Bridal retail and alterations
VeilFittings follows a gown from the day the deposit clears to the afternoon the bride carries the garment bag out your door. Your consultants, your seamstresses and your front desk all work from the same dates, so nothing depends on the sticky note taped to the steamer.
The rack problem
Bridal is the only retail where a single missed date turns into a phone call nobody wants to make. The trouble is almost never the sewing. It is the ledger, the calendar and the rack living in three different places.
The designer confirms a window, your consultant writes it in the order book, and nobody checks it again until the bride calls. A gown that lands late needs rush alterations or a rush charge you end up absorbing.
Average rush freight and overtime absorbed per late gown: $340Three consultants share one paper calendar and one seamstress. Two brides get the same 11 a.m. slot, and the second one waits in the salon while a bustle is pinned in front of her.
Double bookings cost a typical shop 6 selling hours a monthDeposits are easy. The remaining balance, the alteration estimate and the preservation add on are the ones that slip until the pickup date, when nobody wants to have a money conversation.
Shops we onboarded were carrying $4,100 in unbilled alterationsYour lead seamstress says she is full. You have no way to see whether that is thirty hours of hems or ten hours of beadwork. So you either turn work away or promise a date you cannot keep.
Two to three declined alteration jobs a week at $285 eachHow it works
Log the bride, the designer, the style number, the size ordered, the deposit taken and the wedding date. VeilFittings works backward from the wedding and sets the dates that matter: expected arrival, first fitting, final fitting, pickup.
Each order sits in a lane: ordered, in production, shipped, received, in alterations, ready, collected. Move a card and the whole shop sees it. If a designer window slips past your first fitting date, the order flags itself before the bride does.
Appointments are booked against a seamstress and a room, not against a hope. Each job carries an estimated hour count by task, so a Saturday full of bustles and a Saturday full of hems no longer look the same on the calendar.
The pickup screen shows the balance, the approved alteration line items, the preservation order and the accessories on hold. Your front desk collects everything in one pass and the order closes clean.
What is on the board
Every screen was drawn next to a working owner, then rebuilt after a Saturday on the floor showed us what she really needed at the counter.
One record per gown holds the designer, style, ordered size, cut date, deposit and balance. Search by bride, by wedding month or by designer when a rep asks what you reordered last season.
Book first fittings, second fittings and pickups against a named seamstress and a named fitting room. Overlaps are refused at the moment of booking rather than discovered on a Saturday morning.
See each week as estimated hours per person, split by hem, bustle, side seams, cups, straps and beadwork. When a bride asks for a rush, you can answer with a date instead of a guess.
Price alterations by line item from your own task list, then send the estimate for the bride to approve on her phone. The approved total moves straight onto the pickup balance.
Every order shows the weeks remaining and the slack left in the schedule. Orders with less than three weeks of slack rise to the top of the board automatically each morning.
Text and email reminders go out before every fitting with the address, the shoes and undergarments to bring, and the balance due. Replies land in the order record, not in a personal inbox.
Inside the board
Nothing on the board is invented vocabulary. The lanes are the words your consultants already use at the counter, which is why staff pick it up in an afternoon.
The deposit is taken and the cut date is confirmed with the designer. VeilFittings holds the promised window and starts counting weeks against the wedding date the moment the order is written.
Log the tracking number when the designer releases the gown, then check it in against the order when the box lands. Size, color and style discrepancies get flagged at check in, while there is still time to act.
The gown moves to a named seamstress with a task list and estimated hours. Every pinning, every price change and every approval is stamped with a date and a person.
Pressed, bagged and tagged with the rack position, so the front desk finds the gown in under a minute. Collection closes the order with the balance, the preservation order and the accessories in one screen.
Any order with less than three weeks of slack is pulled into a separate lane on the morning view. Rush pricing is applied from your own rate card rather than negotiated on the spot.
Postponed weddings, returned samples and cancelled orders keep their history instead of disappearing. When a bride comes back eight months later, her file, her measurements and her balance are still there.
Built for the calendar you actually work
Bridal runs on a curve, and software written for a hair salon or a general appointment book cannot see it. VeilFittings knows that the gown you sell in February is the alteration hour you owe in May, and it plans the workroom that far ahead.
The season view lays your booked weddings against your fitting capacity for the next nine months. When April is already at 110 percent of your seamstress hours, you see it in November, while there is still time to hire an extra fitter or move first fittings earlier.
We do this import with you on a screen share. Most shops send a photograph of the order book and a spreadsheet, and that is enough.
What changes
Line item estimates and phone approvals mean the beadwork restitch and the second bustle point get billed instead of absorbed. The average shop added $1,870 a month within two seasons.
