When we first opened for business, it was as a brick and mortar storefront selling flower girl dresses, fancy dresses, handsome suits for boys, toys, gifts, and even books.  This was nearly 10 years ago.  After our first year of successful business, our founder decided an online catalog could be a great asset for our small town store.  An online presence would allow us to preview more styles of dresses for girls and suits for boys through visibility to a large, more diverse audience.  So, www.shopbriarpatch.com was born. 

Being an online business offering special occasion girls dresses and boys suits creates a challenge in terms of shipping, return shipping, exchanges, and even inspection and restoration of returned items.  There is a very real and costly expense of maintaining well trained and detail oriented associates to handle all these processes.  After operating an online catalog several months, we found that our rates of exchange and return were small in relation to overall internet sales.  By crunching numbers and visiting other quality online merchants of special occasion clothing for children, we discovered an option for a "restock fee" on returns.

This appealed to us as one of our major objectives is to provide girls dresses and boys suits of wonderful quality at wonderfully affordable prices.  By removing the cost of returns from our pricing calculations, we are able to offer flower girl dresses, party dresses, boys suits and boys tuxedos at very fair prices.  Since our rate of return is so low, most of our clients benefit from the restock fee policy.  We were also careful to set the restock fee at a very reasonable amount, 10%, so that it was still a better option to spending time and money through a physical hunt for the perfect flower girl dress or boys suit.  A 10% restock fee was agreed upon by our managing group as this percentage is less than restock fees we observed at other special occasion retailers.  Through surveys and interviews, we found the 10% restock fee was in no way a deterrent to doing business at The Briar Patch given our wonderful selection and reasonable prices.

The 10% restock fee assessed to returned girls dresses, boys suits, and other merchandise purchased through our online catalog  helps to offset the cost of employee time required to inspect, steam, primp, and make pretty items returned to us after initial purchase. Just one fairly fluffy dress will take 20 minutes of focused associate time to inspect, steam, and return the girls dress to immediate stock.  A second function of the restock fee, and an important one, is to deter misuse of our girls dresses and boys suits by those who will plot to order, actually wear, and then return our merchandise back to The Briar Patch.  It is an ugly scheme, but sadly, one we have witnessed several times.  How inexpensive our world would be were everyone simply honest!

So, at The Briar Patch, the restock fee has very real and customer oriented origins.  It is in no way a part of policy to unfairly retain a customer's money in the event of a return.  We implement a restock fee as an ultimately better value for the majority of our customers.

Thank you for reading!