Essense of Australia Brand Guidelines: The Perth Bridal House and Its Family of Labels

A design-and-business partnership in Western Australia.

Essense of Australia began in Perth, Western Australia, in 1992. Company press releases from 2016 name the founders as Wayne and Martine Harris and the business as Essense Designs, set up to design, manufacture and wholesale wedding gown collections to retailers. The bridal resale site PreOwned Wedding Dresses says the pair combined her experience in bridal design with his talent for business, and that Essense of Australia was their first label. A June 2023 profile in the Kansas City magazine DesignKC describes Martine Harris as having started out as a traditional bridal retailer and gown designer.

The house has used two names. The 2016 releases, and the essensedesigns.com web address it still uses, say Essense Designs. Its careers page now calls the company itself Essense of Australia, as DesignKC did in 2023. The first word is spelled with an s where the ordinary English word has a c, a detail worth keeping in any setting of the name.

The business later spread beyond Perth. The 2016 releases, datelined Overland Park, Kansas, describe that office in the Kansas City area as the hub of its northern-hemisphere business and the original Perth office as the hub of the southern, with further offices in the UK and Switzerland and more than 1,000 retailers. By 2023 DesignKC placed the company’s headquarters in Lenexa, Kansas, and the company’s job listings use the same town. Its careers page now lists headquarters in the United States, Australia and Switzerland, with additional offices in the UK, the Netherlands and Canada; a company listing on the Swiss jobs site jobs.ch names Zug as the Swiss base. The same careers page says the company employs more than 300 people and sells through more than 1,200 retailers worldwide, and Martine Harris, the Chief Creative Officer, told DesignKC the team had grown from two people to about 350.

A first label, then a family of them.

The company sells through several labels rather than one. PreOwned says Essense of Australia came first, followed by Martina Liana, with Stella York joining in 2013. Sorella Vita is the bridesmaid label, which the company was extending in June 2016 with sequined dresses and high-low hems. The company’s website now also lists All Who Wander, and its careers page describes Oxford Street as a private label collection. Its True Society shops list a Martina Liana Luxe line as well.

Each label is given its own character. The company says Essense of Australia is inspired by the landscape of Western Australia and made for brides who want “traditional, timeless styles with a twist.” The New York retailer Kleinfeld ties that same inspiration to Martine Harris and describes elegant fabrics, intricate beading, illusion necklines and graphic lace. PreOwned says Stella York takes its name from the Latin for “star” and aims at a more dramatic, glamorous look.

The collections themselves are described in the language of cut and fabric. A July 2016 release for the Fall 2016 Essense of Australia line, which it said drew on fashion houses in Europe and on New York, listed fit-and-flare gowns with sparkle, A-line dresses with illusion lace and beading, and tulle and organza ball gowns with sweetheart necklines. Harris said in that release that the season was about reimagining traditional design elements for the modern bride.

Sizing is part of the pitch. The company’s website promotes EveryBody/EveryBride, describing it as “more than a plus size collection” and offering designs up to size 34.

On production, the company’s statements are broad: its careers page says it “creates and manufactures” gowns, and its Essense of Australia page says the dresses are “imagined and handcrafted” by its design team. The 2016 releases call it an “award-winning” bridal house, and Woman Getting Married, in a guide updated in July 2022, says the line has won multiple awards; both are given here as those sources’ words.

Design and documentation.

Bridal houses sell a single garment that most customers will wear once, and their images tend to reflect that. The dress usually comes first, shown whole on a stand or a model, with the room, the light and the type kept quiet around it. Pages often stay pale and uncluttered, so that white, ivory and blush can be told apart.

Close-ups do much of the remaining work. Lace, tulle, beading and hand finishing are hard to read at full length, so lookbooks and websites move in on a sleeve, a hem or a bodice seam. These details carry the claims about workmanship, and they give a designer’s pattern or a house’s lace a recognisable surface.

The runway calendar sets the rhythm. New York Bridal Fashion Week and Barcelona Bridal Fashion Week give houses a fixed moment to show a season, and many present a named collection with its own theme, set and printed material. The show then feeds the photography, film and social posts that follow it through the year. Backstage pictures, fittings and the walk down the runway all give a house more ways to show how a gown moves.

The shop is the other stage. Showroom mirrors, fitting platforms, soft seating and rails of samples are all part of how a label appears to a bride, and a garment bag or printed lookbook may be the piece of the brand that she takes home. For a designer, that makes the category a useful study in restraint: a small set of tones, a quiet typeface and careful photography, repeated from the catalogue to the fitting room.

A bridal wholesaler’s own shops.

The company describes itself as “a leading international bridal design house and wholesaler” serving independent retailers. True Society adds a second route. Inside Retail Australia reported in September 2024 that True Society is a collective of bridal stores started by Martine Harris and based in Kansas, which works with independent store owners to convert their shops or open new ones, and supports them with marketing, staff training and back-end systems. All of its stores, the magazine said, exclusively carry Essense of Australia and its sister brands. The company’s own description is a network of company-owned and franchise stores.

At that point there were 10 stores: two in Australia, three in Europe and five in the United States, according to Inside Retail. Its report centred on a new store of nearly 1,000 square metres in a warehouse in Fitzroy, Melbourne, with three-way mirrors, seating for family and friends, a selfie wall and a courtyard for events. Local names can survive inside the format: the Kansas City shops trade as True Society by Belle Vogue Bridal, and the Oregon shops as True Society by The White Dress.

In 2023 DesignKC described the look of those shops: a layout built around a central circle, with interior dressing rooms whose curtains draw back to reveal the bride to family and friends seated around the edge. Harris told the magazine she liked that it avoided squares and hard lines, and said the look is localised: the Lenexa shop, at the base of the headquarters, is pink and soft with gold touches, while the Crossroads shop in Kansas City keeps the character of its old brick building.

For a design guide, Essense of Australia shows how a place name can keep working after a company’s centre of gravity has moved: Western Australia remains the stated inspiration, while the stores, labels and headquarters reach well beyond it. Compare Maggie Sottero, another multi-label bridal house, and David’s Bridal, a bridal name built on its own stores. For this guide we use a gum-leaf green, an ivory and an ochre with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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