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Selling wedding gowns has always been a high-stakes business. New weight-loss drugs make fitting brides for the big day even more fraught.

When Nicole Hamilton found the A-line gown she plans to wear to her wedding reception, she requested a waist roughly 3 inches smaller than her frame.

Hamilton, a product designer in New York, has lost roughly 50 pounds on weight-loss medications in the past few years—including 15 pounds since her fiancé popped the question last May. And she plans to lose more.

But when she went to buy her dress, she ran into a less-than-thrilling hurdle: She had to sign a legal waiver, acknowledging in writing that the gown didn’t yet fit.

Selling wedding gowns has always been a high-stakes business. But these days, outfitting brides for their big day is more fraught than ever because of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs.

With the rise of weight-loss medications delivering dramatic results, future brides can’t say yes to the dress until much closer to their big day. That is forcing bridal stores to stock more dresses to accommodate last-minute weight fluctuations, leaving dressmakers on the hook for an increasing number of rush orders and hurried adjustments.

For two decades, bridal-studio owner Natalie Harris was able to anticipate how a bride’s body would change if she lost five or 10 pounds before her nuptials. Lately, it’s harder to predict.

“They could have been apple-shaped before, and now it’s like their entire midsection is dramatically smaller than it ever was before,” said Harris, the owner of Renegade Bridal & Dye Lab in Houston.

Harris is adapting. She steers brides who are taking GLP-1s toward more forgiving silhouettes, for instance suggesting dresses with adjustable lace-up backs instead of zippers, and prefers cuts that flare at the waist to help mask weight fluctuations.

Her standard timeline from first meeting a bride to delivering a finished dress is three to four months. These days, she fields daily requests from brides seeking accelerated turnarounds—which Harris accommodates when she can. Other brides ask to return their gowns, a request she doesn’t entertain.

“I can’t afford to stock extra inventory. It’s bad math,” she said. That business reality runs counter to Harris’ personal desire to help someone find their ideal dress, she said: “That friction is hard.”

One in 10 couples arranging a wedding this year use the drugs, with an equal share considering it, according to a survey of over 11,500 pairs by wedding-planning platform Zola. For over half of those currently on the medications, the impending walk down the aisle was a primary catalyst for the prescription, the survey found.

On average, wedding dresses cost $2,250, and can reach $10,000 or more for designer gowns, according to Zola. And while the search for the perfect dress may not be as protracted for some brides as it once was, shoppers who are spending thousands of dollars expect precision in every stitch. For dressmakers and tailors called in for late adjustments, that makes their work on the lace, silk and tulle a high-stakes race.

At David’s Bridal, the country’s largest wedding-dress retailer, more brides are starting to shop for their dresses about 45 days before their wedding, compared with the company’s traditional five- to six-month shopping window, said Chief Executive Kelly Cook. And rush orders, with a turnaround within four weeks of a wedding, are up 50% in the last two years, she said. The company is paying for overtime for its more than 3,000 alteration specialists as needed to meet the demand.

The requests from some brides for a compressed timeline are forcing more flexibility from retailers, including a shift in inventory strategy, said Abhi Madan, designer at dress brand Amarra, which supplies specialty boutiques with bridal dresses that retail for between roughly $1,500 and $3,000. Madan said businesses are now forced to have more dresses in stock to accommodate last-minute shoppers, instead of ordering the correct size once the bride-to-be has come in for a fitting.

“We have to take on more inventory risk, we have to be more flexible in the aspect of how the traditional bride orders now,” he said of designers and bridal-gown sellers. “You’re changing an industry that’s always operated on a six- to nine-month timeline.”

Wendy Ianieri-Salerno, who co-owns Darianna Bridal & Tuxedo in Warrington, Pa., has seen some brides shrink so much that tailoring wouldn’t work—they needed to get entirely new gowns.

“It was scary for us because I thought we’re going to either get negative reviews or we’re going to have to refund a lot of money,” she said. Ultimately she has agreed to certain gown exchanges. “We preferred not to, but we really didn’t want to lose that customer-service edge.”

Brides aren’t the only ones slimming down before their big day, Ianieri-Salerno said. Their future husbands often are too. But for grooms, adjusting tuxedos and suits for weight loss is much easier to do. “We can simply and quickly get a replacement in their new size as a rental.”

Some stores shield themselves from liability for a bride’s changing physique with the sort of waivers that Hamilton, the New York product designer, signed when she purchased her too-small, hand-beaded gown. Such waivers existed before the rise of GLP-1s, but are more fraught when a bride is losing a substantial amount of weight. Some users of the drugs report losing a clothing size every two to three weeks.

Hamilton said her shrinking waistline is driven by an overall desire to be healthier, and while it has made dress shopping more complicated, it hasn’t taken away from the excitement of the hunt.

“The size stuff definitely made it stressful in a way that it wouldn’t have been otherwise,” she said. “But I actually enjoyed it for the most part.”