Austin’s Wedding Dress Preservation Leader!
Your wedding day is undoubtedly one of the most special days of your life. If your like most brides we deal with entrusting your wedding dress to someone to clean and preserve it can be a nail-biting experience. We realize that and want you to know your dress is in good hands. We clean and preserve all dresses on-site, have one employee with twenty years experience complete the entire process and have an excellent operational structure surrounding every dress we preserve. Below is our step by step preservation process and also many other things to consider when choosing someone to preserve your dress. Please feel free to call us for all additional information.
Give Your Daughter the Option…
Having your dress cleaned after your wedding is probably the furthest thing from your mind. However what you might not realize is that even unseen stains such as sugar and alcohol can cause permanent damage to your wedding dress in very short order, making restoration the only option to keep it in it’s original state.
Not only is dress restoration a very expensive process (sometimes costing twice the original price of the dress), finding the exact fabric to patch blemishes can be impossible due to the fact that many dresses are custom made with hard to find fabric.
Juana Has You Covered!
At Austin Cleaners our employees are the stars and no one shines brighter then Juana Muguria. Juana personally cleans and preserves every wedding dress we receive and not only has twenty years experience but also a commitment to excellence rarely matched in the dry cleaning industry (if ever!). She is a pre-spotting expert and because we clean so many wedding dresses she probably has more wedding dress cleaning experience than anyone else in all of Austin. We clean and preserve, on average, 4-5 wedding dresses a week. By contrast a normal cleaners won’t do that many wedding dresses in an entire year.
Our Preservation Process
1) Check-In Process
Every wedding dress first goes through a detailed check in process where we create an accurate count of how many items you have brought in so all items are accounted for (i.e. veil, shoes etc.) to ensure that all your items stay together and are placed in the preservation box at the appropriate time. Next all fragile bead work and appliques are covered to ensure no button damage or lost rhinestones during the dry cleaning process. Finally, a ticket is created to assess all rips and tears on your dress.
Bringing your dress to a cleaners that does not have concrete policies and procedures regarding checking in your wedding dress can cause a nightmare for a bride that looses her veil or other part of her dress. Save yourself the headache and trust your dress with Austin’s preservation leader!
2) Thorough Stain Removal
The heavy lifting (pun intended) regarding stain removal is done before your dress is ever dry cleaned. While simply dry cleaning a garment will lift some stains, 80% of most stains are lifted during the pre-stain or ‘pre-spotting’, as it’s called in the industry, phase of cleaning, before the dress is ever dry cleaned. While only dry cleaning will remove some stains, a thorough pre-spotting of your dress ensures the maximum amount of stains are removed during the cleaning process.
Most cleaners have a ‘one stain solution fits all’ approach to stain removal however because there is a number of different solutions they have to attempt lifting the stain numerous times, hurting the the fabric at every attempt. The ability to identify the origin of a stain and also which spotting solution will work best is where the rubber meets the road where pre-spotting is concerned.
The best spotting pros limit the amount of attempts a stain has to be scrubbed at. While the most common stains we deal with is dirt on the hem from the bride walking on the train rest assured that from coke to cake Juana has you covered!
3) Dry Cleaning
Once your dress is pre-spotted it is then dry cleaned to complete the cleaning process. Our eco and health friendly method of dry cleaning ensures your wedding dress gets a deep thorough cleaning all while being as gentle as possible on the fabric and bead work. Every wedding dress is dry cleaned by itself to ensure no bleeding from other garments will occur.
4) Pressing
After the dry cleaning process Juana then presses your dress to perfection. The press of your dress below the bust line is not on display once placed in the preservation box, however a lot can still go wrong during the pressing process with an inexperienced worker.
The main issue that can occur is damage to your dress caused by the excessive heat from a wrongly wielded steam iron. While the steam on your home iron will maybe heat up to 200 degrees, in a commercial dry cleaning plant the steam reaches temperatures in excess of 400 degrees.
Many wedding dresses require different pressing cloths to be placed between the iron and wedding dress to avoid direct contact with the steam extruded from the iron. Juana is not only a pro at knowing which dresses require a pressing cloth but also how to use them.
5) Preservation
Our wedding dress preservation boxes are specially manufactured and come with a great viewing window that allows you to see your dress whenever desired. We buy our preservation boxes from a specialty manufacturer and are far superior to most other preservation boxes in size, style and over all appearance. In addition, the price of the preservation is all inclusive so you can place any additional items inside the preservation box for free (i.e. veil, shoes etc.).
