So at 7:30 p.m. the night before our wedding. I received a call from our cake vendor to unapologetically inform me that we would not be getting the cake that we paid for. We had asked for the cake to be torted (each of the two layers cut in half with frosting/filling in between). Every wedding I have ever been to the cake has always been 4 layers with frosting/filling between the layers. We had been discussing this for months and was told it was something she could do.
So I was absolutely livid to get that phone call that late the night before our wedding as we were in the middle of our rehearsal and rehearsal dinner. No less than 5 times in a condescending tone, I was told SHE was the professional and I needed to trust her. At that point, while I was mad, there was no time to make alternate arrangements. So I just said it is what it is.
Fast forward to our wedding day. Not only did she not tort the cake, she didn't put the frosting on in the agreed upon style, the cake was dry, it was visibly leaning and the lemon curd that was supposed to be in the top two tiers was not added. So nothing about the cake was right. I reached out to her via email after the fact and received a very vague (3 sentence reply): I'm sorry it wasn't what you hoped. I put great care into it as I do for all my clients. Congratulations may your union be blessed. (While this is not an exact quote - it's pretty close to being word for word.)
At this point I submitted a detailed review here on WeddingWire and a day or two later she posted a reply with mostly factual (yet misleading) information and never taking any accountability but rather putting it all on us. Among other things, she's now trying to say that she never charged us for the torting and that she discounted my 12" tier that we added two weeks before the wedding. (We added a fourth tier and took away the kitchen cakes because we had fewer people than what we were originally planning on.) I was never informed that we hadn't been charge or received a discount. So, I went back and added an addendum to my initial review to clarify that and other information in her reply. Within 5 minutes I received an email from WeddingWire that she had disputed my review and it has been removed. Hubby went on and added a separate review and she also disputed his. Sometime within the next hour she called my cell phone. We were in the middle of dinner so I let it go to voicemail.
I listened to her VM after dinner and now she wants to have a conversation. She doesn't understand what I want. I'm not asking for a full refund. I only every hoped she would offer to refund the difference for the services she charged for that we did not receive. But at this point, what I really want is for her to take accountability and allow my one-star rating to be reinstated (I'm even willing to remove the detail and make it vague.) But by removing my negative review she goes back to having a 5-star rating and given how unprofessional she was and the poor customer service we received, I think it's only fair that our review should be allowed to remain.
Aside from asking her what she would expect of a vendor if this had happened to her - I'm not quite sure what to say to her at this point. I want to keep it as civil as possible but I know how upset I am over this. What suggestions do you have? Should I ask for compensation? Should I just ask to have the dispute from my review (edited or unedited) removed and the review added back? Should I request both? At the end of the day we paid $600 for a cake to feed 100 people. It was so bad we didn't even save the top layer - we sent it with the rest of the food to be donated to a local shelter.
On a side note, all of our other vendors were given 5 star reviews. And a few have even commented on how easy we were to work with.
Post content has been hidden
To unblock this content, please click here