I hired Stacy
to do weekend-of coordination for my insane-over-the-top-weekend-long-burning-man-style
wedding in May of 2019. It was three days of craziness at a summer camp in the
San Bernardino national forest, and it the event was guaranteed to challenge
any planner’s abilities – but Stacy assured me she could handle it. Turns out
she couldn’t.
All throughout
the planning process, Stacy was incredibly hard to reach and painfully slow
about returning my communications. She’d promised to be available to help me
evaluate vendor contracts (read them through for me and let me know if I should
be concerned about any clauses), help me negotiate my arrangements with the
venue, basic stuff like that – but I would often have to chase her down with a
half-dozen texts and emails and a lot of stress before she would respond. And
each time, she had some excuse about how her power had gone out or her cell
phone wasn’t working or her internet was down or something equally inane. I’m
sorry – but if you’re in a profession that is driven by communication as
wedding planning, you need reliable technology rather than excuses.
Our division of labor was that I would plan the wedding (I’m a professional
organizer by trade), and she would step in starting a few weeks before to wrangle
vendors and create a weekend-of plan – then from the moment we set foot at the
venue, she would be in charge of making sure everything happened according to
my plan. She was to handle the décor and set-up, managing meals and food
throughout the weekend, keeping folks on schedule and making sure activities
happened when they were supposed to. But unfortunately, she and her staff dropped
the ball in nearly every arena all weekend long.
When I
contracted with Stacy, she had promised me her services plus those of three assistants
for the duration of the weekend – which in my mind, meant two actual grown
people who did this kind of work professionally for a living. However, I only
got one fully adult assistant – Stacy brought her two minor children to serve
as the other assistants. (She also drug her husband along to help some during
the set-up stage, but he left after that.)
First off, I
let me say that her one for-realz employee John was FUCKING AMAZING! However,
we were less than impressed with the rest of Stacy’s minions. These kids spent
most of their time either goofing off until someone came and told them to do a
task, whining about the amount of work, or fighting with mom (she and the
daughter got into regular screaming fits with each other throughout the weekend,
and there was one point when my DJ felt the need to step in and defend the son
when Stacy was berating him – completely unprofessional and unacceptable
behavior). When we paid for three “assistants,” we did not expect two of those
assistants to be minor children who were going to require insane amounts of
babysitting and who argued with “the boss” every time you said anything to
them. We expected three assistants of John’s caliber – folks who could work
independently, who could problem-solve and figure out how to get a task done,
who took initiative rather than sitting around waiting for instructions before
tackling an already-on-the-timeline to-do – and who grasped that whole “ask the
wedding coordinator, not the bride” concept (I can’t tell you the number of
times one of Stacy’s kids bugged me about how to handle a problem, and I had to
tell them “go ask your mother, that’s not my job this weekend”). Stacy’s
children, while lovely people, have neither the maturity nor the training and professional
demeanor required for this industry – and they were a completely inappropriate
staffing choice for an event of this size and magnitude. Frankly, I felt that I
should not have been charged full assistant price for either of them – as they
did not perform full
assistant
services.
There were
also some pretty egregious regulatory violations committed by Stacy’s staff. At
one point the first day, I caught two of her folks SMOKING on site when it had
been made abundantly clear in every discussion, on our wedsite, and in the
camp’s printed rules that this was a MASSIVE legal infringement (in a national forest
in a state that has been catching fire every 15 minutes over the past couple of
years) – this have gotten her entire staff kicked off the property for the
weekend and landed us with a $10,000 fine from the national park service! I also
witnessed her son handling bagels and rolls (and her daughter serving pizza to
my guests) with their BARE HANDS! What if one of our guests got sick because her
kids engaged in unsanitary food service practices?
There’s also
the fact that all throughout the weekend, I kept finding jobs half-done or done
in a very slipshod manner. Here’s the thing – I’m incredibly anal-retentive,
and provided Stacy with DETAILED descriptions of what I wanted in terms of décor,
food service, the activities to occur during each segment of the weekend. We
also had several meetings beforehand to discuss the logistics, and Stacy even
created a “timeline” translating my wishes into a plan of attack. (I put this
in quotation marks because her plan was a total joke – the first draft not at
all reflecting my priorities or the level of service she promised me, the final
draft super sketchy and incomplete, and the whole thing delivered MUCH later
than Stacy had promised in her initial pitch to get me to hire her.)
However, any
planning was made irrelevant when much of my instruction and the vast majority
of her “timeline” was disregarded the actual wedding weekend. I kept finding decorations
I had provided which were never put out, reception food laid out according to
specification, and my eyeball jello shots for our toast randomly sitting out
for anyone to take along with the buffet food (what should have been a big
“ta-da” reveal moment, the same as you would for a bride handing out champagne
flutes, ended up being an “oh yeah, you might have already eaten some of these
but now we’re using them for the toast” afterthought.) These might seem like minor
details, but it’s details like this that made our wedding so epic – and it frustrated
me mightily that Stacy considered them not important enough to worry about
after I’d spent months planning all these details.
Oh, and did
I mention that Stacy’s crew actually broke some of our décor, shoving it into her
van? (We had a unity volcano that looked like us, and they snapped two of the
point off with their mishandling.) Not cool.
