Up to 200 brides are believed to have been left without dresses following the sudden closure of Wedding World in Marino, Dublin.
The shop, which sells bridesmaid dresses closed last weekend and directed customers to contact its sole supplier Dessy.
Michelle O'Neill from the Dessy group, told RTE's Liveline on Tuesday "we knew that we might be responsible for all of them [orders] on Thursday afternoon when they informed us they were going to cease trading over the weekend".
“Before that we had no idea this was going to happen,” she said.
“Dessy are owed a lot of money going back over the last year.”
Ms O’Neill said there may be up to 200 customers who ordered dresses and paid a deposit, but these orders were never placed with Dessy or paid for by Wedding World.
“We think we know of around 130 girls in our system, we were told by Wedding World that there may be up to 200 girls. That means there are women who have placed orders who Wedding World never ordered the dresses from us.
“We don’t really know the size of it, we only know what we have got as orders. There could be more of them, we don’t know.”
Refund
Dessy has advised customers who paid for dresses or placed deposits to get in touch with their bank or insurers.
She also said anyone who has yet to receive their dress to get in touch via Facebook, though the customer will likely have to pay for a second time.
“Girls are happy to pay us because otherwise they’d have to start their order again somewhere else or go and buy something from another kind of store,” she said.
Caller Carmel Mulcahy said she and her sister visited the shop recently looking for a refund as her niece had paid for two dresses that didn’t fit and Wedding World refused to change them.
Ms Mulcahy said they refused to give a refund and were asked to leave the shop. The gardaí were later called who said on arrival it was a “civil matter”.
A former employee, Sheila, also contacted the show and said “generally it was a very uncomfortable place to work”. She said staff members were placed in “difficult situations” and told to withhold information from customers.
