Behind Belinda’s Desk 

The Dresses I Got Completely Wrong (And the Very Expensive Lessons They Taught Me)

By Belinda Birt

I’d love to tell you that after nearly a decade of buying dresses for Your Secret Closet, I get it right every single time.

I absolutely do not.

Sometimes I get it very, very wrong.

And sometimes those mistakes are funny.

Sometimes they leave sequin-shaped imprints on your backside.

And sometimes they cost thousands of dollars.

One of the biggest misconceptions about buying for a designer dress hire business is that if a dress is beautiful, it will be a good rental.

If only it were that simple.

A dress can look incredible in a campaign. It can be from a designer we know and love. It can be the exact colour everyone is asking for. It can look like an absolute guaranteed winner.

And then it arrives.

Or worse, it arrives, looks amazing, and only then do you discover the problem.

Over the years, I’ve bought hundreds and hundreds of dresses for Your Secret Closet, and while experience has definitely made me a better buyer, there are some lessons you can only learn the expensive way.

These are a few of mine.

The Sequin Dress That Left an Impression. Literally.

One dress I will never forget is the LEO LIN Stephanie Sequin Strapless Mini Dress.

On paper, this dress was incredible.

At the time, LEO LIN hadn’t really ventured into sequins, so it felt exciting and different. The dress featured these beautiful long, dangling sequins, and we bought it in both green and the most incredible rainbow colourway.

Visually?

Stunning.

Photographs?

Amazing.

Sitting down in it?

Absolutely not.

I wore one out myself one night, which is something I occasionally do because there is no better way to understand a dress than actually wearing it for an entire evening.

And let me tell you, it was possibly one of the most uncomfortable dresses I have ever worn.

The dress was lined, but the long sequins still managed to scratch wherever they touched the skin. Then there was the issue of actually sitting down.

The sequins at the back would bend underneath you at bizarre angles. They were so long that once they bent, they didn’t necessarily sit properly again. You’d stand up and suddenly have sequins pointing in all directions, with patches of the lining visible underneath.

And as for sitting in them?

I came home with the outlines of sequins imprinted on my backside.

Beautiful dress.

Questionable seating experience.

The problem was that none of this was obvious when we bought it. On the rack, it looked incredible. On the body, standing up, it looked incredible.

But a rental dress doesn’t just need to survive a fitting room.

It needs to survive dinner.

It needs to survive sitting in an Uber.

It needs to survive a wedding ceremony, a long lunch, a dance floor and, ideally, a trip to the bathroom without requiring an engineering degree.

That dress taught me one of the most important lessons in buying:

A dress has to be wearable, not just beautiful.

My Ongoing Battle With Black and White

Then there is black and white.

Derby Day dressing. The eternal black-and-white problem.

Every year, beautiful black-and-white dresses appear in collections, and every year I am tempted.

And after years of experience, I now approach them with extreme caution.

Because no matter what anyone tells you, black fabric and white, or cream fabric can be a complete nightmare together.

The black bleeds.

Into the white.

Into the cream.

Into anything remotely light-coloured.

And suddenly the beautiful crisp white sections of a dress start turning a strange, dirty, brownish-grey colour.

The worst part is that customers understandably look at the dress and assume it hasn’t been cleaned.

We’ve had customers look at black-and-white dresses that were only a month or two old and ask:

“Do you not wash your stock?”

And we’re standing there thinking:

We have washed it. That’s the problem.

We have tried everything.

Cold washes. Different detergents. Vinegar. Salt. Every trick someone has suggested to us.

And sometimes, no matter what you do, the black still bleeds.

There is nothing quite like spending a significant amount of money on a beautiful new collection, only to watch the white fabric slowly turn a colour I can only describe as “sad beige”.

It is particularly painful because the dress itself can be in perfect condition. Structurally, there is absolutely nothing wrong with it. But once that crisp contrast is gone, the dress no longer looks premium, and in a rental business, presentation is everything.

So now, when I see a dress combining large sections of black with white or cream, I become very suspicious.

Beautiful?

Yes.

Perfect for Derby Day?

Probably.

Will I be standing over the laundry sink in three months questioning every decision I’ve ever made?

Also probably.

When a Dress Is Actually Too Affordable

This one sounds strange.

Surely a lower-priced dress is better for a rental business?

Not necessarily.

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that the retail price of a dress has to make sense in relation to the rental price.

