After wearing a very special dress for the first time to my friend’s wedding on a Saturday in August 2024, I brought it on the following Tuesday to Prestige along with another dress. When I came back to pick it up on Friday, the second dress was great, but the Farm Rio dress was a disaster. It was wet, wrinkled, and fraying in multiple places (photos attached). I pointed it out to the cashier and she said “Oh yea I was here when you brought that in, it did not look like that a few days ago. It was a beautiful dress.” I asked her why it was *wet* when I had brought it in for dry cleaning, and she said that they followed the directions on the tag and washed it. It was literally coming apart at the edges and looked like it had been run over by a truck. The cashier said they would try to fix it.

They took almost a month to repair it. When I picked it up the second time, it was definitely better, but it still looked much worse than when I originally brought it in. It looked worn out, and the places that were fraying are no longer fraying but still look pretty rough. The leaves on the dress used to have structure, and now they just flop. The cashier told me I would get a call from the owner. I never did.

After following up, I had several email exchanges with the owner, Jeanne. She eventually refunded the cleaning costs, around $40. I said that as a small business owner myself, if I had damaged a client’s things, I would reimburse them for the cost of the item. She instead decided to take a position which I found rather absurd — she claimed that she went and bought a new dress identical to mine (which has been sold out for months, so I’m not sure where she would have found it), and then she “processed it five times”, and it didn’t come out the way my dress had. So, she claimed that my dress must have already been damaged when I brought it in.

I sent her timestamped pictures of me in the dress just a couple of days before I brought it to them, showing that it was undamaged. She continued to try and deny that they had damaged it, but eventually offered to give me the dress that she claims to have bought. I said okay, and I asked where to pick it up. She never responded.

I find it hard to believe that Jeanne could have spent $300 on a brand new, sold-out dress, just to try and damage it, rather than just reimburse me for the dress they damaged. She never sent me any pictures of the dress she claims to have processed, and I’m not sure I believe it ever existed. It seems like an extreme way to avoid accountability.

I only recently moved to Charleston and came in to Prestige Cleaners based on their excellent reviews. I’m a freelancer and not exactly wealthy, so I don’t usually spend a lot on clothes, but had bought this dress for the wedding of a close friend. The dress meant a lot to me, both because I put a lot of heart into picking it out, put a lot of money into it, and had just worn it for the first time to a memorable event.

I’m uploading screenshots of our email exchanges as well.

I guess I just have to eat my $300 loss and the loss of a beloved dress. I’m disappointed that a community business would behave in this way. Unfortunately there are several similar complaints against Prestige on Better Business Bureau and SC Department of Consumer Affairs, none of which were resolved, so this seems to just be a thing that they do.