ahead of schedule. The production team putting the show together were absolutely amazing and everyone we encountered on the show had such a positive outlook and a collective drive to make a great show – it was inspiring and fascinating to see how it all worked behind the scenes and how it was starting to look on the monitors during filming. We also really enjoyed working with RiRi the other bridal expert on the show. It was great to work with another business owner who loves dressing brides as much as we do and has such passion for the industry. Her enthusiasm was infectious and we feel the three of us made such a good team to offer the very best to the brides on the show.
So what were the brides like and were they ‘real brides’? Yes absolutely they were! We were each matched to our own brides as their ‘stylist’ just like we would do at The White Collection. We didn’t meet the brides until their appointment, just how it would be in our own boutiques. The appointments were totally genuine and we really got to know our beautiful real brides and inspire their confidence in their bridal look just as we do in our ‘day jobs’. Being with these lovely brides was when we felt at our most comfortable and could truly be ourselves which meant the nerves just disappeared!
And the ‘reveals’ at the end – they were honestly the most amazing part of the show. We won’t put any spoilers in here in case you haven’t watched the show yet but there were genuine tears and emotions from us and the crew as well as the brides – some really special moments that we are proud to have been a part of.
We look forward to hearing what everyone thought of the show look forward to seeing the photos of the brides we styled on their Big Day!