Every entrepreneur has a story of a decision that changed their trajectory. For Luxe Redux Bridal founder Lindsay Fork, that moment came in 1999, when she had just finished an internship with The Cincinnati Horticultural Society. Now, she owns a bridal boutique, a bridal resale chain and an outlet store. Here’s what happened in between — and what’s on the horizon for her stores.

Fork was proud of what she had achieved at The Cincinnati Horticultural Society during her sophomore year at Xavier University, helping plan one of the largest flower shows in North America. When CHS asked her to stay on through the summer, she accepted. That same day, however, her roommate showed her a job listing for a bridal stylist role at one of the largest bridal stores in Cincinnati. Her roommate said: “This is everything you’ve ever wanted to do. You’d be so good at it.” Fork recalled: “I knew she was right.” She applied, got the job and began her journey in bridal fashion.

Fork’s love for the industry had started early. “When I was a little kid, Mom would take me to the library, and instead of going to the little children’s book area, I’d go over to where the magazines were and flip through the pages of dresses, tagging the ones I loved,” she said. She also knew about retail thanks to her parents, who owned a motorsports dealership. “My sisters and I were at the store with my mom and dad for some pretty late nights,” she said. “We’d have sleeping bags on the floor of my dad’s office. There was a Coca-Cola machine there, and we would count and roll quarters. That was our vacation money.”

Becoming a Small Business Owner

After graduating with degrees in business and entrepreneurship, Fork worked a few sales and marketing jobs, but she felt pulled back to the idea of owning a bridal dress shop. She had heard that franchise Bella Bridesmaids was interested in the Columbus market. But her father said: “Why would you go into a franchise situation and pay royalties to someone else when this is something you’re passionate about and you’ve proven that you can do it?” She started looking elsewhere. For her sister’s recent wedding, Fork and the other bridesmaids had bought their dresses at La Jeune Mariee, an 800-square-foot store in suburban Columbus. “I felt comfortable reaching out to the owners to just say: ‘Are you interested in selling?’” she recalled. “In my dad’s world,” Forks added with a laugh, “everything’s for sale for the right price.”

It so happened that one of the owners had a parent who was ailing, and the owners were looking to get out. “It was just kind of kismet that we approached them,” Fork said. In 2008, she purchased the shop. La Jeune Mariee was a special-order, designer boutique. Each bride tried on samples, and when she chose one, employees ordered the gown in her size and color preference. As new styles arrived every season, Fork found herself overwhelmed by sample inventory. Despite holding flash sales and organizing a massive sample sale with other local bridal boutiques, the glut persisted.

Becoming an Entrepreneur

So Fork conceived of a new store that sold sample dresses year-round at much lower prices. “I knew there was a demographic for off-the-rack gowns,” she said. “La Jeune Mariee didn’t have as wide of a price range as we do today. It was really focused on the $3,000 to $5,000 price point.” Not everyone could afford those prices. In 2011, she opened the first Luxe Redux Bridal, in the same building as La Jeune Mariee. The network she’d built in the bridal industry proved invaluable for inventory. “My friends were seeing what I was doing with Luxe, and they were like: ‘I have a bunch of extra stock and inventory, too. Can I send you my dresses?’”

Fork decided the best solution to the surplus was to open more stores. “I was facing the same challenge as at La Jeune Mariee: too much inventory,” she said. “But I believed in the concept.” The key to expansion, she knew, was finding the right markets and opportunities. That meant looking at neighborhood centers. “We started out small, focusing on mom-and-pop and boutique landlords,” she said. “Triple net leases scared the crap out of me in the early days.”

She stayed in familiar territory at first, opening a store in Cincinnati, where she’d first worked in a bridal shop. Then she opened in Indianapolis. It was a turnkey backfill of a bridal store “that decided to go out of business.”

Becoming a Lifestyle Property Tenant

Fork’s biggest leap came in 2019, when the fifth Luxe Redux store opened, at Pinecrest, an upscale lifestyle center in the Cleveland suburbs. It came onto her radar via a leasing agent who previously had lived in Columbus, was familiar with Luxe Redux’s success and was actively sourcing Columbus retailers for Pinecrest. Fork said the property wanted to balance national brands like REI and Nike with smaller that could offer something unique to the mix. She wasn’t sure what to expect from a presence in this kind of next-level property, but the company soon was overrun with appointment requests and sales.

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After that, “I knew we could go into a luxury lifestyle [center] and kill it,” she said. Openings in other high-profile properties followed. Luxe Redux Bridal opened in Houston’s Sunrise Lake Village in July 2023, in the new Woodward West apartment building in midtown Detroit in September 2023 and the new Hyve Nashville residential building in July 2024.

Becoming an Outlet Retailer

Meanwhile, space became an issue again. “We had a waitlist with our consignors. We had gowns we couldn’t bring in because there was nowhere to put them in our eight stores and our distribution center.” The team found themselves getting rid of dresses that “truthfully were still in amazing condition and still had value to them,” she said. It killed her. “I had been telling my team for probably two years that we needed to have an outlet. Everybody would just stare at me like deer in headlights because I think they were thinking: ‘OK Lindsay, who’s going to manage this store and who’s going to run it and how are we going to build it?” But Fork pushed forward once again. Her first outlet store, Ohio Bridal Outlet, opened in July in Jeffersonville, Ohio. “It’s doing fantastic,” Fork said. “We’ll probably have more outlets in the future.”

In 26 years, Fork has gone from a summer job in a bridal shop to owner of a bridal shop and has expanded that business into bridal resale, an outlet store and more, all under the umbrella of Luxe Brands. Her plans, however, are far from over. Within five years, she hopes to surpass more than 40 stores. The company now employs someone solely to manage store openings. “They work with myself, my husband, our COO and our outside real estate team to really make sure that we’re super organized with our whole flow and how we look at new cities.”