I love wearing dresses. Since I'm a slob who likes to throw clothing on without having to give the matter a lot of thought, and am now also a mother who gets dressed in a hurry while trying to appease the cranky small child, dresses are perfect for me. However, it's been difficult to find the right one lately. I'm still nursing, so the neckline has to be easy to open. Also, I like a particular style of dress, one that is somewhat fitted but not tight, and those seem to come and go. At the moment, they seem to be back in, but what looks good on the hanger doesn't necessarily look good on me (as I found when I tried on a dress at my sister-in-law's clothing store.)
So yesterday I'm coming back to my car from Long's, and I pause in front of Dress Barn. I've walked by it a million times, but have hardly ever gone in — they generally have tended to be as stylish as their name suggests, with lots of straight-waisted, big shoulder-padded, ugly-patterned belted numbers. Last time I went in one in the city a couple of years ago, there was one dress in the window that appealed, but again, it wasn't a good fit.
Not this time though! I don't know what happened to the place — new management? New designers? — but they had many really nice dresses, reasonably stylish patterns... and they fit me! I ended up buying two, for $34 each. And I did this despite the pushy sales people (who kept trying to get my to open a credit card account with them) and the insipid music. Go figure.
I guess they are doing something different — according to this Motley Fool article, they're making some dough off the new dresses.
I have two suggestions for them though. One is, do something about the website! It's worse than useless.
The second one is a marketing tag line. "Let yourself shine" is nice enough, but it doesn't really communicate the brand. My version: "Dress Barn. No shit." Is that a winner or what?
