I run a wedding venue and one thing you might consider is advertising with wedding venues as the choice of a wedding venue tends to be 'first in the chain' of suppliers used for a wedding. So all other suppliers (cakes, wedding dress etc) come after choice of wedding venue. An exception being the wedding rings. Maybe the wedding dress may be searched for before the venue but mostly the Venue is the first in the supplier chain. Wedding Venues are therefore the go to place to advertise with when you are a supplier further down the chain.
Attending wedding fairs is also an obvious thing to do if you were selling direct. But you want to wholesale I presume.
Oddly I do not have many wedding dress shops advertising on my website (Craig y Nos Castle). What I have is one formal hire company and one wedding dress company that have been on the site for so long they may not even be trading (need to check!). So, it can do you no harm to do the following.
1. Create a website with a load of sample photos of wedding dresses - updating as fashions change
2. Get links from multiple wedding venues in a given town / area to your website. Ideally get advertising on the venues' own sites. At the very least get links from them to you (even if you have to offer a reciprocal link to them).
3. Research all the wedding venues in a given area. Systematically. Eventually you will get one or two to link to you, preferably get quite a number of venues supporting you in this way, with links to your site, or advertising on their own site some of your products.
As ana example, Go to 'Craig y Nos Castle Weddings' website and find the Suppliers section to see what I do for suppliers - they get a section on a page dedicated to their niche - e.g. wedding dresses and formal hire. Not all venues will do this but many will link to you in return for a return link to them - a free 'you scratch my back I'll scratch yours' system.
4. Having done the above, now find out all the wedding dress shops in the area you targeted for the wedding venues. Tell them how 'well you are supported by local wedding venues' and you would hate for them to miss out on all the local support for your dresses, so now is the time for them to stock your dresses.
5. Once some shops are stocking your dresses, update your site with links to the shops promoting them in their area. Tell the shops you are promoting them on your site as a place to go for your dresses. This will encourage them to support you.
1,2,3, above will probably facilitate 4 which I presume is your objective.
Martin at Craig y Nos Castle.
