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Shannon Lee Hale, owner of Rusted Rose Bridal in the Geistown Cloverleaf, is pictured with a black wedding dress. Below is the front of her new shop.

Shannon Lee Hale is the owner of Rusted Rose Bridal in the Geistown Cloverleaf.

Shannon Lee Hale, owner of Rusted Rose Bridal in the Geistown Cloverleaf, is pictured with a black wedding dress. Below is the front of her new shop.

Shannon Lee Hale is the owner of Rusted Rose Bridal in the Geistown Cloverleaf.

Brides sometimes experience a phenomenon called “the dress moment,” said Patty Rae Naylor, of Johnstown.

She wasn’t sure if she would feel it during her search in 2019 for a dress, but then she walked into Rusted Rose bridal shop in Kittanning.

Rusted Rose owner Shannon Lee Hale put Naylor at ease.

“I felt like I had known her for years,” she said. “Then I had the dress moment. I could feel it before I even looked in the mirror.”

To top it off, she said the song “Beautiful Crazy,” by Luke Combs – a song that had a special meaning to Naylor and her fiancé – played through the shop’s speakers.

“I bawled in her store,” Naylor said. “This is the dress I have to marry Justin in.”

When Naylor learned last year that Hale was relocating her shop to Johnstown, she reached out.

“I said, ‘Do you remember me?’ and she said, ‘Oh my gosh,’ and we just became friends,” Naylor said. “We’ve bloomed a nice friendship. She is a wonderful soul and wants to bring people happiness.”

Rusted Rose sticks out in an industry that traditionally features white.

“Everybody in the wedding business is the ‘white’ something – the white lily, or the white orchid or the white lace,” Hale said. “That’s not me.”

Hale brought her business to Johnstown in March.

“I’m very much antique-y, rustic, grew-up-on-a-farm – like, that’s me,” she said. “So, I am the Rusted Rose.”

Hale, 33, was raised in “a little tiny farm town outside of Kittanning,” she said. After high school, she worked for David’s Bridal and ran a store in Washington, D.C., before taking over a store in her hometown.

“I cashed my 401(K), spent my savings, and that’s how I opened Rusted Rose,” she said.

She said she couldn’t have chosen a better name for the business six years ago. In the time since, she became ill and had to depend on her sister to run the store, and then it shut down because of COVID-19 economic restrictions.

And since she relocated to Johnstown, her store has been impacted by the new Geistown roundabout.

Work at the roundabout ended a few days ago. Hale’s parking lot was paved last week. Her new address will be Ruth Way, no longer Bedford Street, she said.

“During the pandemic everything has drastically increased in price, and my whole model since I opened is I wanted to be affordable, so every dress is $2,000 or under,” she said.

Consistent with her out-of-the-box thinking, she has her own exclusive label – Shannon Lee – which features a line of black wedding dresses in addition to the traditional white dresses.

“White was more of a ‘you are given to your husband’ kind of a thing, but now people are going into it very equally,” she said. “Women aren’t given, they are walking into it freely.

“If you want to rock a black dress, and that’s what you feel is the best version of you, then I think that’s what you should wear. On your wedding day you don’t want to feel like a made-up Barbie that’s not you.”

She developed her line of black dresses through evaluating designers, determining who had the best quality and prices, she said.

“I have four black new dresses coming to the ‘shadow’ collection in the fall, and I have a lot of light colors coming for the spring,” she said. “I’m looking into doing more different things, like a pride line, like do a rainbow ballgown.

Hale said the move to Johnstown was made easier as clientele followed from Kittanning.

“With Bedford Street being closed for so long, having a following from another county was helpful,” she said. “It kept the business afloat while people around here didn’t know I was here yet.”

Hale moved to Johnstown in 2019 after marrying her husband, Adam Hale.

“It got to a point where I was like I have to move my store to Johnstown, too, because I can’t commute an hour and 15 minutes to Kittanning anymore,” she said. “Or I have to close.”

Her stepson, Gladen, is an athlete at Richland High School.

“We were definitely not going to move out of the area,” she said. “It’s awesome to be in town and I get to be part of an awesome community. People talk bad about Johnstown, but I’ve had nothing but great experiences. ... People downtown are trying – there are restaurants and the brewery and cute little hair places and its picking up.

“There’s more young coming,” she said. “Love the way the young community is coming together in Johnstown.”

She would like to see Ruth Way serve as the site for monthly street parties.

“You can have a band down there, some food trucks on the first Friday of every month, and it would be something for the whole community.”

Russ O’Reilly is a reporter for The Tribune-Democrat. Follow him on Twitter @RussellOReilly.

Russ O'Reilly is a reporter for The Tribune-Democrat. Follow him on Twitter @RussellOReilly.

Russ O'Reilly is a reporter for The Tribune-Democrat. Follow him on Twitter @RussellOReilly.

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