Marie Hunt of Headpiece.com joins us on Wedding Secrets Unveiled! to share her insights from over 35 years of crafting stunning bridal headpieces. For the past 25 years, she has been designing exquisite bridal accessories from her shop in Pompton Plains, New Jersey. Recently, Marie has been helping brides transform cherished family heirlooms into beautifully restored, wearable treasures. Whether you’re searching for a unique way to incorporate sentimental materials into your bridal look or want a standout statement piece, Marie has you covered!
Meet Marie.
My name is Marie Hunt, and I’m a bridal accessory designer. I have a New Jersey storefront in Pumpkin Plains, NJ. We just celebrated our 25th anniversary. I serve brides who are looking to have a bridal accessory like no other bride has. So, I design modern style pieces and also vintage style pieces.
We met Marie because of one of our couples. She reached out looking for images from this wedding day.
That’s right- we shared a bride, and she was actually one of the most challenging projects in my entire career. She wanted to use her mom’s headpiece in some way for her wedding. Her mother is her best friend, and she just thought it would be a beautiful idea. But the issue was that they had opened up the box that the wedding gown was preserved in, they were shocked and devastated to find out that apparently there had been some sort of slow leak in their basement or something, and there was an opening in the box. When they opened the box, the dress was fully covered in mold. She originally wanted to take the dress apart and make it into some sort of thing for her rehearsal dinner, or something like that, so the only thing that they felt was salvageable was the head piece.
No! I didn’t know that. But, I know how close this bride is with her mom. I can only imagine the devastation they felt opening that box.
She was actually a virtual bride, so I worked with her through FaceTime, and initially my consultations with my virtual brides begin with maybe a half hour to a 45 minute consultation. So, she showed me the piece virtually and I thought, “wow, what are we going to do with this?”. Not only was it molded, but had changed colors – it was gold and the rhinestones were falling apart. It was in really dire shape. Now, with virtual brides, I don’t give any firm design or quote until I can get the item in my hands. So, she mailed me the piece and it was just as bad as I thought it would be.
But I did tell her, however, that if anyone can do anything with this headpiece, it is me. So I worked with her on some ideas. We ended up totally deconstructing the piece to the point where it had leaves on the sequins. The sequins had turned to yellow gold, and we took every single seed bead off of every leaf, hand cleaned all the seed beads. Then we fully replicated these leaves. But instead of using sequins, we use Swarovski crystal, because any type of sequin will always yellow over time.
I’m looking at her blog right now so I can visualize everything you did (see it here) and it’s amazing to hear where it came from.
Eventually we were going to design a headband style for her. And then after some time passed, she got the idea where she wanted to surprise her mom with some accessories to wear and her hair on the wedding day. I explained we would take away from the design if we were making more pieces. So we changed the design completely and wound up making a beautiful accessory to wear around her hairstyle. And then she did surprise her mom, at the night of her rehearsal. It was just such a beautiful story.
I love that. Well, I know we got a little side tracked, but back to you now. I think by now, our listeners really understand what you do – you take heirloom pieces and create something new! Tell me a little bit about how you started doing this.
I’ve been sewing since I was nine years old, and I took every single sewing course that our high school offered – to the point that there were no more sewing classes left. I did an independent study and applied to the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. I majored in fashion design, intimate apparel was my specialty, and I graduated with honors from FIT.
Once I graduated, I worked for a small lingerie company. About a year later, I was recruited to become a fit development designer for international Playtex, designing foundations. So, I worked for them, and absolutely loved it because everything was done by hand in the 80’s. There were no computers, no kind of CAD programs, no kind of anything like that. So when you had a garment, you were actually doing the pattern by hand and grading it by hand.
Fast forward, I was married, I got pregnant with my first born, and had planned to return back to work, and then I didn’t have to go back to work. I held the baby, and I stayed home. That’s kind of how I fell into business. People were asking me if I would design their wedding dresses, headpieces and veils, because I had designed everything for my own wedding.
Hobby Turned Business Creating Bridal Headpieces
So I ended up doing it as a hobby out of my house for 10 years. And then we bought the domain name headpiece.com in 1998 and that’s where everything really began. I was designing for brides from California to Japan. The business kind of grew out of my house, but it was kind of not ideal. I had three kids by that point and if I had a bride coming to the house, I was cleaning up toys and managing the TV and it was a bit overwhelming.
One night, I had the most realistic dream and I told my husband about it the next night – about owning a storefront, and in the storefront, it had four quadrants. The name of the store was Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue and it had a blue and purple sign out front. Five days later, we signed a lease in New Jersey, and I designed the entire store according to that dream. And here we are, 25 years later.
I love that story. Tell me a little bit about what type of pieces you are doing currently – I know it’s evolved.
