Your wedding decor speaks volumes about who you are. It reflects your personality, your style and will often set the tone for your event and aid in your guests overall event experience. Chair covers can add color to an otherwise dull event space, cover up a dirty or odd colored chair and even relay the overall formality of your event to your guests.
Chair covers can often seem like a waste when your budget is busting at the seams, so it's not unreasonable to consider other options that can save you money. One option that people often consider is purchasing their chair covers and attempting to resale them. If you have ever considered purchasing your linens with the hopes of reselling them after your event to "save money", you may want to reconsider and ask yourself is it really worth the time and hidden cost you will encounter. 

1. Quality-Often times people boast that they purchased their chair covers at the same price it cost to rent them. While that may often be true, the detail they often leave out is it's often a lesser quality. Online wholesalers often offer very affordable chair cover options but the chair covers themselves often times are nowhere near close to rental quality. The fabric used is often lesser quality and does not hold up to repeat washing...we have seen chair covers fall apart after one trip through the washer!

    

2. Your Time-Nothing looks more beautiful than a room full of crisp white chair covers and neatly pressed sashes but keep in mind, those chair covers and sashes didn't press themselves. When you purchase chair covers from online retailers, they come individually wrapped in packages and are folded time and time again to fit into that packaging. The result...a brand new, yet hard wrinkled chair cover and sash that you, your wedding party, friends, and family will spend hours steaming and hanging. Dress My Chairs has spent years testing different fabrics, folding and packing methods to insure our chair covers arrive wrinkle free. Can other online retailers guarantee the same?

    

3. Cleaning-All too often we hear people say "I'm purchasing my chair covers and will sell them after my event". While this sounds like a great idea and is possible, keep a few things in mind. No one wants to purchase dirty chair covers so they will all need to be cleaned prior to selling, and cleaning chair covers is not as easy as it seems. This usually involves lugging the chair covers to a laundry mat as most home washers can only wash 10-12 chair covers at a time. Plus, people spill. Time and time again we receive chair covers back that have wine, chocolate and food stains. Not to mention scuff marks on the bottom of chairs covers and while Tide and Oxyclean are wonderful they do nothing in lifting stains like these. These stains require industrial strength laundry products. Also, did you know that most stains treated with home cleaning products need to be treated within 24 hours to avoid permanent staining? That means someone will need to wash all of your chair covers within 24 hours to avoid set in stains and I'm sure you have better things to do then slave over a washing machine.

    

4. The Sale-So let's see...You have spent hours steaming/pressing your chair covers (or worse...had your friends do it!), purchased your cleaning materials, spent 2-3 hours washing and folding them only to sell them for 1/2 of what you paid for them...if you're lucky. You can't sell them for what you paid for them because after all, why would anyone pay full price for used chair covers when they can buy them brand new with free shipping from the same place you purchased yours from. So in the end you will probably only get about half of what you paid for them and that's only if:

• None of them were damaged and they are in excellent condition. If there are chair covers with stains you will receive much less.
  
• You are able to find a buyer in your area who is willing to purchase used chair covers and needs the same amount of chair covers you have. Sure you can sale them in smaller lots but that's even more of a headache.
  
• You know where to advertise your chair covers (Remember eBay and PayPal both charge fee's that cut into your profit and there are shipping costs).
  
• You can list them on craigslist but be prepaid to negotiate.