Pregnancy is an emotional, exciting and sometimes challenging time for most women. It is a time for enormous physical and emotional change. As if shopping for everyday maternity clothes for our changing bodies isn’t time consuming and expensive enough, but when you need that extra special dress for an occasion, such as a baby shower, a wedding or a maternity photo, it is additional cost, time and stress involved looking for the right dress, and most likely, you will only wear it once.
So if you are on the lookout for an outfit for your baby shower or maternity photo shoot, here are some reasons why you should rent instead of buy a maternity dress.
- Save money
This is a no brainer - renting a dress is usually only a fraction of the cost of buying a brand new dress, especially designer brands. Buying a designer maternity dress can be as expensive as $300-$400 plus alterations, whereas a rental is approximately $95.It is particularly true when you consider the very limited shelf life of maternity gowns in your wardrobe, so the cost per wear of buying a maternity dress is much higher compared to your normal dresses.
- Avoid clutter and waste
Even if you are not budget conscious, and don’t really mind spending the extra money, but you are still buying something that will probably end in your wardrobe after one wear, collecting dust. You might like the idea of owning something, but you can also save that valuable wardrobe space for your new baby’s clothes later on.
- Reduce waste
Eventually, your unwanted dresses will end up in landfill and contributing to our already huge problem of textile waste. If they are made of synthetic materials (and many of them are), it will takes years and years to break down and many of them will shed micro plastic particles along the way into our soil and water stream.
- Dress maintenance costs money
You don’t need to clean it afterwards if you hire as this is already taken care of, and this is standard practice for all rental businesses. Usually a nice maternity gown will require dry cleaning or hand wash as they are made of delicate materials, so that is a cost most of us don’t think about, but it does exist.
- Save time - no more running from store to store
Each dress of ours are carefully selected to ensure they are bump friendly and look great on photos, and are sourced from different suppliers/brands, which saves you the trouble and time to browse through hundreds of sites or physical stores yourself.