Bringing Love Back to Brides: Fallen In Love Bridal
Finally finding the perfect wedding dress can feel like a miracle, but to Sara Cook and Mary Beth Moore, owners of Fallen In Love, it’s just another day in their boutique bridal salon. The two business owners came from years of bridal shop expertise, and their experience now shines through the attentive consulting that bridal and formal dress shoppers can expect right here in High Point. At Fallen In Love, as Sara says, “You’re a bride, and you’re our bride.”
Both ladies spent years with a bigger bridal chain before opening their own boutique. Sara and Mary Beth crossed paths constantly without knowing it through a variety of connections, but their friendship love started to form one day when Mary Beth and her sister-in-law came into the bridal store where Sara worked at the time. While the shop consultants were busy serving other customers, Mary Beth stepped in to help her sister-in-law, and Sara says she saw a “spark” for consulting.
“She was doing our job for us!” Sara laughs now. Soon, Mary Beth transitioned out of being a full-time stay-at-home mom to was work alongside Sara in the bridal shop.
They both spent several years working in the same big bridal chain, but the dizzying day-to-day of the large bridal shop frenzy became overwhelming. Both Sara and Mary Beth felt the need to take a break from the industry. Any bride knows the process of finding “the dress” is often exhausting and overwhelming. And according to Mary Beth and Sara, being a consultant looking for “the dress” all day on such a large-scale can cause similar fatigue.
“You’ve got twenty clients a day,” Mary Beth says, “and you feel like your head is spinning.”
But Sara and Mary Beth didn’t let temporary burn out from their client volume keep them from pursuing what they loved. They started noticing just how far the ladies in their lives had to drive to find bridal boutiques. And even after a long drive, there was no guarantee that the perfect dress would be found. Then Mary Beth’s own father came to her with his friends' complaints.
“His granddaughter had to go to Charlotte to get a dress,” he said of his work friends, and as a life-long High Pointer.
“That’s just absurd, Mary Beth, you need to open a shop!” she recalls her father saying. And the gap he pointed out got the pair of friends thinking. Mary Beth grew up in High Point on Main Street and watched her parents run small businesses, hoping that she could do the same one day.
Sara lived in High Point for ten years, always feeling connected back to the city. For these two ambitious ladies, it was love at first sight when they realized they both had just the right skill and heart to create a business they could really cherish in the city they felt was home. When they found their space on North Main Street, they knew it was meant to be.
“We walked in here and we felt like we could do this,” Mary Beth says.
Despite all the work that goes into preparing to open a bridal shop – curating a selection of dresses, prepping fitting suites, decorating the store – Mary Beth and Sara brought the principle of weddings to the forefront of their planning: love!
That simple message of empathetic care has gone a long way in treating each woman to the bridal shopping experience they deserve.
“Whether you’re a flower girl or a mother of a bride, you get the same experience,” Sara says.
“Or whether you’re a bride with a $500 budget or a $400,000 budget,” Mary Beth adds. “You’re getting the same service here.”
That service to each and every customer includes a one-on-one private suite, a one-on-one style consultation with one of the owners, and a celebration of some popped bubbly, photos, and more when the perfect gown is found.
For instance, when one bride came in needing a $200 dress for a courthouse wedding right around the corner, Sara and Mary Beth found her a short, showstopping dress she adored and showered her with the same celebration that they would for any bride. The bride was shocked that she received that level of treatment for such a quick dress search, but the women at Fallen In Love would never offer anything less.
“Our thinking and our values are that every person who walks in that door should be loved and respected,” says Mary Beth.
Since the two women are master stylists who also know the inventory they select like the back of their hand, they can help guide uncertain brides-to-be towards gowns that will leave them feeling flattered and fabulous. Sara and Mary Beth’s experience in consulting means they see a beautiful bride before she can even see it in herself. If a bride-to-be isn’t ready to leave her insecurities at the door on the way into her appointment, she will definitely leave them behind on the way out.
“We know our designers; we know our gowns. We know when a girl walks in based on their body type which dresses and designers are going to be best for us to put them in,” Mary Beth says. From cap sleeves to A-lines, to corsets, to ballgowns – the ladies at Fallen In Love can find a dress to make any bride feel her best in her own skin.
Their attentiveness goes beyond styling, however, and their small store allows them to offer more personalized attention. Beyond finding beautiful gowns, the women know how to manage a lot of emotional dynamics, jitters, and fears – even if that just means taking a break, looking at bridesmaid dresses, having a glass of champagne, or starting fresh on a new day. Because oftentimes, what a bride needs to feel beautiful isn’t the perfect dress but personal care.
“We had a bride who was 69 years old who was doing a full wedding with bridesmaids,” Sara recounts. “And no other shop was listening to her. She told us she couldn’t even get an appointment because they weren’t taking her seriously.”
Mary Beth and Sara jumped into action to support this bride and find her a dress she loved.
“It doesn’t matter what your age is or what your situation is,” Sara says. “If you’re a bride, we should celebrate you.”
Unlike many bridal and formal shops, Fallen In Love prides itself on providing accessibility to all guests. Handicap-accessible suites, dress tailoring considerations, and plenty of space for parents to be present with their daughters are all part of making sure each client gets the same experience of feeling beautiful and celebrated.
But their expertise and celebratory nature doesn’t just stop with wedding gowns. Their selection of formalwear makes Fallen In Love the perfect spot for girls searching for homecoming and prom dresses as well.
Their small, boutique nature gives the duo the opportunity to live out the bridal consulting dreams they never could at the bigger chain stores, and they don’t plan to give up that intimate, one-on-one business model anytime soon, so High Point’s future brides can rely on this shop for all of their post-Valentines daydreams.
As Mary Beth sums it up, “We like this. If we grow and God opens doors we can plan, but we really like the ability to take clients ourselves.”
In the back of the small store is a section dedicated not to bridal gowns but to bridal portraits. These portraits aren’t of women who purchased a dress from Fallen In Love. No, these portraits are of brides who were married long before Fallen In Love opened. It's a collection of sepia-tone prints, grainy photos shot on film, family portraits snapped on cell phones, and more. The faces smiling back from these homemade portraits represent multi-generations of love stories that comprise Sara’s and Mary Beth’s lives – from their own bridal portraits to their parents and grandparents.
That’s why Sara and Mary Beth’s vision of cherishing every client is more than a mission; it’s built right into the name.
“We want every woman that walks in to feel beautiful, feel loved, and feel cared for. We want them to feel like our daughters or our moms or our grandmothers.”
Mary Beth Moore, Co-Owner of Fallen In Love
“The name Fallen in Love can sound a little cheesy, but each letter represents a woman in our life,” Mary Beth explains, pointing out the women whose stories have profoundly impacted her own. “We want every woman that walks in to feel beautiful, feel loved, and feel cared for. We want them to feel like our daughters or our moms or our grandmothers.”
Because at the heart of Fallen In Love isn’t just another wedding dress, but rather that enduring sweetness of celebrating womanhood and marriage that lasts a lifetime.
Discover our High Points,
The HPD Team
Photography by Anna Danielle Photography
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