Custom Couture in Georgette

We’re pleased to announce that we are now offering our Custom Couture line of dresses in our georgette fabric. Previously, these design-your-own dresses were only available in our satin and charmeuse fabrics. Our website should be updated within the next week to ten days to include this option. However, we are presently accepting orders for these dresses in georgette. Just send an email after you order informing us that you want your dress in georgette and we’ll make it happen. You can check out the color range by looking at some of the Celebrity Inspired dresses we offer in georgette (e.g. Teri).

A Few Great Links

Below are a couple of links to sites that have recently said some nice things about us. We’re particularly proud of the first one, which is from an existing customer who just received her dress this past weekend:

Happy Customer!

A Charmed Event

Wedding Tips

Madame Butterfly

Another one of our all-time favorite customers is Andi (a/k/a Mrs. Butterfly on weddingbee.com). Weddingbee.com is a site that allows women to post questions, issues, vendor reviews, etc. regarding their upcoming weddings. What struck us about weddingbee.com is how articulate the posters are. It’s great content for anyone who’s in the process of getting married. Sometimes more popular sites like weddingchannel.com and theknot.com can be a little annoying with their automatically streaming video and slow loads.

In any event, Andi was kind enough to write some really great things about us throughout the whole process – from ordering swatches, to communications about our Jr. Bridesmaid dress (she was the first one to ever order it!), to having her bridesmaids wear our dresses. In fact, her comments about us are so good that we feel compelled to inform you that she was not paid for her words (although we did send her one of our fabulous t-shirts). We're very proud of our A+ vendor grade. Here’s a link to all of Andi’s comments about us which includes photos of her dresses http://www.weddingbee.com/index.php?s=cocomyles. You can click on each post's title to see the full posting and photos.

We’re thrilled she had such a great wedding and we wish her – and Mr. Butterfly – all the best for the future!

New Additions to the Site

We’ve reconfigured our site so that future additions to our Custom Couture can be done in a simpler and faster fashion. We’re excited to formally introduce our Short Sleeved Top and ¾ Length Sleeve Top. We'd received a ton of requests to make some tops that had a little more coverage and we've produced these tops with those requests in mind. The shawls aren’t looking too pretty on the sleeved tops at the moment, but we’re working on that.

We’ve also added purple/violet to our charmeuse color family as a stock color. Based on requests we’ve received over the past two months, purple is a very popular dress color.

We’ve also gotten around to adding a lot more testimonials and have decided to automate this system so that your “kind words” can be shared much faster.

We’re now looking to add a few dresses inspired from the recent Golden Globes awards. At the moment, we’re admiring the dresses worn by Jennifer Hudson, Angelina Jolie and Penelope Cruz. If there’s anything you were particularly fond of, we’d love to hear from you.

Is that Tiffany Blue? No, it’s Ashley Blue

These pictures were sent to us from one of our all-time favorite customers, Ashley, who has to be one of the sweetest people on this planet. Ashley was one of the first customers we had that sourced a non-stock color with us back in June. She had wanted a very light blue satin for her wedding dress and we were lucky enough to be able to source it for her. She chose Chocolate Charmeuse for her bridesmaids. We found it fun to simply name colors after customers once we sourced it for them - - - sort of an homage to those who trusted us to get the right color for their wedding. Lately, people have been asking whether we have any “Tiffany Blue”. We’ll send them a swatch and advise that the color is properly known in these parts as “Ashley Blue”. We're wondering if one day someone will walk out of Tiffany’s with a box and someone will say it looks just like Coco Myles' Ashley Blue.

Different Styles Matching Perfectly

This photo was sent to us recently from Helaine who was kind enough to take a picture of herself and her fellow, beautiful bridesmaids in their Coco Myles dresses. We think the picture provides a really good example of how our dresses can be worn in different styles and yet match perfectly since they’re all cut from the same fabric (Brick Red Satin in this instance). As you can see, some dresses are beaded, some are strapless, and one is being worn with a shawl. Now, as for the footwear . . . we assume this picture was taken either pre- or post-nuptials. Thanks, ladies!

