Sorry, this is long...
My wedding was 2 months ago and things (mostly) went amazingly well— most of my vendors were a dream! 🙂
Unfortunately, my month-of coordinator did miss the mark on so many things/details. She started taking over about two weeks (so I didn’t even use her for the whole month) before the wedding and seemed so great— she has over 15 years of experience and had (few) but great reviews online. However, she definitely did not finish off strong. I still think she did about 70% of her job so I can say that I couldn’t have done it without a coordinator, but if I could do it all over again, I would have hired someone else.
I’m still trying to compose my review on my coordinator and wrestling with it. I’ve already brought up the detailed list of things she missed so that she’s aware and tried to frame it as an “FYI” type of an email to not come off as a pain in the butt, but she still got very defensive and placed blame on other vendors. I’m not sure if I’m being over-dramatic and should just let it go, or if the things she did miss warrants a review for future brides? Just need a little insight from other brides and planners if these mistakes are within the margin of error for weddings and I’m being too hard on her. Any insight would be helpful. 😞 Thanks in advance.
Just an overview of things she missed:
- She bustled my dress incorrectly. This was not her job and my MOH was starting to bustle me up for my first look (my coordinator told me to bustle my dress for it and take photos after ceremony with it unbustled). My coordinator, not wanting to figure out who to pass the family corsages/boutonnières to (which was part of her contract that she created!), told my MOH to do that instead while she bustled up my dress. When my MOH tried to tell her where the buttons were, she told her, “I’ve done one with 50 buttons before and have done this 100s of times. It’s pretty straightforward.”My seamstress altered my dress to kind of waterfall down when bustled. It’s supposed to be clean lines. It looked like wadded toilet paper instead. I know I should have stopped her, but I was so nervous for my wedding that I wasn’t even processing everything going on.
- She stuck my veil on me without asking me where I wanted it (again, my MOH was supposed to do this so I’m not sure why she took it upon herself). I just felt the veil shoved in my hair and that was it.
- When it came to me walking down the aisle, her assistant who was holding my veil just dropped my veil. Didn’t fan it out or anything. Literally, threw it down.
- After ceremony photos, she bustled me up again. I can’t believe my bride brain got to me and I didn’t say anything when she was doing it (I honestly don’t even remember her doing it), so I have 300+ photos of my dress (incorrectly) bustled and 4 photos of the dress with the train out. In some photos, the back of the dress looked fine (probably because my photographer is amazing), but most of it looked like a hot mess. My MOH didn’t catch how the bustle was wrong (since I was getting pics taken during the first half of cocktail hour and then sitting for the rest) until right before we walked out for reception intros and redid it for me then. I’ve attached photos of how my dress was bustled and how she actually bustled it.
- I later found out that she not only asked my MOH to pass out the florals, but she asked my mom and one of my other bridesmaids to pin the boutonnières on the groomsmen and ushers. So she had 3 people doing a job that was in our contract for her to do.
- When I told her about my bustle and veil, she brushed it off and said it looked fine and looked just like a different bustle (she even provided picture examples). That’s fine and all if some bustles are meant to look like that, but I paid quite a bit for my dress alterations and bustle to look a certain way. She then proceeded to tell me that what I probably needed was a “lady-in-waiting” and that didn’t align with her business philosophy. She then continued to say that she typically lets the photographer be the creative director so she’s not sure why he didn’t take photos of my train (ummm... because you bustled it?!)
- Due to the rain, we had a layout change for our ceremony. Our new aisle ended up having a big giant (fixed) pole in the middle of it. This would have been fine with us (crap happens and we just gotta roll with it), but we were standing around the venue about an hour before the ceremony started and not once was this mentioned to any of us. Instead, she told all of right as she was scurrying us down the aisle while the music was already playing. People walking down didn’t know which side to swerve to for photos/videos and I walked down with both my parents so it was a bigger mess there.
- Our timeline (that she created) included doing rounds at each table halfway through dinner. No one pulled us aside to start doing rounds. When I noticed that dinner was about to end (and dancing would probably start soon), my husband and I took it upon ourselves to start visiting each table. We got to about half the tables before we were pulled for our parent dances.
- I had tons of people tell me later on that her TWO assistants were literally just standing around not doing anything and we’re on their phones. My brother who is usually completely oblivious to anything going on around him even noticed this.
- She packed up all our decor in our sprinter van (which we were leaving at the park to pickup the next morning) and left the lights on. When we got there, the battery had died and we sat around (the day after our wedding) for over an hour waiting for roadside assistance. Lol. When our guests were boarding the shuttle back to our hotel, our uncle (who owned the sprinter) noticed the lights on and called her to tell her. She told him that they were almost done and it wasn’t going to die in an hour.
- When we unpacked our decor, I found about 10 of our RENTED napkins with our stuff. She’s the one who facilitated the rentals for it so I don’t know how she could have screwed that up. I also got an email a week after my wedding from the venue saying they still had some of my decor (runners, chargers, etc).
- I gave her all my decor two days before the wedding and a list of it. I had individual dessert signs with dedications to our passed grandparents (for their favorite desserts) and somehow that never was placed on the table. She said she never saw it, but when I opened the box, someone had clearly unwrapped the signs (I wrapped them in tissue paper to prevent them from being scratched during transport).
- In addition to the dessert signs, she also didn’t have our neon sign for our photobooth turned on. She blamed it on the photobooth operator even though her team put it up.
- When we first started going over details about the wedding, I told her that I had two important things I needed her team to keep an eye on: no one eat the desserts before dinner and that the card box was kept locked. Our desserts were half gone by cocktail hour (my 16 year old sister had to be the one to alert me and stop guests). When we got our box at the the end of the night, it wasn’t locked and the lock actually was never used (it was still inside the box wrapped in the paper).
- The morning of my wedding, my makeup and hair artists showed up before 8am when we were expecting them around 8:30am. She tried to blame it on me not sending her the final schedule for hair and makeup, but the last line of contact with the artists was actually her telling them to switch some of the schedules around.
- when the makeup artist arrived early, my MOH called her to figure it out (around 8am) and actually woke her up! My first rental delivery at the venue was at 10am and my coordinator lived about 45 minutes away from my venue and was supposed to drop by my hotel beforehand (hotel was around 30 minutes away from her house and 30 minute from the venue). We’re pretty sure she would have been late if we hadn’t have called her! Lol.