Our boxes have a top that has a Velcro enclosure so you can have additional protection for your dress. Adding additional items inside your preservation box adds to the over all presentation so don’t forget your veil!
No Third Party Involvement
Most bridal boutiques offer some sort of preservation package to brides that buy their dresses from that boutique. No bridal boutiques (that we have ever encountered) clean or preserve your dress themselves so that means they are shipping your wedding dress to a third party company that is not under the same company umbrella as the bridal boutique.
As many customers can attest, there are numerous problems that can occur when leaving your wedding dress and/or clothes with a drop store that IS under the same company as the plant that does the cleaning, much less a third party company that has loose operational ties to the boutique. In addition, our price to preserve a wedding dress is less expensive then most bridal boutiques that offer preservation services because after shipping costs and the cut that the boutique takes the price can get really expensive.
All Inclusive Pricing
Many dry cleaners charge extra for your veil and all additional items that you wish to preserve with your wedding dress. Not only is our price all inclusive it is already lower then many of our competitors BEFORE they start charging you an arm and a leg to also preserve your veil. Say no to up charges!
Bead Work Protection
Many fragile bead work patterns and appliques require extra protection to ensure there is no damage done during the dry cleaning process. An inexperienced worker can cause havoc on fragile buttons if they don’t understand the need or how to protect your bead work. In addition many dry cleaners don’t maintain their machines properly and can cause graying of whites and clouding of your bead work, however not at Austin Cleaners!
Additional Wedding Dress Services
Wedding Dress Dry Cleaning
While 80% of the wedding dresses we clean are preserved, the other 20% are from brides that have bought a wedding dress that is a floor model, the bride has taken her pictures before the wedding and it got dirty or it is after the wedding and she is going to sell the dress. Sometimes brides also wish to donate their wedding dress (click here for information on donating your wedding dress). The only difference between preserving and cleaning your wedding dress is the additional step of putting the dress in the box. The dress gets cleaned the same way and the intentions the bride has for the dress will determine whether to just dry clean or preserve. So whether you only want to freshen up an older dress or pass your wedding dress to another lucky bride Austin Cleaners has you covered.
Wedding Dress Pressing
Many times brides have their dresses shipped from out of town and they arrived wrinkled from being in a box. If your dress only needs to be pressed and not cleaned we also offer that service as well
Bridesmaid Dress Dry Cleaning & Pressing
Because we do all cleaning on-site we can do last minute pressing on bridesmaid dresses as well. Most couples have relatives that live outside of Austin and we often get requests to press bridesmaid dresses that have been folded in an airline compartment or suitcase. If your bridesmaid dresses need pressing or cleaning call the experts at Austin Cleaners.
Call to Speak with the Owner Directly @
(512) 219-6959
Or fill out the form below to email (Most responses are within an hour)
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I used Austin Cleaners to preserve my wedding dress and was ecstatic to see the results, as they were beyond my expectations. My reception was outdoors and took place in June 2007, where my dress was dragged through dirt and left with some scary looking stains around the hem. Despite that fact, I waited until around early 2009 to clean and preserve my dress! Needless to say, those stains had time to set.
The Austin Cleaners cleaning and preservation process left my dress flawless, and the final presentation in its box through the window pane was stunning!
I would recommend Austin Cleaners to any bride looking for an exceptional wedding dress preservation service!
After six years, my wedding dress was still in a garment bag taking up way too much of my valuable closet space. I searched online for wedding dress preservation services and found that many of them required me to ship my dress to them and it would take months to get it back. (Yikes!)
I took it to Austin Cleaners and they gave it a thorough cleaning and placed it in the preservation box along with my tiara, shoes, garter and veil. It looks beautiful! And I got it back much earlier than expected. I have more closet space and and I have peace of mind that my dress is not going to be an awful shade of brownish yellow in 10 years.
I would highly the wedding dress preservation service to any bride who wants to keep her dress beautiful for years to come.
Getting my wedding dress cleaned was the easiest process of the entire wedding. They did a great job at a reasonable price. I was very impressed especially considering how lacy my dress is. Thanks Adam to you and your team.
Austin Cleaners did a great job cleaning and preserving my wedding dress! They were very helpful and had my dress back to be in just few weeks, quicker then they quoted me. It was a wonderful surprise. I would highly recommend taking wedding dresses to Austin Cleaners.