Logistical Assistance from the Bride

Recently one of our customers, Linda, helped us get a dress to one of her bridesmaids who ordered a little late. Through no fault of our own, we needed to rush a dress to the bridesmaid on a Saturday morning for a wedding that night!! After we were able to produce the dress much faster than usual we breathed a big sigh of relief and patted ourselves on the back for another job well done. That was until we found out that neither UPS nor FedEx could deliver the dress to where it needed to go before 1:00 pm Saturday. Linda was kind enough to accept delivery of the dress at approx. 9:30 am and get it into the hands of the bridesmaid that same morning. It was a great feeling coming into the office the following Monday with a kind note and photo from Linda letting us know that everyone loved their dresses and expressing her gratitude for getting everything done in time. Linda is elegantly wearing our Scoop Neck Top with Ballroom Skirt in Navy Satin. The woman looks great and, more importantly, has a great heart!

Baltimore Rules

For whatever reason, the U.S. city we seem to be most popular in is Baltimore, Maryland. We haven’t done anything special in the way of marketing to folks in Baltimore. It just seems that word-of-mouth has spread there quicker than in other cities. Other than the movie “Diner”, I never really had an appreciation for Baltimore – I don’t even like crab cakes. Now Baltimore is one of my favorite cities. The picture posted above is from one of our latest Baltimore customers. Christiane needed a dress in a rush for her friend’s wedding. All of the bridesmaids were given the freedom to buy their dresses from wherever they wanted and we’re thrilled Christiane found us. While you may tend to think we’re selling our dresses to dainty women who write poetry and have nicely manicured nails, you can see that we can also make ladies who participate in roller derby look great! Christiane is a member of the Junkyard Dolls which is one of the teams in Charm City Roller Girls (“Baltimore’s Only All Girl Roller Derby League”). Christiane is on the far-right wearing our “Sweet Emmy” dress in red satin (yeah, as if Emmy Rossum could compete in roller derby). As tough a lady as we’re sure Christiane is, she was a delight to work with and we’re happy she looked great at the wedding. Dig those gloves too!

Seasons Greetings!

Being that it’s the holiday season and that the world has taken a much needed pause to celebrate, we thought now would be a good time to post stories and photos from some of our favorite customers who were kind enough to express their gratitude to us and send us pictures of themselves in their Coco Myles dresses.

Of course, with the way blogs work -- with later entries being published above prior entries -- this little intro probably won’t be read until after you’ve read the other entries. In any event, we hope you enjoy(ed) them! And Seasons Greetings to all, particularly to our customers who have made this such a fun year!

Photo Shoot Results!

As mentioned a little while ago, we had what we think was a really successful photo shoot last month. We think these photos will come in handy for a variety of reasons, including showing our prospective customers how nice our dresses look when worn. We’ve had a good number of emails from people asking for pictures of this sort and we’re happy to now provide them. We decided to post a few of the photos so folks can see them before they’re put on our site and used in our marketing/advertising materials. The dresses are (from bottom to top): Black Satin Strapless Top with a Tea-Length A-Line Bottom with White Satin Sash; Turquoise Charmeuse Criss-Cross Top with Asymmetrical Bottom (Pearl Ivy Beading); “Sweet Emmy” in Red Satin; Hot Pink Satin Sweetheart Top with Ballroom Bottom (Royalty Beading) and Shawl; “BlueBerry” in Royal Charmeuse; and, “Lily” in Eggplant Georgette. We hope you like the photos as much as we do! Please note that you can click on them to enlarge and see more detail.

Shefinds.com Finds Coco Myles

Being an online company, it is always nice when independent bloggers find us and write nice things. We recently got a great review in Shefinds.com, a site who’s self-proclaimed purpose is to “study the trends and surf the web for the best items and then send you a link in the SheFinds weekly newsletter.”

We’re very happy to have been featured this past Wednesday as their “Bargains Week Feature Find”, even though they claimed our sizes only ran up to 16 -- we go to 32. You can check out their kind words right here. Thank you, Shefinds.com!

Referrals from dressupgames.com

I woke up on Friday and was shocked to find that our traffic was about five times as much as usual. After checking out the referrals leading to our site, we discovered that we were a newly added link to dressupgames.com. We're their top link in their formal design section. We’re very grateful for the new visitors!

