Wedding stress led to new career
By: Jessica Selby 
Kent County Daily Times Staff
Kentcountytimes.com
11/11/2005

TIOGUE - Planning a wedding can do strange things to people, like overwhelm them with tasks, make them forgetful and, in the harshest cases, cause a sense of insanity.

For Coventry resident Annmarie Therriault the idea of planning weddings did just the opposite - it sparked a career change. For most of her adult working life Therriault was employed as a hotel manager. She said she enjoyed what she did, working with people especially, but when she got pregnant with her first child, her full time position as a live-on-site manager at a high end hotel had to end. She made the decision to go and work for her father, who at the time owned a wholesale seafood company. Therriault took on the retail end of things for her father and said she enjoyed that job, too, for a bit until suddenly that position ended just as abruptly as the first. The lease her dad's company had with a store they were selling their seafood out of ended and was not renewed, leaving Therriault without a job again.

With her son, Matthew, approaching six months and an upcoming wedding to plan, Therriault said she wasn't exactly sure what she was going to do.

"At the time all of this was happening in my life I was planning my wedding and what made it even worse is that I kept on finding it very difficult to find the items that I was looking for," Therriault said.

"I am allergic to flowers so I knew I had to find an alternative to a flower bouquet, but I couldn't." Therriault did eventually find an alternative - a crystal bouquet creation handcrafted by a woman in Australia.

Therriault said she learned far along in her wedding planning that much of what she was looking for she had to find online. "I know it's obvious that the virtual world is so big, but you still wouldn't, or at least I didn't, think that the stuff you find out there you can't find anywhere around here," Therriault said.

Therriault admitted to doing fairly well with the Web site alone (to date the site has received hits from 106,000 visitors, many of whom have made purchases, including brides from the United States, Italy, Canada and Australia). But she said she felt as though she was not able to deliver the level of service to brides that she wished she had had while she was in their shoes just months before. "For a time I enjoyed just selling my items on the Web site because I was able to stay at home with my son and still pay the rent; but, I didn't like that I wasn't able to deal with the brides one-on-one," Therriault said.

"It got to a point where I was ordering items and then having brides come to my home to see them and that was when I started to realize that I really wanted to be able to create a place that brides could go to do one-stop shopping for everything that they would need so they would be able to relax and not have to go crazy looking for what they wanted." Hence the opening of Therriault's new store, Couture Bridal Co., located in Dominic's plaza at 577 Tiogue Avenue. The retail shop is a direct spinoff of the virtual boutique Therriault said she loved so much. The only difference is that the new shop has more to choose from and offers an actual location so that brides can go and see all of the items firsthand.

Items range from special sign-in books to traditional unity candles and some unusual cake toppers. Therriault carries bride's maids' gifts, invitations, veils, jewelry, bridal shoes, cake cutters, hair pins and even has a travel desk in house and is a licensed travel agent prepared with everything a bride would need to plan her honeymoon. Therriault's shop will officially open next week beginning on Wednesday. Her hours will be 5:30 to 9 p.m. Wednesday through Friday and Saturday and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

"My hours will change as needed, but I wanted to start out being here for brides after they get out of work," Therriault said, "when I thought it would be most convenient."