I can design anything. If you ask me to design a headpiece out of rocks from your garden, I could do it. I’ve designed pieces out of sea glass, out of starfish, out of seashells, in addition to traditional freshwater pearl and rhinestone pieces for brides. But about two years ago, I noticed a huge, huge uptick in the amount of brides that were inquiring about vintage bridal accessories, so much so that I started asking them how they found out about me.
To be clear, you specialize in vintage pieces?
Everything is from scratch, but I do specialize in taking existing pieces and making them into something new.My passion has always been bridal accessory design, but now my passion is definitely working with brides that are bringing me an older piece and I’ll design custom veils or headpieces from the item, whether that’s a gown, veil or someone else’s headpiece. I recently designed a headpiece from beading on the shoulder of a wedding gown.
I saw that you did a lot of refurbishing and vintage work, and so I didn’t realize that was part of your evolution.
The cool thing is that once I saw the uptick, I started asking brides – and they said they searched Google and found me. I work with a social media coach, Jen Herman, who has authored four books on Instagram, and you can follow her on Instagram, Jen’sTrends, and I’m part of her membership: Profit Your Profile. I’ve been part of her membership for about four years now, and we have guest speakers every month. We have training sessions on Instagram, we have office hours on Instagram. We had this challenge a bit ago to make an Instagram Reel. It took me 8 hours, ha. I spent so much time on it with little results, and I just felt this is the biggest waste of time I could be designing a head piece. Why am I doing this Instagram Reel?
Trending Instagram Reel Leads to Business
Well, here we were presented with this challenge. And of course, if I’m presented with a challenge, I accept it, and I did it. It took me about a day and a half to do this Instagram reel, and we were traveling down to Virginia to see family. I said, I’m just gonna press post and I’m not even gonna look at it. I keep my phone on silent all the time. We were down in Virginia enjoying family time, and my phone kept vibrating, vibrating, vibrating. It turns out that my second Instagram reel ever went viral.
Currently, we have almost 700,000 plays on that reel, and I think almost 22,000 likes. This all happened within the weeks that I was getting all of these Google inquiries. Weeks later, my business totally flipped, and now 95% of the designs I’m doing are vintage restorations and restyles. The other amazing thing is while I absolutely love my showroom in New Jersey, it’s a lot of overhead to keep, but 90% of my consultations are virtual.
That it’s all part of the running theme that you’re doing what you’re meant to do, because everything’s stumbling with you, and you’re following the path between the dream and now your specialty, which is vintage. There’s something special about the vintage.
My motto is vintage restoration and restyle is a love story. So it started with love. It continues with love. There’s love in between. There’s love that’s lost, there’s love that you want to continue on. So I think my evolution is saying there’s a family history behind every single piece, and I, in restyling it, get to become a part of that family history, and that is so incredibly satisfying. I could design a gorgeous Swarovski piece and freshwater pearl that no other bride in the country has.
Yes, I enjoy it, and it’s beautiful. But when these vintage pieces walk out of my shop, or I’m shipping them all over the country, I almost feel like I am giving up like my first born. Even though the client is paying for my expertise, and they’re paying for this one of a kind design, I become so attached to it. I have such a passion for the whole process of creating it – it’s just as emotional for me.
Talk to me a little bit about the trends you’re seeing right now.
I always like to say that I don’t follow trends – I create trends. I am never looking on Instagram or anything like that to see what the latest wedding trends are. Really, my brides are not typical brides that follow trends because they want everything to be so incredibly individual and unique, but in the way of vintage restyle. What I will tell you is that a lot of brides will come to me with a certain piece and we discuss, first of all, their hairstyle. That’s always number one. I also investigate the venue, the dress, the designer – and working around the hairstyle is important when we come up with our ideas.
Creating a new piece from a vintage piece
And many times, brides just want me to take their vintage piece and create it into another headpiece. But if I do that, what are they going to do with that headpiece after their wedding day? Are they going to pack it in a box like their mother did? My signature is to design a headpiece, but design it in multiple components so that they can break it down to rewear parts of it and not pack it away for years. Instead, they can wear part of it for their honeymoon or anniversary. So I think that’s something that I’m kind of creating a trend with.
The 80s and 90s pieces right now are so big for me.
I bet that’s so interesting because I feel like the 80s are definitely influencing the fashion world right now.
Yeah, it’s when their moms got married. So the vintage pieces that are coming to me are mainly 80s and 90s, though I have a piece I’m working with from the 20s and one from the 40s too. I’m really known as the probably top expert, and also – I use wax flowers, which I absolutely love to work with. So that’s a whole other branch.
But getting back to the 80s, it’s interesting, because the brides will come to me, and the first thing they tell me is they don’t want the 80s poof on the back of the piece. I always tell them, you won’t go down the aisle looking anything like an 80s bride.
So what I do is that I strip it down. Take all those components and I ask them what components they love. I give them ideas on different elements they can add to make these pieces into something that is current and beautiful, so that when they walk down the aisle, they’re going to wow their guests. And in the case of Alyssa, the bride that we shared, she said everyone wants to know where she got her headpiece. No one could believe it was made from her mother’s headpiece in the 80s.