No more rebuilding the fitting calendar on Monday or calling designers to ask where a gown is. Owners report getting most of a working day back, usually the one they spent on the phone.
Across 18,400 tracked gowns, shops on the countdown view have not put a bride in a rush hem the week of her wedding because an arrival date went unnoticed.
The first import surfaces every open balance and unbilled alteration in the shop. Most owners collect that backlog within the first sixty days of running the board.
From the salon floor
We carry four designers and one seamstress with two apprentices. Before the board I was the only person who knew which gown was where, which meant I could never take a Tuesday off. Now my manager opens the shop, reads the lane view and knows exactly what walks in that week.
The workload view ended an argument we had been having for six years. My head seamstress was right: she was carrying thirty four hours of beadwork in a week I thought was light. We hired a second fitter with the numbers in front of us instead of a feeling.
Alteration estimates used to be a pencil number on the back of the order form. Now the bride approves the line items on her phone before we cut a stitch, and the balance is already on the pickup screen. We stopped losing money on bustles.
Pricing
Bridal is seasonal and your software should not punish a busy May. Every plan carries unlimited gown orders, unlimited fittings and unlimited brides.
$59
per month, one location
$119
per month, one location
$249
per month, up to 6 locations
Every plan is billed monthly in US dollars and can be cancelled at any time. No annual contract, no per bride fee, no charge for the brides you serve in peak season.
Fits the shop you already run
Nothing here assumes a shop like somebody else's. The first hour of onboarding is spent teaching the board how your shop already words things.
Add the houses you carry with their real production windows and their rush policies. The countdown uses those windows rather than a generic average, so the warnings you get are the ones that matter.
Hems, bustles, cups, straps, side seams, sleeve work, beadwork repair and pressing all carry your prices and your estimated hours. Change a price once and every future estimate follows.
Fittings publish to Google Calendar and Apple Calendar for the staff who want them on a phone. Balances, deposits and alteration lines export to CSV each month for your bookkeeper.
Questions owners ask
The price is the plan price and nothing else. Single Shop is $59 per month, Shop Plus is $119 per month and Multi Store is $249 per month for up to six locations. We do not charge per gown, per bride or per appointment, so a strong May costs the same as a quiet January. Text reminders are included in the plan rather than metered.
Most shops are running live inside two weeks. You send us your open order list as a spreadsheet or a photograph of the order book and we load the gowns, brides, wedding dates and balances for you. Then we spend ninety minutes with your team setting up designers, task pricing and seamstress hours. Owners usually run the paper calendar alongside the board for one Saturday and drop it after that.
Only the staff logins you create, with the permissions you set. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest and stored on US hosting with daily backups kept for thirty five days. We never sell shop data, never share bride contact details with designers and never use your records to train anything. If you leave, you export every order, appointment and message to CSV and we delete the account within thirty days.
VeilFittings tracks the order, the schedule and the balance owed, and hands the payment itself to whatever terminal you run today. Balances and alteration line items export to CSV for QuickBooks or your bookkeeper each month. Calendars publish to Google Calendar and Apple Calendar so your seamstresses see their week on their own phones. If you need a specific connection, say so during the walkthrough and we will tell you honestly whether it exists.
You can cancel from inside the account at any time and the plan stops at the end of the month you already paid for. No exit fee is charged and no notice period applies, even mid season when the fitting calendar is full. Before the account closes you can export every gown order, fitting, estimate and message as CSV files that open in any spreadsheet. Nothing is held hostage to keep you subscribed.
They do not have to. The workroom view prints as a clean daily sheet with each gown, bride, task list and estimated hours, and most shops tape it to the pressing table. Fitters who do want a screen get a phone view with one button, done, which moves the gown to the ready lane. The owner and the front desk do the typing, and that has been true in every shop we have onboarded.
The Fitting Room
Working intelligence for bridal boutique owners: gown orders, alterations pricing, trunk shows and the shop floor behind every pickup date.
Book a walkthrough
Send us the week you are dreading: the gowns still in production, the fittings you have not scheduled and the balances nobody has chased. In forty five minutes on a screen share we will show you that same week as a working board, with your designers and your task pricing in place.
Walkthroughs are run by someone who has stood behind a fitting room curtain, not by a sales team reading a script. If VeilFittings is wrong for the way your shop works, we will tell you in that call.
Prefer to write first? Email jimenezjulien42@gmail.com and we will answer with a real date and time.
We reply within one business day, in person, with two proposed times. No newsletter, no drip sequence. If email suits your shop hours better, send the details to jimenezjulien42@gmail.com instead.