There have been dresses I’ve loved and thought would be perfect for our customers, but the recommended retail price was simply too low for them to work successfully as rentals.

If a customer can buy a dress brand new for only a little more than it costs to hire it, why would they rent it?

And at the same time, we can’t simply make the rental price cheaper and cheaper.

There is a point where the numbers stop working.

Running a bricks-and-mortar dress hire business comes with significant costs that people don’t necessarily see when they look at the price of a rental.

There’s the shop.

Staff.

Electricity.

Internet.

Water.

Superannuation.

Insurance.

Cleaning.

Repairs.

Packaging.

Payment fees.

And all the other little costs that seem determined to multiply when you own a business.

Then there is the cost of buying the dress itself.

For us, renting a dress for less than around $100 becomes very difficult to make financially viable. By the time the dress has been purchased, cleaned between rentals, maintained, repaired and eventually retired from the collection, there needs to be enough room in the rental price for the dress to actually earn back its investment.

So yes, believe it or not, a dress can actually be too cheap to rent.

That was definitely not something I expected to learn when I started Your Secret Closet.

And Then There’s the Sale Email...

This one may be my personal favourite.

You place your wholesale order months in advance.

You carefully select the styles.

You choose the colours.

You choose the sizes.

You commit thousands of dollars.

The collection finally arrives.

You unpack everything, photograph it, upload it to the website, prepare it for hire and proudly introduce it to your customers.

And then, approximately five minutes later, you receive an email:

SALE — 50% OFF.

Wonderful.

Even better is when the dress is suddenly being sold by the brand for less than what you paid for it wholesale.

Nothing quite prepares you for that feeling.

You’ve committed to the stock months earlier. You’ve taken the financial risk. You’ve paid the wholesale price.

And now your customer can potentially buy the dress brand new for less than you paid for it.

Mega frustrating is probably the polite way of putting it.

And yes, it has created more than one financial nightmare over the years.

Because once a dress is heavily discounted at retail, its perceived value changes immediately.

A customer who saw a $600 dress as being good value to rent for $150 may understandably feel very differently when that same dress is suddenly available to buy for $180.

You can’t control it.

But you still wear the consequences.

The Part of Buying Nobody Really Sees

I think this is the part of buying that people don’t always realise.

When you walk into Your Secret Closet and see a rack of beautiful dresses, you’re seeing the ones that made it through.

You don’t see the dresses I considered and rejected.

You don’t see the styles I desperately wanted but knew wouldn’t work.

You don’t see the orders that looked incredible on paper but arrived and didn’t quite live up to expectations.

And you definitely don’t see me sitting at my desk six months later, staring at a dress that has barely moved and thinking:

Well, Belinda. That was an expensive idea.

If you’ve ever wondered how the dresses that do make it onto our racks are chosen, I’ve shared more about how I choose every dress we stock and why so many never make the cut.

Because for every dress I get completely wrong, there are hundreds of decisions happening behind the scenes before a new style ever becomes part of the Your Secret Closet collection.

Buying is part experience, part instinct, part knowing your customer and occasionally, part crossing your fingers and hoping you haven’t just made a terrible financial decision.

The longer I’ve been doing this, the more questions I ask.

Is it comfortable?

Can you sit down in it?

Can you wear a normal bra?

Will the fabric survive repeated professional cleaning?

Will the colour transfer?

Is the fit consistent?

Is the retail price high enough to justify hiring?

Is the brand likely to discount it heavily next month?

And, perhaps most importantly:

Will our customers actually want to wear it?

Because the truth is, I can love a dress.

My staff can love a dress.

The campaign can be incredible.

The designer can tell me it’s going to be the hero piece of the collection.

And our customers can still collectively say:

“No thanks.”

And they have.

Do I Still Get It Wrong?

Absolutely.

I’d like to think I get it wrong less often than I used to.

But fashion is unpredictable.

Customers are unpredictable.

And sometimes the dress you think will be booked every single weekend barely moves, while the one you almost didn’t order becomes the dress everyone wants.

That is part of the fun of it.

It’s also part of the risk.

Every dress hanging in our store and every dress in our designer dress hire collection online represents a decision I made at some point.

Some have gone on to be hired dozens of times and become absolute Your Secret Closet icons.

Others?

Well.

Let’s just say they taught me something.

And occasionally left a very memorable pattern on my backside.

Belinda x