The good talking point, because she had that long veil that she wore with it. Her hair piece was definitely kind of a statement. I love the fact that you think about it after the wedding day and using their investment again later.
That’s exactly it: it is an investment. This work takes time. Every single component that comes apart and I’m cleaning it. Some of the biggest obstacles I come across are hair spray, damage, oxidation, and glue. By the 70s, everything that had been made by hand was becoming mass produced. What’s the quickest way we could do it? Oh, let’s take this bag of flowers that were imported from China and frame it. Glue it and wrap it. By the 80s and 90s, the head pieces were really made of inferior quality elements. So the only thing that’s really special about those pieces is that they belonged to their moms.My job is to take it apart and make it look couture, and I happen to do that pretty well.
Let’s share some stories about things that you’ve done pretty well. Are there any stories that stand out to you about the journey of the headpiece?
There are so many. I could write a book about it! There’s a couple that are kind of mind blowing. One is I had a very high end dry cleaner and preservationist call me up, and they were in a bit of a bind. There was a granddaughter whose grandmother was on her deathbed, and she was called to the hospital, and the grandmother said, “I really want you to have my wedding gown and my headpiece, and I want you to wear it on your wedding day.” Well, that’s kind of intense to consider.
This granddaughter didn’t even have a boyfriend. 3 years go by and she gets engaged. So, they open up the box the gown had been preserved in and the headpiece is missing. They go back to the dry cleaner and start talking to them about it. Well, it’s been three years. They have no idea where this headpiece is, so they call me up and they ask if I can replicate it. How am I supposed to replicate it? I don’t know what it looks like!
So the mother brings me the black and white wedding album where the quality of the photos in those days of black and white photos is… not great. I replicated that piece by comparing the beads, the pearls, the pattern of it, to the size of the irises in the grandmother’s eye in the photo. And it was spot on. That’s kind of amazing, right?
Creating Vintage Pieces
I have another bride who brought me her,I think, it was her grandmother’s hat from the 50s, and the hat was made out of a really, really fine lace. What can you make out of a hat that’s just a piece of fine, flat lace? I took the hat apart and cut every single piece of lace off of it, stabilized it, and then wired it and hand beaded it and made it into the most amazing back style from a hat.
Repairing a Bride’s Crown
Then I had one other bride who came to me, and her great aunt had a piece that she wanted restored. I think it was the late 50s or early 60s – a crown. She searched and searched and searched for months and couldn’t find anybody to help her. Finally, someone at work mentioned a woman who might be able to help her. She goes in, leaves a deposit and then the woman ghosted her. And this piece was very, very meaningful to this bride. So eventually she called from her boyfriend’s cell phone, and the woman picked up the phone and basically her crown was being held captive. She then found me, and I said to her, “Well, how much money are you going to lose on this deposit if you go and rescue your crown?”
I am definitely the person that can help you to restore this beautiful crown to its original condition. So she goes into the city to pick up the crown, and the woman decides to restore it at the last minute. It literally looked like it was painted with white out. She removed all of the vintage stones and threw them out and replaced them with crummy stones. The bride came to me, I then had to completely strip down this crown, down to the bare metal, and recreate it by enameling it, finding vintage stones that will be suitable to bring it back to its natural beauty.
Your stories are very captivating, and they know they bring us in! There’s a lot of meaning there. I would assume for your clientele – that’s part of it is the stories and the meaning they want to wear something that empowers them with the story that their pieces are holding.
It’s true. But also you’d be amazed at how many of my brides have lost their mothers? I lost my mom three years ago, and I’m still not over it, but my mom was there on my wedding day. I cannot imagine walking down the aisle or even doing all of these bridal things without your mother by your side. So I mean, with my business, I’m working all the time, but if a bride tells me she lost her mom, I will find a way to put an extra day in the week, and I will help her, and I will create something for her.
Wrap Up Question
What are some key points that couples should be asking restoration companies when they are inquiring to make sure that they are working with a true professional company to ensure that their wedding day is an absolutely perfect event?
The first thing is that you definitely want to make sure it’s a reputable company, and once you connect with them initially, be careful what you are told.
Number two is to ask questions. How are you going to restore or restyle my piece? Will you be using glue? Glue is a red flag. Anyone with experience in millinery design and accessory design will only be using glue for minimal reasons.
Number three is reviews. Read into the reviews, look for a story – not just a statement. If there’s a story behind it, you know there’s something good.
What We Discussed
Meet Marie Hunt (2:13)
Marie Hunt’s Background and Business Journey (8:27)
The Evolution of Headpiece.com (10:52)
Challenging Projects and Client Stories (17:58)
Trends and Popular Requests (18:54)
Unique and Memorable Projects (26:34)
Wrap Up Questions(33:24)
Links Mentioned in the Episode
Find Headpiece at Instagram | Facebook | Website
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