Of course
our biggest complaint for the weekend was how much of our time we had to devote
to doing Stacy’s job. When we hired her, we were told that we just needed to
show up with a smile and a costume and enjoy the weekend – she’d take care of
everything else. Instead, we had to devote half the day Friday to decorating
the reception hall (when it was supposed to be done mid-afternoon and by 3PM it
was maybe a quarter finished and no one was taking any steps to get it completed),
a big chunk of Saturday morning to setting up the ceremony site (when it was
also not done and there was no activity in that direction even after breakfast
ended), and a large part of Sunday morning helping break down/pack up. Not only
did this add to our stress and exhaustion, but we also had to push our photo
session much later than we wanted, and kept us from taking as many pictures as
we would have liked. We were also not happy about the fact that so many of our
guests HAD to pitch in and help to get everything done. Our friends assisting
should have just been gravy on top of your staff’s efforts – instead, it turned
out that their manual labor was NECESSARY to get the basic job done. Unacceptable.
And yes it
was a big job, far beyond what is required for a normal wedding – but Stacy knew
that from the very start. We’d always been incredibly forthright about the
scale of this event, she saw the layout and size of the campground way back
months and months before at our first walk-through, and she saw the level of
detail I included in my wedding plan. Stacy assured us that she could
accomplish what I wanted in the available time with only 4 staff members. I
even said to her (multiple times) that if this wasn’t enough staff, let me know
and we’d be fine with more people – I feel like Stacy seriously
underestimated
what it would take to accomplish this wedding, and we are the ones who paid the
price.
We also feel
like Stacy’s “coordinating” of events was not in line with what she assured us of
when we contracted with her. She told us that a big part of what you do is
“manage” the timeline of events – but yet we (and our friends and our
photographer) ended up doing a great deal of the work in that arena. As a
bride, I shouldn’t have to come ASK my coordinator what the procedure is for
getting me down the aisle – that should have been something she prepped me on
well before the actual ceremony. (Stacy didn’t.) I shouldn’t have to tell my
coordinator that she was sending the flower girl and ring bearer down the aisle
to the wrong music (which Stacy did) – she should be so familiar with our
ceremony that she knows exactly what’s happening at each point along the way. (Stacy
was barely present for our rehearsal – screwing around on her phone and not
paying attention while I led the run-through.) I shouldn’t have to tell my
reception emcee “Hey, we’re supposed to do the cake pops and toast” or “Hey
we’re supposed to have a garter/bouquet toss” followed by “but Stacy hasn’t
said anything to me about how that’s going to work and I don’t see her setting
anything up, so can you please go find out?” My guests shouldn’t have to storm
the kitchen to get cream for their breakfast coffee because her crew never put
it out. And I most assuredly shouldn’t have to ask you why our officiant wasn’t
instructed to sign the marriage license after the ceremony – these are all BIG
parts of Stacy’s job description as wedding coordinator that just didn’t
happen.
But the best
part came late in the reception evening when I found out that Stacy had thrown away
$800-$1000 worth of catering food, not only without either Ben’s or my
permission, but in direct contradiction of my verbal and written instructions.
At a wedding where I’ve told my wedding coordinator that I want to take any uneaten
food home (and where we’ve got “zero-muthaflippin’ food waste” signs
everywhere), she made an executive decision to toss the leftovers WITHOUT EVER
SPEAKING TO
ME ABOUT IT. Her justification when I confronted her about this of “we weren’t
going to have access to the kitchen after 7AM” was nowhere near acceptable – if
she’d come to me and told me that beforehand, I would have said that I would be
happy to get up at 7 and get the food out of the fridge myself. And Ben
confided that Stacy asked him about throwing away the food and he told her
specifically not to. As far as we’re concerned, that’s the equivalent of
destroying our personal property.
This was not (as I was promised) an event where I was free to have fun and not
worry about the details – rather than helping me to better enjoy the weekend,
every interaction with Stacy’s staff (except for John) created more stress and
anxiety. And both my photographer and DJ were SHOCKED at the level of
unprofessionalism displayed by Stacy and her kids. (At one point Stacy asked my
DJ what was happening next during the reception, the DJ showed Stacy her
printed schedule of the weekend's events, and Stacy took a photo of it with her
phone – the DJ isn't supposed to provide the wedding coordinator with this
information, it's supposed to be the other way around!)
To add insult to injury, when I contacted Stacy about these concerns and asked for
fair compensation for the thrown-out food, as well as the level of service that
we were promised and did not receive (meaning the difference between what she
charged for a full assistant and the current California minimum wage for the
hours charged us for each of her children, as well as the hours charged us for her
crew to be decorating, setting up the ceremony area, and breaking down the site
that we and our friends spent doing their work for them) – Stacy did nothing.
Her response was not “yeah, things didn’t go as I’d planned, but I want to make
you happy” – it was “I’m sorry you feel that way, I need to speak to my attorney”
and then nothing. Stacy made it incredibly clear to me that she gives not one
crap about actual customer satisfaction or taking responsibility when something
in her business goes sideways.
I didn’t want to have to leave this review – but Stacy has given me no choice. She
forced me into filing a dispute with my credit card company, and she’s forced
me into spreading the word about her questionable business practices. She’s a
sweet person who I believe simply got in over her head and did not expect the
weekend to go as it did – but she did nothing to remedy the situation, and that
decision has destroyed her reputation with me. I no longer see Stacy as a
solid, upstanding businessperson – and I don’t want to see someone else go
through what I did with her. If you’re thinking about hiring her for your
event, caveat emptor.