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- Shenandoah Valley, Virginia, USA
A traditional wedding dress you wear once, for a single day. Let's say a person get's a nice dress for $200, that is $200 spent on one day's worth of clothing. Either one has to sell the dress (a $200 dress won't sell for much on the secondary market), get married again in the same dress, or wear it to a recommittment ceremony to get more "wear" to lower that $200 and spread that money out. (I might add that most wedding dresses also aren't built to stand up to daily wear either, they are much more fragile than most garments.)
Now let's say a person buys a dress that she can wear everyday for $300- $100 more than her wedding gown. It's well made and she takes very good care of it. She wears it 10 times a year for 3 years. That's 30 wears, or approximately $10 a wear. Some people would look at the $300 everyday dress as a better deal than the $200 wedding gown, because they will wear it more often. (Now I understand that a wedding gown is more special to most consumers, and that accounts for the higher prices. But some people consider number of wears in pricing something, and quality impacts the number of wears.)
I feel that's somewhat sad. I know a woman who makes cakes (she's retired) mostly for friends and family and she basically covers her materials, barely. She was charging $1.50 per slice and the going rate is $5.00 for the same type of thing in the area. She started charging so little because she was unexperienced, but has found it very difficult to raise her prices now that she is more skilled, and she took a lot of flak when she raised her prices to $2.50 a slice (which is still underselling her skill level severely). I understand wanting to do things for the "love of it" (I really do) but I have to feel sorry for someone who's talented but can't make a living at something because of the market not valuing their skills.
