California Apparel News

For big bridal trade shows, retailers typically head to New York in October for New York Bridal Fashion Week, when there is a confab of exhibits around Manhattan, or to Chicago in late September for the National Bridal Market.

But Los Angeles has had a scarcity of big bridal shows for store owners until last year when New York–based The Knot launched its Couture: Los Angeles Bridal Market with scores of exhibitors showing everything frilly and lacy.

Brett Olsen, an associate producer of the Couture bridal trade events, said that The Knot had many requests by bridal-gown manufacturers and retailers to produce a show on the West Coast. “Los Angeles was an untapped market,” he said, noting that The Knot has been producing a bridal trade show for some 20 years in New York. “People look to us as an authority on wedding gowns.”

Last year the venue was the Siren Studios in Hollywood. But this year the show moved to The Reef, formerly known as the LA Mart, near downtown Los Angeles, where the event occupied two floors during its Aug. 30–31 run.

More than 50 bridal brands showed 150 collections in an open-air environment, where many spaces had their own mini-runways to show off the flowing and flouncy styles that make up their Spring/Summer 2016 collection.

Most of the gowns were heaped with lace and silk, but one of the emerging trends for brides-to-be is a move to make their wedding and all the accoutrements as personal and individual as possible to distinguish it from friends’ weddings. “So much of the average girl’s life is on social media that that influences her,” said Tricia Dixon, regional sales manager for XO Group Inc., the parent company of The Knot, which is a multi-platform wedding resource. “So she wants to make her wedding as personal as possible. She wants to take ownership of her wedding.”

Anything that smacks of individualism is up for grabs, such as a unique nameplate, place settings, floral arrangements or bridal accessories.

Many of the exhibitors at the Los Angeles bridal trade show were trying to find more West Coast customers. That was the reason Franssical, a San Francisco label launched more than two years ago, was at the event. “We need West Coast representation,” said Marie Krim, the label’s national sales director, who is based in Dallas. “We don’t have a lot of reps on the road.”

While they had picked up a few new accounts, Krim and her colleagues, including the label’s designer, Vivi Ta, thought the show was slow, and they would analyze whether to participate in it again.

Veteran wedding-dress maker Kevin Lu, who launched his Casablanca Bridal company in 1997 from Anaheim, Calif., was taking a no-holds-barred attitude on his enormous exhibition space, which included a table of sandwiches, cookies, pasta salad and wine; racks of wedding dresses; and a small runway to show his Casablanca label, which wholesales for $499 to $899, and his higher-end Amaré Couture collection, which has a wholesale price of $899 to $2,000. The gowns are manufactured in a factory that Lu owns in Yantai, China, that employs 1,000 workers.

His labels are regularly seen at bridal shows in Dallas, New York, Chicago, England and Canada. His philosophy is to connect with as many retailers as possible and get more eyes on his gowns. “It’s show time,” he said, standing at the edge of his space.

This was the second Los Angeles Couture show for the Mon Cheri Bridals company, based in Trenton, N.J. Pamela Henderson, helping out with sales, said last year’s show at Siren Studios “was horrible.” The location was difficult to get to for many buyers. “This venue is better, but I don’t think there have been as many buyers,” she said.

But store buyers from the West Coast and beyond were meandering through the open-space exhibition area. Claudia Bermudez Adamcesicz came from Metairie, La., near New Orleans, where she has owned the Bustles & Bows Bridal Boutique for nearly two years. She normally shops the bridal shows in Chicago and Dallas but decided to check out the Los Angeles show and visit relatives at the same time.

She wanted to see some of the lines she carries, such as Kitty Chen, Privato by Mon Cheri and Kenneth Winston. “It’s been great. I like it,” she said. “Everything is here and it’s not too big.”

Debra Zagar traveled from Puyallup, Wash., near Tacoma, to stock her store, called Something Blue Bridal Boutique.

“I usually go to New York,” she said. “I am just checking the show out. There are a couple of designers here that I carry, and I am looking for other labels.”