illian Nimick never thought she’d go viral.

But thanks to a mysterious note pinned to a donated dress, the Mount Pleasant boutique owner soon found herself TikTok famous.

Nimick, who owns Nimi Boutique on West Main Street, said she has been gathering formal dresses and gowns to offer free to women and girls who can’t afford special occasion formal attire.

She had received a donation of 25 bags of dresses, and was sorting by size when a note pinned to a blue gown with a beaded bodice caught her eye.

The note detailed the former owner’s fondness for the gown and her wish that it not simply go to Goodwill, that it instead find its way to someone who would love it as she had.

The note told of the former owner finding the dress at a small boutique amid a search for a reasonably priced gown and wearing it to the prom with her high school sweetheart, whom she was engaged to marry in 2020.

The note requested the dress not be donated to Goodwill, but rather find a “better purpose.”

“She donated it to a nonprofit, and somehow, it ended up in another set of bags that were donated to me,” Nimick said.

Hitting home

The note struck a chord with Nimick, first because she could relate to not being able to afford a prom dress that cost several hundred dollars.

“I actually used a cocktail dress that was my mom’s as my prom dress,” Nimick said.

Secondly, Nimick’s curiosity kicked in, and she wanted to find out whether the couple had, indeed, gotten married amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

“And that part about not going to Goodwill - I figured it came to me for a reason, and it’s serving its better purpose, just like she wanted it to,” Nimick said.

So, Nimick decided to try to track down the dress’s former owner.

“I started with a TikTok,” she said. “I made a TikTok, and I stated why I wanted to find this girl. The TikTok hit 1.3 million views, 3,000 comments, 155,000 likes and over 5,000 shares.”

But it would be a resource much closer to home that would prove successful.

“I shared it to my Facebook page, and I shared it to the What’s Happening in Mount Pleasant group as well,” Nimick said, noting that it took only three days to get a response. “She messaged me on Facebook.”

Found at last

It turned out that the gown’s former owner was Shania Potosky, a Mount Pleasant resident who wore the dress to her junior prom in 2014.

When she saw that Nimick was searching for the owner of her old prom gown, she was shocked.

“I thought, ‘Oh, my God, she found it.’ I never thought I’d see it again once it left me,” she said.

The story behind the dress

The former Shania Thieler first came across the blue gown after fruitlessly searching a high-end clothing store for a suitable dress. She said she and her mother spent only a short time looking through the racks before realizing, “There’s nothing here that doesn’t start with a three, and some of them have a comma,” she said.

So, her mother pointed her in the direction of Pat’s Bridal, a smaller boutique in Connellsville. And it was her mother who spotted the blue dress, which as it turned out, was never meant to be in Pennsylvania at all.

Potosky said a search of the serial number revealed that the dress was destined for Chicago but became lost in transit.

Her mother plucked it from the rack and told her she should try it on, but at first, Potosky wasn’t so sure.

“At first, the jewels seemed a little gaudy to me,” Potosky said.

But she tried on the dress and fell in love with it. She bought the dress and donned it for the Mount Pleasant Area junior prom, which she attended with her high school boyfriend, Stanley Potosky.

In 2019, Potosky decided to downsize her closet, and the dress was among the items to be donated.

Potosky remembered a story she had read about a wedding dress that had been found with a note pinned to it.

“That was a dress with a story,” she said. “I thought, ‘My dress has an interesting story, and no one’s going to know that unless I write this,” she said.

So, she said, “I sent it away with a note and kind of wished it the best with whoever it finds.”

Life after the dress

Then, she got married, despite the pandemic.

“It came in waves,” she said. “Everything was open, then it was shut. Then, it reopened.”

She and her then-fiance were fortunate enough to choose a date that fell during a period of time when restrictions had been relaxed. They were married on Sept. 26, 2020.

The couple still lives in Mount Pleasant, and Potosky said it’s hard to believe her dress’s journey brought it right back to her hometown.

“It amazes me that it wasn’t just anywhere. It was in this new shop in town,” she said.

Nimick plans to add it to her growing inventory of gowns that will be available for free meets with Potosky’s approval.

“A price tag on a prom gown should not prohibit you from having a high school experience like that,” she said.