![]() ![]() That money primarily went to the warehouse landlord, according to Redmond. ![]() An auction of dresses and other warehouse items in Deerfield Beach didn’t bring raise much - $245,000. Last summer, the trustee began the long, slow process of liquidating bridal dresses and other assets to pay creditors. During their wedding dance, he reassured her: “I’m not sure what the other dress was, but this is perfect.”Īlfred Angelo’s attorney Redmond said the bridal company had “a very strange business model with people putting such a large deposit on dresses.” The stores only carried samples dresses were ordered mostly from China and then custom-fit to the brides. It was the one people always said to go to.”Īfter Alfred Angelo closed, “I couldn’t afford to buy another expensive dress,” said Bove, who had budgeted a total of $6,000 for her wedding.īut the replacement dress didn’t matter to her husband Anthony Bove, 45. That was big for him.”īove said she shopped at Alfred Angelo “because it had been around so long. He works in maintenance for a retirement home, delivers pizzas at night, and drives a retirement home bus on the weekend, she said. He works three jobs,” Bove said of her father, Al Villegas. “It wasn’t about the dress, it was more about my Dad. The medical lab worker was heartbroken about losing the dress because her father had given her $1,000 to spend on her bridal gown as a gift. Some were able to get “charge-backs,” or cancelled credit card transactions, while others filed claims with the bankruptcy court.īeyond the money lost, the closing of Alfred Angelo took an emotional toll on the brides.īove, 34, was one of the brides who desperately stood in front of the Alfred Angelo store in Boynton Beach last July. Others who had ordered dresses never got to see them. “We simply didn’t have funds available to repay the shippers so a lot of inventory was lost to liens or abandoned,” Marks and Smith said. Others were aboard a ship in California but shippers wouldn’t release them until they were paid. Some were stored in China and couldn’t be shipped to the U.S. Some dresses were locked up by landlords when stores were abandoned overnight. Some were lucky, as Redmond, the trustee and store personnel worked to connect brides who had upcoming weddings with their dresses being altered in the stores.īut Smith, the trustee, said much of the inventory was lost. When Alfred Angelo suddenly closed its stores, brides scrambled to try and secure their ordered wedding dresses. She is handling the case with her lawyer, Brett Marks, of the Akerman law firm in Fort Lauderdale. Bankruptcy Court in West Palm Beach resulted in claims from creditors that are “north of $20 million,” according to West Palm Beach trustee Margaret Smith. The Chapter 7 liquidation case filed in U.S. The Delray Beach-based company was one of the nation’s largest wedding dress retailers, and its closure left thousands of disappointed brides, shuttered retail stores across the country, and left 300 to 400 employees without jobs. Now, one year after Alfred Angelo collapsed, its bankruptcy case drags on. Bove moved on, selecting another dress at David’s Bridal, where she and other out-of-luck Alfred Angelo brides were offered dresses at 40 percent discounts. Well before her wedding, the national chain of bridal salons closed last July and filed for bankruptcy. Carolina Bove, who was married in March, is still out the $800 deposit for an off-white strapless wedding gown she ordered from Alfred Angelo, and never got to wear.
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