A prom dress is perhaps the second most important and expensive dress a young woman will wear in her life. It is the dress she will wear one time to a formal affair with friends and maybe attend a fancy dinner, take photos and dance the night away for 4 to 5 hours. After the fun-filled night, the dress is then placed in the back of the closet, in a box in the attic or the garage for storage.
Later, that same dress you paid a fortune for may either be donated to Goodwill or stay hidden away in storage, but Deborah Gruen and Anne-Marie Weller thought about another way to get the most out of the dress and have someone else's prom dreams come true.
Promagain.com is designed as a marketplace where young women can post photos of their pre-owned or never worn dresses for others to purchase. The dresses that have been worn before are sold at a discounted price, which is so much better than purchasing a new dress that will only be worn once. The two business partners thought of the idea after seeing their own daughters' prom gowns taking up space in their garage.
"Anne-Marie and I met through school and Girl Scout activities with our children many years ago," Gruen said. "I have three daughters and Anne-Marie has one, all who have gone to multiple homecomings, winter formals, and proms."
Those dresses from the previous functions were taking up valuable living space and the idea of donating the dresses to Goodwill or giving them away seemed wasteful. So they created the website and their daughters were more than supportive when they learned of the idea.
"They were very enthusiastic about getting money for their dresses," said Gruen.
Based in California, the thing that makes Promagain.com different from other websites that sale prom attire, is that the seller keeps 100 percent of the profit.
"To our knowledge we are the only website that sells formal dresses without taking the profit," said Gruen.
Promagain.com does not take any possession of the dress, so once it is posted on the website, if the seller of the dress does not want the dress to be sold they can have the dress removed from the listing.
Sellers pay a fee of $3.99 per item to have it listed on the website. For items featured on the homepage, the cost is $8.95 for 30 days. The dresses are then moved from featured listings to regular listings in which buyers must search for them online.
The website may be called promagain.com, but dresses are available for any type of formal occasions from weddings to charity balls.
"I think that the biggest thing that we may want to put out there for people is that it's not just for prom," said Gruen noting they have options for galas, charity balls and other formal functions held throughout the year.
The company is not even a year old, having started in October of 2015, but it is growing rapidly. In the near future, promagain.com plans to offer menswear and accessories for sale.
"We are pretty excited about how things are working out," said Weller.
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