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Hi Lovely Bride Community,

We want you to know that Lovely Bride stands firmly against the racial injustice we are seeing in our country. We are a company of individuals who stand as allies to the Black Lives Matter movement and behind all BIPOC. In solidarity with the Black community, we are committed to speaking up, driving for change, and most importantly taking anti-racism actions for a better future in the bridal industry.

We will never pretend to know all of the right answers, but we can guarantee that we have and will continue to be committed to learning and improving as a collective to promote a Diverse and Inclusive environment for Our Lovelies and our staff. For some time now, we have been working behind the scenes to create change in the bridal industry, but we haven’t always been transparent with you about our efforts. Today, we want to let you know the ways our company is committed to promoting anti-racism in our staff and bride community, including past, present and future efforts. This is a long-term commitment to listening, learning and doing the work to bring change.

Lovely believes in equality for all, regardless of race, color, religion (creed), gender, gender expression, age, national origin (ancestry), disability, marital status, or sexual orientation. We strive to not only believe this, but represent this in our brand, through our staff, on social media and in our brand voice. We recognize the inherent differences in us all, and work to celebrate those differences with listening and respecting other points of view.

We’d like you to know some of the work we have done up to now. Last year, we appointed a Diversity and Inclusion Advocate to our company. Danielle Anane has been with Lovely Bride since we opened our DC shop in 2013, and she has been a passionate leader on size inclusion and race representation in our brand. With her guidance we’ve come up with an actionable plan of ways we can promote a Diverse and Inclusive environment for our staff, our designers, and our brides.

 

While we have just scratched the surface of the work we want to do, Lovely has pushed ourselves and our industry to do better by:

  1.  OPEN DIALOGUE
    Committing to an open dialogue from our staff, designers and brides. We’ve created realness@lovelybride.com as a direct line for our community to speak to Danielle about ideas for changes in our company and the wedding industry.
  2. REPRESENTATION ON OUR SOCIAL + WEBSITE
    While we know we still need to do better, we have focused on including more diversity on our Instagram account and our website. We have a social responsibility to use our platform to represent all of our brides and will continue to use our IG as a megaphone for others whose voices need to be heard.
  3. DIVERSITY IN OUR CONTENT
    We are committed to seeking out images from our Black brides and producing more content of our own with diverse models. In the future, we are also committed to hire BIPOC partners to create work with us behind the lens, as well as in front of it.
  4. THE NEW NUDE
    We have also been working behind the scenes to define the ‘new nude’ in bridal fabric. Nude colors are very common in bridal, and we have been frustrated with the one-color-fits-all mentality. In our Louvienne brand alone, we have over 4 different nude colors to accommodate brides of varying skin tones.

 

Are we proud of the work we have done? YES.

Have we done enough? NO.

Do we have much more work to do? YES.

 

We have a lot more work to do, including more listening, thinking, and then reacting. During the past week, we have brainstormed some new ideas that we are committed to doing in the future. The work doesn’t stop at the below actions, please know this will forever be an ongoing conversation of ways we can internally and externally be an inclusive and safe space for Our Lovelies.

  1. REPRESENTATION IN OUR PARTNERS’ WORK
    As a boutique brand, we carry designers from around the globe. We realize that those designers also need to do better representing diversity in their work. We have gotten a commitment from ALL of our designers do to better, with many of the designers asking for personal consultations and advice from Danielle. It will be important to us to continue the dialogue and hold our partners accountable for the diversity we pledge to represent. Their brands are a reflection of our values too if we chose to carry them in our stores.
  2. SUPPORTING A DIVERSE WORKFORCE
    32% of our workforce at Lovely Bride are WOC. However, we need to create more management opportunities for Black professionals and are committed to seeking out a more diverse management team. To support our current staff, we are committed to offering diversity training to our staff to ensure we are fostering an environment of inclusion at work. We will always keep our doors open at all levels to make sure all of our staff can be heard and valued, with specific sensitivity to BIPOC. As a collective, we got this same commitment from all of our franchised stores.
  3. FOSTERING THE BLACK COMMUNITY IN BRIDAL
    We are committed to working with more Black designers at Lovely Bride. We welcome any suggestions on Black talent that we can add to our portfolio. In the meantime, we will be working on a mentorship program where we can invite more young Black professionals to shadow our owners, Marketing team and Product team to learn about the opportunities in bridal and make more of those opportunities available to BIPOC.

 

Lastly, we want you all to know that we value you, we see you, we’ll listen to you and we WILL react. We want to hear from you! If you have any suggestions or just want to talk, don’t hesitate to reach out to realness@lovelybride.com.

All our best,

Lanie List, Danielle Anane and the entire Lovely Bride team