Amsale the business of bridal

The biggest decision a bride makes--after she chooses the man she will marry--is her wedding gown. In 1985, Amsale Aberra wasn't about to give up on finding the sophisticated and classy gown she had always dreamed of for her own wedding. She says she scoured all the bridal magazines and wedding boutiques, which were full of fussy, ruffled, spangled debutante dresses that were all-the-range in wedding fashions at that time.

A determined Aberra--a graduate on New York's Fashion Institute of Technology and at the time a designer assistant for Harve Benard, a mid-priced sportswear brand on New York's Seventh Avenue--finally gave up on shopping and sat down with her sketch pad. She created and stitched a simple, A-line-silhouetted gown with a high waist and see-through "illusion" sleeves in rich, silk duchess satin fabric.

Aberra got the bridegroom and the wedding gown she wanted, and she also discovered her calling--as a wedding gown designer.

Two years later, she was in her Manhattan apartment whipping up her first collection of a dozen tailored and sophisticated wedding gowns without a ruffle or a row of beading in sight. She ran her first ad in Modern Bride magazine, attracting the attention of the owner of Kleinfeld, the legendary bridal retailer in Brooklyn, which bought her entire collection--and a fashion house was born.

Today, Aberra is the head of one of the most successful couture wedding businesses in America with sales of $30 million and dozens of retail accounts, including Saks Fifth Avenue. The Amsale Design Group now encompasses three labels (two that she bought in the past few years) that cater to different sensibilities. They include Amsale, for the sophisticated "Manhattan Bride"; Christos, for the classically feminine "Newport Bride"; and Kenneth Pool, for the dramatic "Hollywood Bride."

In 2001, Aberra opened her first boutique, a luxurious salon on Madison Avenue, and her gowns now average about $5,000, but can climb to about $60,000 for the most luxurious, one-of-a-kind couture creations. "I am passionate about fashion and designing," says the 52-year-old designer. "I really didn't get into it for the glamour or the fame. I love the work. And there is so much hard work."

Together with her Harvard-educated attorney and MBA husband Neff Brown, who runs the business side of her operation (and her daughter Rachel, a talented artist who has created New Yorker-style drawings for Amsale's print advertising), Amsale gradually and painstakingly built her business.

The House of Amsale, with its 36 full-time employees, manufactures gowns in New York's garment district and also with contract factories in Bangkok. Saks Fifth Avenue is the company's biggest retail account, where all three Amsale collections have been top sellers. "There is a stable of designers at the very high-end--like Vera Wang, Reem Acra, Monique Lhuillier--and Amsale is a major player in this league," says David Teeter, the buyer for couture and bridal at Saks. "Her gowns have a classic simplicity, and she has been inventive in her evolution over the years, always adding a modern twist."

Through the years, Amsale has gotten much attention for the red-carpet gowns she has designed for a number of actresses, including Kim Basinger, Halle Berry and Salma Hayek. That connection has helped burnish her upscale image, but her modesty remains. "I don't measure myself by how much the press writes about me," she says.

In addition, Aberra, who is a native of Ethiopia, knows that her upscale clients of all races focus on fashion, not necessarily the individual who's creating it. A case in point is Judy Byrd-Blaylock, a Black attorney and business owner who was planning a lavish formal wedding, dinner and gala reception in Manhattan. She had decided on a Monique Lhuillier creation but later decided on an Amsale gown, a strapless couture gown with a dramatic fan-back train that detached for dancing at her reception. "I kept seeing a variation of [the Lhuillier] gown all over the magazines," Byrd-Blaylock says. "I changed my mind because I wanted something that was really unique."

In another area, Amsale's talent generated an unexpected bonus of a different sort when the executives at Ford Lincoln-Mercury chose her to be the new spokesperson for the 2007 edition of the MKX, Lincoln's first entry in the compact crossover SUV market. She now appears in Lincoln's general market TV commercials and magazine advertisements for the new vehicle, which they hope will help them position the MKX as an attractive yet casual luxury brand. "She embodies the American Dream that crosses cultural and racial barriers as very all-American, and we want to celebrate that," says Marc Perry, the multicultural-marketing manager for Ford Lincoln-Mercury. "This is an important product line for us to get young people to consider Lincoln. Amsale represents an agent of change."