Amanda Timm was scrolling through Facebook one night in December when she saw a post about a woman who had opened her wedding-dress keepsake box and discovered another woman’s dress inside.
Timm, who got married in 2013, said she remembers thinking that she, too, should check her “Bridal Keepsake” box. “I put it off for a couple of days and then, this is so random, my 5-year-old daughter said, ‘Mama, I really want to see your wedding dress,’” Timm said. “So I opened it, and it was like I lost all feeling in my body. I just kept saying, ‘This is not my dress.’ It was just so crazy.”
The differences were striking: the dress in the box was an ivory Oleg Cassini satin gown that had been purchased at David’s Bridal; Timm’s white strapless mermaid wedding dress was custom-designed and had a removable lace top with three-quarter-length sleeves.
“OMG. I’m devastated,” Timm, 39, wrote in a Facebook post on Dec. 31 that included photos of both dresses. “I have the wrong dress. I’ve had someone else’s dress boxed up and preserved for almost eight years! I’m going to cry. I would love to find my dress, but also the owner of this dress.”
Timm, who lives in Clear Lake, Minn., immediately reached out to Woodbury Cleaners on City Centre Drive, where she had taken her dress to be preserved after her Feb. 23, 2013, wedding in St. Paul.
The business had undergone two changes in ownership since 2013, but current owner Polly Nemec called her back right away.
“I can’t even tell you how much that meant to me,” Timm said. “I am so thankful for Polly. She was so nice and kind.”
The invoice taped to the box had Timm’s name and contact information on it, but the invoice number listed on the tag attached to the dress didn’t match. Nemec told Timm that she wasn’t optimistic about the chances of finding her dress.
Nemec had Timm send her pictures of the invoice and the tag on the dress and told her she would do what she could.
When Nemec saw the invoice and the tag, she realized they were from the same software company Woodbury Cleaners uses today. “We don’t have any of the records from back then, but I called the software company to see if they had any archived information,” she said.
Within a couple of hours, someone called back with the name and contact information listed on the other invoice. It said: “Men’s Wearhouse.” The phone number listed was that of the Men’s Wearhouse in Woodbury; a personal email with initials and the last name of “Zempel” also were listed.
The Men’s Warehouse in Woodbury didn’t recognize the name. “I had to do a lot more sleuthing,” Nemec said. “I got on Google, and I stalked on Facebook and LinkedIn to try and put things together. The email didn’t have a name, but it did have initials.” She emailed the address, but didn’t immediately hear back.
That same day, Feb. 1, Timm was interviewed by WCCO-TV reporter Liz Collin.
“I have to say, I am so, so sad,” Timm wrote in a Facebook post that afternoon. “It’s hard to even think that my dress is gone forever. I tear up everytime I think of losing it forever. I just hope that if someone watching the news sees that they too had their wedding dress cleaned during March/April 2013 at Woodbury Cleaners maybe they can look to make sure they have the right dress.”
The WCCO story aired at 5 p.m. Around that same time, Kris Zempel Lystad, 47, of Stillwater, was returning home from work.
When she logged into her email account, she found the message from Nemec at Woodbury Cleaners. “She wrote, ‘I’ve got a weird question for you,’” Lystad said. “She wanted to know if I had worked at Men’s Wearhouse and had taken my wedding dress in to be preserved. She said I should check my box.”
Lystad, who got married on June 30, 2012 at Woodbury Central Park, grabbed her wedding-dress box from her front entryway closet — the coolest and driest place in her house — and discovered Timm’s dress inside.
“I looked at it and said, ‘Yeah, that’s not my dress,’” she said. “But my veil was in there, so it was half right. All I could do at that point was laugh. My bad for not looking in my box in the first place.”
Lystad called Nemec who immediately contacted Timm.
“My dress is FOUND! I am so incredibly happy,” Timm wrote on Facebook.
Lystad, who works at U.S. Bank in Stillwater, previously worked as the formalwear manager for Men’s Wearhouse in Maple Grove; her sister, Beth Zempel, worked at the Men’s Wearhouse in Woodbury, she said.
Lystad lived in Oakdale at the time, and the Woodbury Cleaners was just a few miles away. She said she listed Men’s Wearhouse as the contact phone number because she “worked 50 to 60 hours a week, and Men’s Wearhouse was the only place you could find me.”
She waited until March 2013 to take her dress to the dry cleaner because her mother, Carole Zempel, was battling Stage 4 colon cancer. “It wasn’t high on my list of priorities,” she said.
Lystad and her husband, Troy, don’t have children, but she said her nieces would “be more than welcome to wear it should they want to.”
“I mostly kept it for me to look back on,” she said. “Seriously, I did it just for me. Maybe I’ll open it up on my 25th anniversary and look at it. It certainly doesn’t fit anymore, I promise you that. COVID has not been kind to me. And when you go from a job where you’re on your feet all day to a desk job, that doesn’t help either.”
Timm, who works as a medical coder for M Health Fairview at the Princeton clinic, said she hopes her dress will become a family heirloom. She and her husband Mike have a son, Blake, 6, and two daughters, Ellery and Brynn, 4.
“I’m not like this fancy girl, but I had this vision in my head of what I wanted for my dress, but then I couldn’t find it anywhere,” she said. “That’s why it was custom-designed. I’m really a sentimental person, so something like this is a big deal to me. I want to be able to say, ‘Look at what Mommy wore’ and ‘Look at what Grandma wore.’ It’s just something super-special to share with your daughter or granddaughter one day.’”
On Saturday, the women will meet at Woodbury Cleaners and trade dresses. Nemec said she plans to check over the dresses and carefully repack them in new boxes and tissue paper.
“It’s just a great feeling,” Nemec said. “We’ve been in the business since 2008, and you always hear these horror stories, and you go, ‘Oh my gosh. What would we do?’ Well, here we were, thrust into one. I just kept thinking, ‘If I don’t try, there’s no chance. I’ve got to try.’ I was fortunate that all the little puzzle pieces started falling into place. It worked out — this time.”
Timm said Nemec is her hero.
“There aren’t many people out there who would try that hard to get something back,” she said. “It’s crazy how it all worked out. When I opened the box, I thought, ‘Oh, there’s no way I’m getting it back.’ I thought it was gone forever.”
She hopes sharing her story serves as a warning to other brides. “Open your box, and check your dress,” she said. “I would hate for this to happen to anyone else.”
The Link LonkFebruary 05, 2021 at 09:17AM
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The case of the missing wedding gown. Woodbury dry cleaner helps brides find missing dresses - TwinCities.com-Pioneer Press
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