October 2019 experience with MgBe
My husband and I hired Magnolia Bluebird to plan our October wedding in 2019. After several interviews, references, and research we went into the relationship with Magnolia Bluebird with sound confidence in their expertise. My interview was with both Danielle, the owner, and my planner, Taren. During the interview process, they were professional, impressive and demonstrated an expert level of expertise as it pertains to wedding planning. Danielle spoke highly of Taren and her abilities, as well. It was not until we engaged Magnolia Bluebird that my husband and I learned that Taren’s expertise was in corporate events and that our wedding would be one of Taren's first as the lead planner.
I will start by saying that my wedding day was very beautiful, but it took extensive work on my end to get my wedding to where I wanted it to be. I will also start this review by framing the expectation that we had of our wedding planner and why we decided we needed to have a planner (of course, these same expectations were conveyed explicitly to Danielle and Taren at the start of this process). A planner was imperative to plan our wedding because I have a job that requires frequent international travel. My husband is a graduate student at Princeton in New Jersey. With that, we needed a planner that was going to spearhead the logistics of our wedding, while tactically employing their expertise; utilizing their network of vendors and other relationships; managing our expectations in real time as it pertains to budget; and most importantly, clear and regular communication, follow-up, delivery, and a keen attention-to-detail.
Early in the process we experienced issues with Taren's communication, delivery, lack of attention-to-detail, and an inability to follow-up on items. Taren regularly over promised and under delivered all the way up until our actual wedding day. Taren is not detail-oriented; she continually misspoke on costs; she regularly forgot to follow-up on items we discussed during our weekly calls. I found myself continually having to remind her of items that were missed or completely forgotten. Upon me raising these mistakes, Taren was dismissive and quickly swept mistakes under the rug. She took little responsibility for mistakes And often blamed other vendors for the errors.
We had a terrible experience with a vendor recommended by MgBe. We were very upset about this poor vendor choice because one of the services promised by MgBe was access to their vendor lists. Vendors that they have previously worked with and backed their services. Due to these issues, there was a real lack of trust between us and MgBe at the start of the relationship. I did bring this issue to the owner, Danielle's attention, to which Danielle responded appropriately and vowed to fix the issue.
Unfortunately, we continued to experience the same issues and poor service from Taren. When we brought this up to Danielle she told me that I am the only bride experiencing these issues with Taren and that all her other clients love her. In making this comment, we felt that Danielle was diminishing our complaint in comparison to other clients and alluding that the issue not with Taren but with me and my husband. After this conversation, we came up with yet another path forward, that would now have Danielle involved in our wedding planning in an attempt to correct what was not working. When Danielle stepped in to help, things did improve slightly, but we kept finding mistakes on our budget, with order quantities, and other details that we had relayed to our planners multiple times before.
About a month before our wedding, during another discussion of our issues with Danielle, she asked if we wished to part ways. We were completely caught off guard by this comment, not only was it unprofessional, it was completely insensitive to the milestone this day was for my husband and I. We were hurt, offended, and very disappointed. I let her know that our wedding was only a few weeks out and that we did not have the time to find another planner. Also, at this time, we had already invested $10,000 in MgBe’s services and did not want to lose out anymore on that investment.
In the end, MgBe pulled off a beautiful wedding due to my active involvement and help from my mother in the design process. There were a few mishaps on the day of the wedding, but what wedding doesn’t have them? I reached out to Taren a few days after our wedding to schedule a follow-up call/close out call. I felt weird that no one from MgBe reached out to us after the wedding. We never heard from Danielle after the wedding to check-in on how it went and to see if we were happy, and as of this review, I have still not heard from MgBe. Other than my requested call with Taren, I never heard back from her either, despite the fact that a few things we discussed on the call required her follow-up.
Overall, we were completely dissatisfied with the service that we received from MgBe and would not recommend that you trust MgBe with something as special as your wedding day.