Build-a-Dress
Build-a-Dress

Research

We publish original data from our own production records — what custom dresses actually cost to make, and which styles people actually ask for. Everything here is free to read and free to cite.

Publications

One publication so far.

Report · 8 August 2026

The Custom Dress Report 2026: what custom dresses cost and which styles people actually request

Median quoted prices by occasion, the most-requested silhouettes, fabrics and colours, and what the dresses are for — computed from our own production records rather than survey estimates or retail list prices.

Dataset: 5,397 designs · 383 quotedWindow: Aug 2025 – Jul 2026Licence: CC BY 4.0

How we publish

These reports exist because we could not find honest, first-party numbers on custom dressmaking anywhere — only retail list prices and estimates. So we publish ours, with the same standards applied every time:

  • Aggregates only. No individual customer, design or order is identifiable, and we never publish body measurements or size data in any form.
  • A minimum sample per figure. We do not publish any category with fewer than 20 records; small categories are combined or left out.
  • The method is published with the numbers. Every report states its dataset window, what each figure counts, and what the data cannot tell you.
  • We label what a number is not. Where we publish quoted prices, we say they are quotes rather than amounts paid — precision about that distinction matters more than a rounder headline.
  • Free to reuse. Published under CC BY 4.0, with the underlying dataset downloadable as CSV, so anyone can check our arithmetic or build on it.
Journalists and researchers are welcome to use these figures with attribution. If you need a cut of the data we have not published, ask — we would rather publish a considered number than have an estimated one circulate.