Entrepreneurial bridesmaid crashes wedding market with Little Borrowed Dress

It's a conundrum of being in your 20s. Female friends who know full well that you can barely spring for nachos and a pitcher of beer at the local dive bar ask you to be a bridesmaid in their wedding, a prospect that means buying an expensive formal dress that will be worn precisely once.Millennial women are the demographic most likely to be asked, and while they are loathe to say "no," many struggle financially as one friend's wedding can snowball into four or five or six, all in the same year. Corie Hardee, founder of New York City-based startup Little Borrowed Dress, understands this firsthand."I've personally been a bridesmaid many times,disposable paper cups and never wore the dress again," Hardee tells me. "You can go online and rent a handbag or a gown for other occasions, but not for being a bridesmaid. This is a major customer pain point.disposable wooden cutlery" 

We know what remedies pain points, though: startup business models, which is why Hardee founded the bridesmaid dress manufacturer and rental website, which today announced $1.25 million in seed funding from Index Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and others. The funding will be used to redesign the website, expand the dress style options available, and build up the team, which now numbers five, Hardee says.While the overall U.S. bridal market was $55 billion in 2012, according to the Wedding Report's most recent data, the bridesmaid dress market represents a significant slice. Each year, some 9 million to 10 million bridesmaids spend about $2 billion on dresses, spending an average of $230 per dress.Little Borrowed Dress lends dresses for less: cocktail length frocks go for $50 a pop and full-length gowns for $75 each. Designed to fit women of varying shapes and sizes without the need for alterations, the dresses arrive two weeks before the wedding, to allow for try-ons and to allay the nerves of worried brides. Customers mail the dresses back to the New York-based startup on the first business day after the wedding.lv monogram empreinte artsy price Or if they decide to keep the dresses, they can buy them for $150 and up. While Hardee wouldn't provide specific revenue numbers, she says the'pany has a stock of 3,000 dresses and during the height of wedding season in the summer 2013, 80 percent of them were rented.