Now Elizabeth Graham is creating custom-made wedding dresses from a Victorian villa in suburban Dunedin, unsure what the post-Covid-19 wedding landscape is going to look like.
Two years ago, after travelling around the world, Ms Graham returned to Dunedin and opened Miss George Luxury Emporium in George St.
Prior to lockdown, she downsized to a home-based studio to cut overheads. The wedding industry had changed during lockdown and the future was very much unknown; she believed it would change how people planned their weddings.
She suspected there would be smaller venues and guest lists and possibly more casual occasions, potentially affecting her business — and how she worked — so it was about adapting to that future.
She was still holding some dresses, which had been completed and paid for, for brides who had to cancel their weddings planned for the lockdown period — and who did not yet know what their revised plans were.
Ms Graham had a bride travelling from Wellington for a fitting today but she also wondered whether clients would be prepared to travel, given the current climate.
She has worked in the industry for about 30 years — including doing personal fittings with Britain’s Got Talent judge Amanda Holden in Holden’s home in Richmond, London — before returning to the city where she studied at art school.
"Somehow Dunedin gets under your skin".
She loved the "million-dollar view" when she walked to her mailbox, the architecture, "incredible blue skies" in the middle of winter and even the weather. Everything she needed was in the city.
Now working from home, with dresses lined up down her hallway, it was much more private for clients. But, without a retail space and shop window, it would be "hard to attract a client from Auckland".
If she felt more confident about the future, then she would go back into a retail space, but she would not need as big a store and she probably would not return to the CBD — "because the CBD is looking dead".
Too many stores were closing down and she believed there was much more of a "buzz" in the suburbs, like Roslyn-Highgate and Mornington, and the likes of Vogel St.
Asked what she believed needed to happen in the CBD, Ms Graham said public transport needed to be more convenient. She did not drive — she had never needed to — and she had always found public transport more efficient than being in a car, while parking was also too expensive.
In Dunedin, public transport was not more convenient or cheaper and parking had become more difficult, she said.
She suggested a tram, running the length of Princes and George Sts, that people could jump on and off, which would work for families, tourists and the elderly.
It was about "just making it easier for people"; public transport had to work to people’s timetables to make it easier for them to consider taking a bus to work. You had to look at how people lived here and work around that.
Lockdown had also made people feel more confident about home-based businesses and she believed a lot of people would continue to work from home.
For Ms Graham, it was about looking at how to adapt; she could not be in a retail space at the moment, and she did not know what the wedding industry was going to look like in the future. Maybe dresses would be off-the-rack and there would be no longer a need for made-to-measure, but she would be sad to see that go, she said.
