Mallory McKewen – BridesMade

When she was crowned queen of the American Quarter Horse Association in Ontario, Mallory McKewen was the grown-up that little girls in the horse-riding world looked up to.

And when she was preparing for the association’s annual pageant for regional queens across North America, she picked the perfect gown.

“It was red because I was the only Canadian in the competition, and it was super blinged out,” she says. “I don’t usually get attached to clothing at all, but I fell in love with that specific dress. Like, that was the one I wanted to win wearing.”

But what did she do with it when the event was over? Well, not much. That gown, which cost under $500, stayed in her closet.

BridesMade, Mallory’s size-adjustable bridesmaid dress rental business, doesn’t do pageant gowns, but consider this experience a distant ancestor of the idea. And how it came about was the perfect combination of events.

After going through school and landing a job in finance, Mallory was pretty happy – at first. “But after doing it for a year and a half, I needed more,” she says. “I wanted responsibility now. So that was what told me I want to do something else, and I thought entrepreneurship might be the best path.”

She dedicated her daily two-hour commute to a business brainstorm about what problems she could solve. While many ideas were immediately shelved, and a lot were repeats, one stuck in her mind. She had written: “It’s silly that I just bought this gown knowing I was only going to wear it once.”

A little too niche for a business, she decided, so the idea joined the others on the junk pile. There it stayed until another problem popped up: a friend of hers had been asked to be a bridesmaid.

“She just vented about it for half an hour, and the whole time I was thinking, this is just sad! Your friend who asked you to be in her wedding party was probably so thrilled to ask you, and to have you beside her on her big day,” Mallory remembers. “Why do you hate that you have to be in her wedding so much?”

Sinking money into a dress that would never be worn again… well, that was one obvious problem she could identify with. But the whole process of buying a bridesmaid dress and making sure it fit was another set of challenges she’d never really considered.

“Gone are the days when your bridesmaids would be your five best friends who all still lived in the same hometown and went to high school together,” she says.

“You’re usually now bringing together a bunch of people who don’t necessarily know each other and don’t necessarily live close together.”

Then there’s the fitting. “They’re not standard sizes. If I typically wear a size six, I’m probably a ten in a lot of bridesmaid dresses. Or maybe they do fit true to size, or maybe I’m a 12. Who knows?” she adds.

So getting everyone together and going to a bridal boutique isn’t always possible. And shopping online on Amazon or other retailers means you won’t really know what size you need, or what the dress will look like when it’s on.

Mallory did her research and spoke with a lot of bridal parties about the idea of renting instead of buying their dresses. The results were overwhelmingly positive, and the problems they did have with renting were problems she could solve.

“That made it worthwhile to buy some stock photos and just take a Sunday to make a website,” she says. “We didn’t have inventory, just a button that said ‘I want to rent my bridesmaid dresses.’”

Almost overnight there were 200 legitimately interested people. Then 2,000.

“It was just me at the time, so the biggest thing I had my eye on was making sure I was building a business out of a problem and not just trying to come up with a cool idea,” she says.

But with results like that, “I thought, okay, this is real. I need to bring in a partner to help me do this, and I need to leave my job, because it’s all or nothing.”

Today, BridesMade offers its own line of dresses in 22 colours, designed to fit without alterations, and a stylist service to make sure the dress you choose will look great on you. Really want to be sure? They’ll even send a sample box so you can test the dress out.

Unfortunately, Mallory did not win the pageant with her blinged-out red gown. But thanks to her experience, she gets to chalk up a win anyway for helping to make wedding planning a little bit easier.

“I don’t think we’re ever going to be able to just say being a bridesmaid is awesome like it should be,” she says. “But I think we’re going to be one piece in fixing that.”

Learn more at:
https://bridesmade.ca/