A California woman’s wedding dress was lost in the mail and disappeared in Texas, but thanks to a Temecula store owner, she has her priceless momento back.
At Overstocked in Temecula, you can find just about anything on any given day.
“You’re never going to find the same thing twice. It’s always a big treasure hunt and you literally never know what you are going to find,” said Veronica Romanenko, the store owner.
Romanenko buys containers filled with liquidated items from retailers like Walmart and Target. She then sells those items at incredibly discounted prices.
Most of the time, she doesn’t know what she’s going to get.
“There’s times where we had customers find laptops, tablets, Movado watches,” Romanenko said.
And then there was the time Romanenko found a wedding dress perfectly preserved in a box.
She didn’t realize that it belonged to anyone, so she put it up for sale at a bargain price: $10.
“My friend told me, ‘hey this is somebody’s dress. It’s actually preserved. They took it to get preserved, and I can tell there’s somebody’s name at the bottom,'” Romanenko said.
The name printed on the box: Jesslynn Webb Lopez, married June 5, 2021.
Romanenko knew she had to find her.
“I’m like Instagram, OK, let me try Instagram, and being a woman I did a lot of investigating and I found her,” Romanenko said.
She immediately sent Jesslynn a message.
“And they said, ‘Hi, does your maiden name happen to be Webb? And are you missing your wedding dress?’ And I was like what? I didn’t know if it was a scam or real because it didn’t know who this was,” Jesslynn Webb Lopez, the true owner of the dress, said.
But then Lopez saw the screenshot of the wedding dress.
“And I was like oh my gosh,” she said.
Lopez says after her wedding, her mom sent the dress to a company in Texas that preserves them, but when it was sent back through UPS, it never showed up.
“And they were like, ‘Well sometimes this happens. Someone could have put the wrong label on the sticker.’ Basically it was just lost and I never thought I would see my dress again,” Lopez said.
Lost forever — until Romanenko sent her the message, which Lopez just happened to read on a very special occasion.
“The day I found out it was June 4th, the day before my one year anniversary,” Lopez said. “Then the girl that was my maid of honor, I was being her bridesmaid at her wedding that day — so I was in a bridesmaid dress finding this out.”
The next step? Get the wedding dress back to Lopez. Romanenko offered to mail it.
“And I was like, ‘Oh no I’m not putting it back in the mail. I’m not going to risk losing my dress again,” she said.
So Lopez and her husband Cristo drove all the way from their home in the Bay Area on the six-hour journey to Temecula where Romanenko gave her the wedding dress she thought she would never see again.
“Do good things and good things will come back to you so it was a good moment,” Romanenko said.
Lopez is not only grateful to Romanenko. She’s also thankful her priceless keepsake wasn’t sold at a bargain price.
“Somehow no one bought the dress for $10,” Lopez said.
She also said she paid “a lot more than $10” for the dress originally.
