Selling your wedding dress abroad

beading on wedding dress

If you decide to offer your dress to buyers who live abroad, you’re giving yourself more chance of selling your dress quickly. We’ve recently launched Bride2Bride in the USA giving you access to the American marketplace and soon-to-be brides and potential buyers.

Sending your dress to an international buyer isn’t that much more complicated than sending it within the UK. The price will depend on the size and weight of the parcel, which will vary according to the style of your dress, and the value of your dress. Here are our top tips for working out what you will need to charge the buyer for shipping:

  1. Almost all buyers are genuine, but when you cannot meet them, make sure you are certain that the buyer is real, so read our tips on selling safely
  2. Make sure you’ve insured the parcel for the full value of the sale – it will add to the cost, but it’s essential to include this.
  3. Your buyer is unlikely to need the dress in a hurry, so when you are getting shipping quotes, choose the economy service.
  4. Make sure you have a sturdy box to ship your dress in; it’s worth buying one if necessary. Choose the smallest box your dress will fit in sensibly; even if the dimensions don’t make a difference to the cost, it will keep the overall weight of the parcel down.
  5. Weigh and measure the box carefully with the dress, any other items included in the sale, and any other packaging inside it so you know exactly what it will cost to send. The less it weighs, the less it will cost to send; it’s very unlikely to weigh more than 5kg.
  6. Make sure you choose a shipping service that is fully tracked and comes with a signature on delivery.
  7. You will need to provide customs information if you’re shipping outside of the EU but most couriers will organise all of this for you; make sure you carefully read all the requirements and fill in any forms correctly.
  8. Find out what tax, if any, the buyer will have to pay (this will depend on the destination and the value of the dress); again, the courier company should be happy to help with this.
  9. Let the buyer know upfront what it will cost to send the dress properly packed, fully insured and inclusive of any customs taxes.

#Pro tip – make sure there is a name and contact number for your buyer clearly visible on the box and label it ‘Wedding Gown’. It will then be treated like the precious cargo that it is!

There are a whole host of companies who have experience in shipping wedding dresses to the US and elsewhere. If you’re not sure where to start, you could try a parcel comparison service like Parcel Monkey  or Parcel2Go. Take a look at Transglobal Express who specialise in international shipping at a reasonable cost.

You could also get a quote direct from courier companies such as:

DPD https://www.dpd.co.uk/
UPS https://www.ups.com/gb/en
Parcelforce Worldwide https://www.parcelforce.com/
DHL https://parcel.dhl.co.uk

We hope you’ll consider listing your dress on our sister site in the USA. If you’ve any questions or advice for other brides, leave us a comment below. Good luck!