Who needs Alexander McQueen? Cut-price designer wedding dresses at Oxfam

With the cost of weddings at such sky-high prices, savvy brides-to-be are searching out ways to cut the cost of weddings, but not the quality.

They’re turning to places like Oxfam for help. The charity’s bridal department in Poole offers over 250 ex-catwalk and showroom gowns at a fraction of their original designer price tag. So gone are the days where women have to beg the bank for a loan just to feel amazing on their big day.

The donated dresses are sample gowns; they have been tried on but never worn down the aisle. There are now 11 Oxfam stores which have a bridal shop department, and over the past four years, the bridal outlet in Poole alone has raised £157,000 for the charity.

It all started in the eighties with volunteer Barbara Walmsley, 74, who set up a wedding unit in her own spare room. She is now the bridal department co-ordinator for Oxfam.

“People have great misconceptions about our dresses; this is not tatty old nylon stuff, the majority of the stock is from bridal shops. We did get a £4,500 dress from Harrods which we sold for just £800.”

The enterprise started after Barbara couldn’t believe the cost of wedding gowns when one of her daughters got married.

Barbara laughingly said: “Recycling is the name of the game, it’s simply superior recycling, I am chief beggar for Oxfam, the letters go out to bridal shops in my name and we aim to sell dresses at a quarter to a third of the price.”

Barbara has been a volunteer with Oxfam since the age of 16 and even when she was a teacher by day, people would still visit her in the evening to try and find their special dress.

Although most designers prefer to remain anonymous with their donations, Oxfam have had gowns given from the gorgeous Sophia Tolli collection and the infamous designs of Jimmy Choo have also graced their shelves.

Yvonne Meston, Manager of Oxfam, Poole told BHbeat: “We want the bride to feel like this is the beginning of her special experience. We try and make the room look like a bridal room, with the same ambiance and sense of luxury rather than just putting the dresses on the shop floor.”

Married in 2008, Lisa Sullivan, from Christchurch, bought her wedding dress from Oxfam for only £250, and she couldn’t be happier with her purchase.

“My mum said she would buy my dress and I couldn’t justify spending a huge amount of her money on it so we tried the charity shop. I love my dress, especially the pattern. It’s got diamante surfing flowers on it, so not traditional, but lovely, and well worth the money!

Using a VPN to UK for More Than Just Watching ... - Anonymous Surfing

Most of the people who use security software or the many VPN to UK products available do so to things like watch BBC Iplayer overseas . For them the security side of these products is pretty immaterial, however this is in my opinion a mistake. You might expect your user accounts, login details and passwords to be quite secure especially if you have that nice secure padlock in your browser. However you couldn't be more mistaken! First of all I want to show you how many places have the possibility of intercepting your data when you login in to Paypal. It's the very nature of the way the internet work that all your data flies across a huge array of shared hardware that makes up the infrastructure of the internet. If you want to see the route your request will travel to a particular website you can use the tracert command in Windows. Just select the command prompt and type the following Here's the route my requests will take starting off from my router, next to my ISP then along a series of routers and switches until it reaches the Paypal web servers.  Any of these points has complete access to all my data and it will probably be logged at most of these points along the way.  Of course you can add to this list anybody who is deliberately intercepting your traffic from any of these locations too. Now normal web requests are serviced using HTTP which is a basic clear text protocol, it's fast and efficient but anyone who has access to this data can view all of it.   This complete lack of security is why SSL was invented to add a layer of encryption to web requests for important transactions like logging in to a web based payment system like Paypal or logging in to your bank account and stuff like that. Next I want to introduce you to a little program called a SSL sniffer made by a company called Komodia.  You can download it for free at this address - Komodia Sniffer .  This program not only can sit and sniff all the data sent and received by any process (in this case it will be Firefox) but it also can decrypt the data as well.  It takes about a minute to set it up and requires no real technical skill. Now you'll have to try this for yourself or take my word for it, but listed in the data is my Paypal login name and the password. I've obviously blanked this out but I can assure you it was completely decrypted and readable.

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