MB Bride & Special Occasion Store History

The original store was started in 1990 as Modern Bride under a different owner. After a year, the original owner, not doing very well, sold the business to the Pedersons. The Pedersons took over the store on November 1st, 1991 (the day it was going to be closed) with three employees, about 20 wedding dresses, around 25 bridesmaids dresses, and some mother and flower girl dresses. We had 2,000 square feet out on Rt. 30E in the Oakley Park complex (which is across from Toyota.)

The entire first month sales were about what our store does in an average hour of business now. Still, the business grew rapidly after that first month. After a few years in business, we expanded for the first time to 3,000 square feet. The owner did most of the expansion construction himself.

By this time we had a better selection of gowns, though by no means extensive.Sometime in the mid nineties, Modern Bride became MB Bride as we were sued by Primedia, then the publishers of Modern Bride magazine. Since we had been contemplating a name change anyway, we felt that the time was a perfect to change our name.

And what does MB exactly stand for? We aren't quite sure ourselves. It just seemed to work. Through hard work and perseverance, our business grew rapidly, reaching the point where customers would come into our store on busy weekends, see the crowded conditions, and walk out.

We then started looking to move the entire store, hoping to double the square footage. While looking for a new and much larger location, we expanded the existing store by another 1,700 square feet. This new area was for alterations and alterations/storage area and to handle the crowds of customers coming from farther and farther away.

Even with the new space, we desperately needed to move. Finally, after many years of looking, we found our present building. Only it needed extensive renovation work, a parking lot, and a lot of thought and expertise in design. And it was about twice as large (15,600 square feet) as what we thought we really needed considering the largest store in the area was about 8-9,000 square feet.

Crossing our fingers and taking a much larger risk than we had ever imagined or wanted, we bought the property and completely renovated the building. The building previously contained a restaurant and bicycle shop on the first floor, a restaurant supply store (upstairs), and miniature golf course (where the main parking lot is now). Before that, the building was the well-known Greensburg Lumber store.

In late 2004 construction had started and about that time a large wedding chain operation went out of business. Just as our business at our original location was almost out of control, we closed for three days and moved everything into our present location just before Christmas 2004.

This proved to be just in time. The first few months were rough because of unexpected amounts of new customers. We were understaffed. Doors jammed, the security system sort of worked, the phone system was inadequate and had to be completely replaced, the computer system was totally inadequate with all the new business and all the problems of a new building kept cropping up.

Eventually we got things smoothed out, but again, another nice problem emerged. We were doing far more business than we had ever expected. So within months we had to add new gown storage space upstairs and doubled the number of computers.

In late 2006, we began construction on our Prom Store area and a massive new rack system for even more gown storage. We also added to our Alterations customer service area since we were running out of fitting room availability.

Today, our upstairs Prom Store is bigger than our original store. So is the area that houses the bridesmaids and flower girl departments. So is our bridal department. So is our storage area. We have over 1,600 bridesmaids gowns (versus 25 when we started) all quite amazing to us.

While we look back and feel blessed, we also look forward to the future. We are always looking for ways to improve our business and have a number of initiatives to keep us ahead of the competition.

Below are some images of our associates interacting with some very famous designers at the markets we have attended in the past and our annual donation to the Christian Laymen Association.