Weddingbee Blog

Dear Bridesmaids,

I love that you are all such dedicated readers of my blog, but for this one, you have to scram. Unless you want to know what your thank-you gift is in advance, and that’s no fun. So, bye!

xoxo,

Octo

Initially, I was thinking I’d like to give my bridesmaids a spa day once we all got together in Pittsburgh as their thank-you present for being in our wedding. That plan was a bust, though. The packages I could afford had pretty scanty offerings, or they couldn’t accommodate us all at once, or they’d take six hours to complete, and overall, it just wasn’t gonna work.

So, today, I headed down to the outlets in Wrentham, MA (about an hour south of Boston) to see if anything caught my eye as a nice gift for the girls. (And, yes, I know this weekend is a tax holiday in Massachusetts—but I conducted an informal cost-benefit analysis and determined that the 6% I would save wasn’t worth the sanity I would give up by trying to do some leisurely shopping in an outlet mall during a tax holiday in back-to-school-shopping season on a Saturday.)

I prowled around in the Michael Kors, Burberry, and Kate Spade outlets, and found lots of promising (if slightly pricier than I wanted) contenders. Michael Kors had some really beautiful sunglasses ($80) and leather wallets ($80), and Kate Spade had a whole bunch of adorable wristlets and wallets as well. Most of those were in the $75 range, though, so it was just a little spendier than I was hoping for.

Ultimately, I went with what I think is probably a bridesmaids-gift classic: Coach wristlets. Beautiful, soft, classy grayish-silver leather Coach wristlets. They were $50 apiece, and they are gorgeeooousss. And I kind of wish I had bought one for myself, but that’s neither here nor there. Want to see them?

Once with the flash off…..

…and once with the flash on so you can see the pretty, slightly shimmery color.

In addition to these lovely wristlets, the Coach outlet had a great selection of wallets, makeup bags, small purses, and wristlets in other patterns. They had both leather and the classic Coach pattern in a variety of colors. I myself waffled on whether to choose the gray leather wristlets, or white cloth ones with the Coach pattern in silver (so pretty and fancy for a going-out outfit!) until it occurred to me how quickly the white ones would get dingy-looking. There were tons of options in the $40-$100 range, so if you’re an Eastern Mass girl and your bridesmaids like classy accessories, I would totally recommend a trip to the Wrentham Outlets.

Do you like them? What did you choose for your bridesmaids?