Dress to Remember
CRANBERRY TWP — Prom is a rite of passage, a really expensive rite of passage, for many high school girls.
That's why Cranberry Community United Presbyterian Church. 2662 Rochester Road, started selling prom dresses for $20 nine years ago.
“There's three or four things in a girl's life that she remembers, and prom is one of them,” said Kelly Stebor, one of the event organizers. “A girl will not go to prom in an ugly dress. So, we find those dresses and get them to the girls that need them.”
The 10th annual “I Found the Gown” runs from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday at the church.
“Our main goal is to help the girls who can't afford it,” Stebor said. “It is meant for those in need.”
But anyone can attend and shop the racks holding more than 2,000 prom dresses of all shapes, sizes and colors, said organizer Nancy Hodges. There are also about 75 bridal gowns, 200 cocktail dresses and 100 mother-of-the-bride dresses.
Many are brand new, donated from local dress shops that have surplus, Hodges said. The price tags of some are in the hundreds of dollars. Others are lightly used, donated by women who wore them once to an event.
The bridal gowns are sold for $50 each. There are also shoes, purses, jewelry and accessories sold for $5 or less.
All proceeds from the event benefit the church's ministries, which include the Victim Outreach Intervention Center, the Pittsburgh Project, Habitat for Humanity, Cityview Church and the Giving Tree.
People start lining up for the event early, Stebor said. Numbered tickets are given out starting at 7 a.m. The first shoppers should be at the church sanctuary by 8:30 a.m.
People are admitted by ticket number and wait in the church's sanctuary until allowed into the sales area in groups of 25 to shop, Stebor said.“We have the dresses sorted by size and by color,” Hodges said. “It's really organized.”Every available space in the church is transformed into a dressing room — about 50 in all.Volunteer seamstresses are on hand to make minor alterations for free and consult customers on more time-intensive alterations that may be needed or wanted, Hodges said. The seamstresses may take home dresses with more complex alteration needs to do the work for a fee.The event hours were extended to 4 p.m. this year to accommodate more shoppers, Hodges said.Stebor said 90 percent of the girls and women who come in to shop have not been to the sale before. Teachers tell their students about it, she said, and it is spread by word-of-mouth.The sale evolved from its start in 2009 at the height of the economic recession. The church had been staging another sale, the Closet Classic Sale, in August for several years and collected a number of formal dresses, Stebor said. Organizers realized there were girls out in the community who couldn't afford to go to their proms because of the high prices of some dresses.So they called dress shops to see what other dresses they could gather for a sale. The first year they had about 350 dresses on the sales floor and sold about 105.Last year sale organizers had more than 2,000 dresses and had more than 650 prom dress shoppers and 120 bridal dress shoppers. They had about 100 volunteers, including National Honor Society students from local schools and Girl Scouts.“We have girls crying, the moms crying, just because of how happy they are,” Stebor said. “It's awesome.”The church raised nearly $8,500 last year from the sale, Hodges said.The church keeps about 200 of the dresses that go unsold and gives the rest away to other groups that need prom dresses, Hodges said.
