Wedding Gown Preservation Really Works

This is Glenn Batts, Manager of the A Cleaner World on Leesville Road in Raleigh.  Glenn is a garment care miracle worker.  With 35 years of experience in this industry, he’s seen and fixed just about every problem you can imagine. 

I called Glenn several weeks ago because I wanted to verify that some information I was about to put on our website was indeed correct.   My questions prompted him to share this story with me, and I thought it was a story worthy of repeating.  It proves that properly preserving a wedding gown is really worth it.

Roughly 10 years ago, a bride brought in her recently worn wedding gown for cleaning and preservation.  Glenn cleaned, preserved, and placed the gown in our special chamber box, according to our customary procedures.  Not too long ago, the bride brought the dress back in, still in the box, to be freshened up because her niece wanted to wear it at her wedding.  Glenn offered to remove the dress from the box, examine it for any stains that might have oxidized, re-clean it if necessary, and then re-press the gown.  When he removed the dress from the box, he said it looked just exactly as it did 10 years ago when he originally placed it in the chamber.  There was absolutely no need to re-clean it, so he simply pressed the gown and had it ready when promised.  The niece wore the gown, and then after her wedding, they brought it back to his store to be re-cleaned and preserved and placed inside a new chamber for another someday wedding.

I hear stories like these and I think, “Wow, how amazing. Why did no one tell me?”  Well, no one told me because our store managers do this kind of stuff every day; to them, it’s just business as usual.  I started drilling Glenn with questions to which he pointed out that his focus is always on taking care of the dress and the customer, not snapping photos.  So no photo to share – just the story, along with one piece of advice from Glenn: “It does matter where the wedding gown is stored.  Never place them in an attic or basement where they are subjected to extreme temperature changes, humidity, and insects.  The best place, I think, is to slide it under your bed.”

If your wedding gown has been sitting in a closet covered in plastic for far too long, drop it off at one of our locations and let one of our skilled managers take a look at it.  You never know who might want to wear your gown someday.