Sisterhood Never Looked So Good

One of the great things about being in this business is discovering opportunities that you wouldn’t otherwise knew existed. This happened to us this past May when we received 50 orders from a university sorority house. Now we knew that a bride and her bridesmaids might like the convenience of shopping online for their dresses given the usual geographic disparity of bridesmaids today, but who knew that sororities might like to order a whole bunch of dresses for their members for special events like formals and rush. It seems we're in a good place since we're not sure anyone else could produce an order of 50 or so beautiful, custom-made dresses in under 6 weeks. Needless to say, we are now bidding on the term “sorority dresses” and look forward to making other sorority sisters look as good as these ladies.

By the way, on this order, the women all bought tea-length black satin dresses but got to choose the particular shape of the top and bottom. Consistency with personal preference -- looks good, no?

"Cheap Bridesmaids Dresses"? Well, No One Searches for “Bridesmaids Dresses with a High Value Proposition”

We bid on the search term “cheap bridesmaids dresses” but there’s something inherent in the word “cheap” that just doesn’t feel right. While our dresses are inexpensive compared to other bridesmaid dresses (particularly those that are custom made), we tend to think of cheap as being low quality which definitely is not the case here. We also bid on “inexpensive bridesmaids dresses” which is a little more palatable. Unfortunately, with this type of paid-search marketing you have to go with what the masses are searching and, based on Overture’s estimates for last month (September ’06), there were only 359 searches for “inexpensive bridesmaid dresses” while there were more than 7,700 searches for “cheap bridesmaid dresses”. So despite our qualms, I guess we’ll keep bidding on the cheap.

theknot.com's "Professional" Posting Policy

So every now and then (okay, practically everyday), we’ll go to theknot.com, which is the largest wedding community website, and type “coco myles” or “cocomyles” into their search field to see what’s being said about us. So far so good, thankfully!

Their posting policy prohibits “solicitations” so we never sought to go there and tout our wares. However, the other day we came across this thread. We figured this was a pefect, non-solicitous situation in which we could interject and offer some information to some prospective customers. We simply wanted to inform the person who started the thread that she could order swatches from us and see, first-hand, the difference between the satin and charmeuse fabrics.

I had previously become a member of theknot.com and, during the sign-in process, honestly identified myself as a “professional” rather than a groom or wedding guest. When I tried to post a response to the above thread, I got a message stating that professionals were not allowed to post.

I definitely understand why theknot.com wants to prevent solicitations on their message boards. I can only imagine how many photographers, limo drives, and wedding bands would be posting. However, I think it’s unfortunate that they don’t give professionals the opportunity to answer, or inform, members if they have a question. I guess it’s tough balancing solicitations and honest information. Maybe they could prevent professionals from starting threads but allow them to post on existing ones. Just a thought.

Speaking of Real, Live Women

Despite our high customer satisfaction rate, we're still finding it difficult to get women to send us photos of the dresses being worn, particularly by their bridal parties. My guess is that when women are planning their wedding and are caught up in the excitement of ordering, or merely discussing the ordering of their bridesmaid dresses, they’re very willing to say, “Sure, I’ll send you some photos!” Then the wedding comes around, then the honeymoon, followed by catching up at work and nights spent sending out “thank you” cards. Before you know it, the bride has forgotten all about us. We also feel a little weird about nagging someone after the fact – we don’t want to come off as the “stalking bridesmaid dressmaker”. The truth is we realize that after the wedding, we’re not that high on someone’s priority list. We also think that women may not want pictures of their wedding posted on the Web or used for commercial purposes, which we totally understand. We’re trying to come up with ways to incentivize (strange how this word does not pass spell-check muster) our customers to send us those photos.

Given some feedback we’ve received and comments we’ve seen on some sites (i.e. theknot.com), we do think this will help others feel more confident about ordering from us. In an ideal world, we’d love to have our customers send us video clips from their weddings which we'd then make available for others to view.

That being said, I am thankful to a wonderful woman who just got married in the UK and was kind enough to send us these photos of her beautiful bridal party. I have to admit the whole “English Countryside” thing is a great backdrop for our dresses – it definitely does them justice! By the way, the dresses are Classic American Beauties (love the irony that they’re being worn by Classic British Beauties) in black satin.

