Suzanne Novak tells new employees that they will either love working in the bridal industry or run off screaming in the night.
“Bridal is a passion,” she said. “Bridal is something that is a very, very, very special thing. And once it bites you, it’s hard to get rid of it. You don’t want to get out of it.”
Sydney Lanhart can attest. Lanhart has worked with Novak for the past six years, doing everything from steaming dresses up to managing the store.
“It just gets in your blood,” Lanhart said.
Now she’s taking it one step further. Lanhart is opening her own bridal dress shop inside the space that is Suzanne’s Sewing Service. She plans to open Legacy Bridal Boutique on Feb. 18 with a celebration that may include Novak and her husband playing music.
Lanhart went to school to be an esthetician, but wanted to be a wedding planner. She applied for an opening Novak had, though she lacked the required industry experience but wanted to gain it.
A couple years into working with Suzanne, she moved away from the idea of planning — “Brides can be brutal,” Novak said about planning — and toward the dresses.
“I liked working with the dresses the best,” she said. “We’d go to events for Suzanne at venues, and I’d talk with all of the other vendors there and wedding planners. And I just love the wedding dresses. That part is what’s fun to me.”
The name came working for Novak, whom Lanhart called a great mentor to her.
“I loved, whenever we got a returning bride, we called them, if they brought their daughters or their granddaughters, they were a legacy bride,” Lanhart said. “They’re coming back to us, sharing their experience with the rest of their family. And so that always stuck with me. That’s where I came up with the name. I want you to bring your daughters and your granddaughters and your friends. Be a lifelong legacy bride.”
The roots of Suzanne’s Sewing Service are in … music?
Not exactly, but there is a relationship in Suzanne Novak’s life between music and bridal alterations she does at her shop in Gilbert.
“Music is a very integral part of my life,” said Novak, who still plays retirement homes about once a month with her husband as “Two’s Company.” “It’s something that I don’t normally share with people because it’s that special. I don’t care what they say about my sewing, but I don’t want to be criticized about my music. So that’s it. You can say whatever you want about how I sew, I’ll fix it.”
Novak, then Suzanne Apilado, learned how to sew growing up in Hawaii from her mother, a tailor, and Hawaiian designer Guadalupe Bulatoa, her godmother. But her father had been a musician and that is where Novak’s passions were. In 1972, at age 19, her dad allowed her to head stateside to join the Australian female band The Vamps, which were expanding to an eight-piece band and had need for a trumpet player.
The next years were spent touring America. When founder Margaret Britt returned to Australia in 1975, Novak, whose talents extend to singing, bass, keyboards and other instruments, joined other bands, toured more through the U.S. and Canada, working gigs in Holiday Inns and roadhouses.
She met her husband, Tom, while with a band out of Saginaw, Michigan. Eventually, she and her bandmates went to California trying to make it. But their pitches to record companies’ audience and repertoire representatives never landed.
“We had an album, but the A side was a disco song, and disco was on its way out and punk was on its way in,” she said. “It was an awkward time for us to try to make it.”
With a daughter now and a need to pay the bills, she returned to sewing. She had not totally left it when she was on the road playing music.
“I was a seamstress, so guess what? I was seamstress for the band,” Novak said with a laugh, recalling the “Tiny Dancer” lyric. “They had Elton John pink satin suits, you name it.”
The band split up, and the Novaks moved to Arizona, where Tom had family. She worked as a department-store tailor and took in sewing jobs at home until she outgrew their thousand-square-foot house.
She opened an alterations store 40 years ago at Stapley Drive and Main Street in Mesa on Feb. 1, 1983. Since then, she has changed locations and businesses a few times, but it always been sewing.
Her latest move came in 2022 when she exited her bridal boutique in Mesa and returned to a space in Gilbert’s Village Center Shopping Center that she previously had occupied for 15 years. No one had occupied it in the intervening three years.
While Novak earlier in her career did everything from custom dresses to prom dress, bridal gowns always have been primary and now she concentrates exclusively on alterations for them.
Brides can be difficult customers, like the fabled Bridezilla would suggest. Novak recalls a time when her workers were constantly complaining about the customers, so she had them do a little one-week experiment. She asked the workers that each time a customer came in, they ask how the wedding is going and how are they doing.
“And Saturday morning, we sat down. I said, ‘OK, tell me,’” she said. “And that’s it. Everybody said, ‘oh, they’re stressed.’ I said, ‘Realize that they’re stressed. We are here to unstress them. So do that.’ And then, I’ll tell you, the shift in attitude was 180 (degrees) because they realized that they’re not really targeting us.”
It is that level of customer service that Novak believes is at the root of her success. In music, it was knowing when the regulars would come into the bars and making sure they were taken care of. In bridal alterations, it is much the same. She has former customers bringing in their daughters and even granddaughters to be fitted, something she considers an extreme honor.
“I think that, really, sewing keeps me young,” said Novak, who is 70. “I mean, it does. I have a purpose to life.”
Tom Blodgett can be reached by email at tblodgett@iniusa.org or follow him @sp_blodgett on Twitter. To voice your opinion on this story, connect with us at AzOpinions@iniusa.org.
Tom Blodgett Senior News Editor | Gilbert @sp_blodgett
Meet Tom Tom Blodgett joined Independent Newsmedia, Inc., USA, in 2022, when the company acquired Community Impact Newspaper's Phoenix-area properties. Raised in Arizona, he has spent more than 35 years in journalism in the state.
Community: He has served as an instructional professional in the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication since 2005, and is editorial adviser to The State Press, the university's independent student media outlet. He also is director of operations for an 18U girls fastpitch softball team from Gilbert.
Education: Arizona State University with a BS in Journalism.
Random Fact: He lived in Belgium during his freshman year of high school.
Hobbies: Tweeting enthusiastically about ASU softball (season-ticket holder) and grumpily about other local sports (pessimistic fan).
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