Despite the recession, it seems Irish fashionistas are still not getting the value available to our sisters in the UK. This sad fact came to my notice when a dress featured in the May 2011 issue of Good Housekeeping sent me scurrying to the laptop to try to purchase it online. The supplier, Marisota, was new to me but I found them easily on Google and a quick brose for ‘dresses’ on their site turned up the little khaki number that had caught my eye. It features a chain detail on the shoulder – a nice nod in the direction of this summer’s military trend – it is machine washable and it has those three-quarter length sleeves that are the joy of menopausistas everywhere. On the Marisota website, the dress, described as ‘Joanna Hope Shoulder Detail 41 in’ (KB495 XM) costs Stg£66 in my size. Not bad, considering it ticks so many of the boxes for me.
But wait, I think. There is something familiar about this site – in fact, it looks very like an Irish website where I sometimes purchase fashion. Could the dress be available in Ireland? It was certainly worth having a look, so I logged on to the Oxendales site, and sure enough, there it was (KB495 JB). The price in my size? Euro 110.49. That’s a price difference of 36 euro at today’s exchange rate on xe.com and it’s a premium too far for this writer. So the credit card has gone back to my wallet and I’ll be paying a lot more attention to comparison shopping online in future.
