How Grace Loves Lace Doubled Its Wedding Dress Sales In A Pandemic

It’s fair to assume 2020 hasn’t been a great year for the wedding industry.

With mass quarantines, lockdowns, and laws that prohibit most of the world from celebrating just about anything ‘offline’, Covid-19 has rung the death knoll for thousands wedding photographers, caterers, and venues globally.

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For a few digital-first businesses, like Australian wedding dress brand Grace Loves Lace, however, the pandemic has created an opportunity for growth.

“We’ve seen a 100% increase on sales since last year,” says founder Megan Ziems. “Luckily for us, the wedding dress is still an essential item for the wedding.”

Only, unlike many of its competitors, Grace Loves Lace was poised to deliver not only an exceptional virtual customer experience, but also dresses unaffected by China’s manufacturing processes. And it has been since day one.

While shopping for her own wedding dress in 2010, Ziems struggled to find anything she liked. She wanted something non-traditional and high-quality, without spending a fortune, but felt frustrated by the bridal “uniform” the industry offered at the time.

Eventually, she took a stab at making her own, using skills she’d developed working in luxury lingerie manufacturing, and went on to launch Grace Loves Lace hoping to fill a gap in the market for women who couldn’t do so themselves.

“I think I was lucky in that I really didn’t want to compete with what was already out there,” she says. “As well as not wholesaling, I wasn’t a part of bridal fairs or anything that traditional bridal wear companies did— like having to push out four collections a year.”

Instead, she sold a small collection of intricate, boho-friendly wedding dresses online, which no wedding dress brands were doing at the time.

“To be honest, I thought that it would be a digital business,” she says. “I had no intentions of opening up showrooms. It just kind of—infilled—as the years went on.”

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Grace Loves Lace’s first showroom opened to meet the demands of local brides from a small cottage in her hometown of Burleigh Heads, on Australia’s Gold Coast.

The demand for the second, in Los Angeles, came as more of a shock, following a pop-up event that drew in crowds “down the road and around the block—it was crazy!

“A lot of what we did back in the early days went off gut instinct,” she says. “I think I knew that we had a good following in the States, but I was shell-shocked when we held that LA event.”

Shortly thereafter, the brand became world-famous when its ‘Hollie’ gown (a kind of bohemian, French lace and chiffon dream) became the most-pinned dress of all time on Pinterest. From there, demand sky-rocketed, and Grace Loves Lace opened nine more global showrooms (in New York, Chicago, Dallas, San Diego, Seattle, London, Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth).

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By 2013, the company was expanding so quickly Megan’s husband, Wade Ziems, left his job as a lawyer to become CEO.

“I was in commercial litigation so I’ve seen—through other people’s experience—a lot of things that can go wrong,” he says. “Things that trip up much smarter people than me, and I’ve learned from them. It’s correlated really well with the growth of the business.”

Wade describes Megan as the ‘creative’, and himself as ‘the careful approach’, saying the balance has been imperative to their success.

So, too, has Grace Loves Lace’s sustainable credentials. Particularly as the pandemic placed them on the forefront of people’s minds.

“Covid raised awareness of how many wedding dresses are made in China,” says Megan. “Unfortunately, a lot of brides don’t ask those questions when they’re ordering their wedding dress, so in the early days, with manufacturing postponed in China, a lot of brides just didn’t get their wedding dresses.”

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Of course, the situation was a blessing in disguise. With wedding dresses made-to-order in-house, and virtual appointments available at the click of a button, Grace Loves Lace offered everything its competitors couldn’t, saving both brides and business.

“The business model is about as good as it can get,” says Wade. “Our consumers purchase upfront, full price, so we’re a very cash-positive business. We haven’t required cash investment.”

To capitalize on the business’ boom, the company has also launched its most sustainable collection to-date—GRACE mini—which repurposes bridal gown off-cuts to create luxurious, comfortable dresses for young girls aged 2-7 years.

The mini collection is completely free from waste and, like all of the company’s collections, is not mass produced.

“The wedding industry is not transparent about their sourcing methods, and I want to change that,” says Megan.

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“I would love to take over the wedding dress world, to be honest. And, now, I think we’ve got the ability to do it.”