Real, Live Women

When we launched back in March, our take was that the website did a great job of showing what the dresses looked like. I loved that our site looks and works like an actual dressmaking application while other sites look like electronic versions of old-fashioned catalogs. Well, as we now seek to broaden our marketing efforts beyond that of paid-search, it seems we need to have some real, live women in our dresses in order to develop a press kit that will be acceptable to traditional media outlets like television and magazines. The truth is we’ve also had a fair number of customers also asking to see what the dresses look like on women.

So we’ve hired our models and are now looking forward to leaving the artistic wizardry in the very capable hands of our photographers, Arnold and David Katz. The shoot is scheduled for November 1 and, hopefully, we’ll have the whole press kit ready in the middle of November, although I’m sure this kind of thing will take longer than anticipated.

Coco Myles in Crain's NY

Here's a nice little article about us in this week's Crain's New York Business that focuses on our pricing.

Send a Swatch, Make a Friend

Here’s the quandary when we started.

We figured most people would be very happy to know that we’ll send them swatches of our fabrics for free, which we do. We also think it’s reasonable to expect bridesmaids and brides to want a physical sample of the color they’re choosing for their dresses. We also know that a bride shopping for bridesmaid dresses is going to have some wedding-wide color issues that go beyond the bridesmaid dress, including flowers, tablecloths, flatware, etc. Because of the huge role that color plays in any wedding, we feel we have a responsibility to provide as much information to the bride as possible.

So our core belief is that we should provide samples to customers especially since we operate entirely online. On the other hand, we didn’t want to be bombarded by requests from 7th grade girls who think it’d be cool to get swatches from a dress company.

We therefore came to the conclusion that we would provide the swatches for free but wouldn’t make it a FAQ on the site. Our philosophy was to freely give the swatches to those who made the effort to ask for them figuring that this would limit the amount of 7th graders requesting fabric.

Those who contacted us about obtaining swatches were generally surprised to find out that we were willing to send swatches for free, probably because they’d seen other companies charge as much as $15.00 per swatch for this service. If you are thinking about buying from us then we think it’s our responsibility to get you what you need to make that purchase – and if that means sending a small sample of the fabric you may use then, to us, that’s well worth it! Forunately, so far, time has proven us correct.

Now, here are our revised thoughts on the matter:

Maybe we were too cautious in our approach to the junior high school kids. I mean, really, what do they want the swatches for? Even if our worst fears are realized and an entire 7th grade class asks for each of our colors, at least they’ll remember our name later on (hopefully). However, the biggest contributing factor to the change in philosophy is our discovery that the simple “swatch request” gives us an opportunity to introduce ourselves to each other and to demonstrate how Coco Myles works in terms of getting back to you almost immediately after you contact us, getting you what you want (the swatches) in a pretty package and for a great price ($0), with friendly customer service along the way. This process creates good feelings for both sides. It also makes a nice template for future transactions involving the dresses.

Because of the positive client relationships that we’ve developed from the swatch request, we think it's time to make our customers more aware that we will send them swatches for free! We’ll probably be adding a FAQ to this effect in the next day or so. If we get deluged with requests then we’ll respond as best we can. At present, we’re able to send our swatches out the same day they’re asked for so long as the request is received before 4:00 pm Eastern Time. All others are sent the next day. Hopefully, we can keep this effective process in place.

So for you Coco Myles fans who can’t let a day go by without reading our FAQ section, they’ll be a new one coming soon that’ll let our customers know that Coco Myles will be happy to send swatches to them for free!

And let’s not lose sight of the power that a simple swatch has to bring people together!

Introducing Our Jr. Bridesmaid Dress

As stated in one of the earlier posts, we're grateful for all the customer recommendations we've received about adding certain items to our offerings. The latest dress we'll be adding as a result of those comments is our Jr. Bridesmaid dress. Our website folks are currently adding this dress to our site, but we thought we'd at least show you what it looks like on this blog. Over on the left are the front and back images of the dress. We're giving our customers the ability to choose both a base and accent color. This way if the bridesmaids dresses are, let's say, Chocolate then the bride can choose to use the Chocolate as an accent color to the Jr. Bridesmaid dress. The dress shown is an example of a White base color with a Chocolate accent color. Of course, the dress can be made in one solid color as well.

The dress is currently available for sale ($115.00) and should be up on our site within the next week. If you'd like any information about sizing and specifications, please send us an email.