Charlotte Armstrong
2/5
At the time of booking Deborah was very friendly and I was pleased. Months past and I had received no contact from her, including no invoice. I got worried when I looked at the receipt for the deposit and saw that she had written down the wrong date for our wedding. Luckily when I emailed her about it she had the correct date in her diary. When we put the deposit down she told me that I had plenty of time to choose colours as they didn't need to be confirmed until 6 weeks before the wedding. At this point I put a reminder in my calendar for 6 weeks before the wedding and if it wasn't for me doing this I'm not sure whether she would have contacted me as when I contacted her about arranging a meeting she had lost some of my details.
We turn up to the meeting and the unit is closed and lights are off. We sit in the car and wait.... and wait.... after 15 minutes and literally just as we were about to give up and go home, a van pulls up and she gets out. I explain that we had a meeting arranged and have been waiting for 15 minutes. She says there was traffic but doesn't apologise.
We head into her unit and she is very disorganised. She has lost her keys so can't get into the warehouse area to show us the sash colours (which was the entire purpose of this meeting!). Eventually she calls her partner who comes with the keys, however, from what I can remember she did not bring out any more colours and we were left to look through a small collection of colours hanging on a rail.
When I made the order we paid to have 2 colours of sash but due to the lack of choice we had to go with just the one colour as the others didn't coordinate. We got no discount for this although my mum (who paid the deposit) was sure we paid a little extra for the 2 colour option. Either way, we were let down when we were expecting to be able to have 2 colours and could only have 1.
At this point we change the number need, adding an extra 5 and was given a verbal quote. We didn't write this down and no paper quote was given. When we got home we realised we only knew the the original quote from when the deposit was made and so I sent her the original amount and an email explaining that if she could let me know the extra then I would send it straight away.
Two and a half weeks later and I had had no reply. I email her again asking if she had got my first email and if I can have a receipt for the money I had sent her.
8 days later and, again, no reply. I check the opening times of her business and she was not due to close for 2 hours. I try to call on the phone - no answer.
After no response for exactly 3 weeks I was angry and worried. I was about to say something publicly on her Facebook page when I saw the option to message her and decided to give her the benefit of one more chance to respond. Miraculously, she did!
She apologised and explained she had had troubles and lost some information (disorganisation or lack of backup). I requested a receipt and a quote for the remaining balance. The next day the receipt was emailed to me with a note saying that as a gesture of good will she would not be charging me the extra £14 due which was nice of her.
At this point my opinion of her business was quite neutral. However, on the day of the wedding I was very disappointed to see that there were several sashes on chairs that were quite obviously the wrong shade and stood out, one of these being my chair. I checked my husbands to see whether it was the same on his but no. He had the correct colour but my chair and several others that I could see had the wrong pink-y shade of lilac, as opposed to the blue-y lilac I have ordered. Not a big deal to a lot of people but I wanted my wedding to be perfect and would have expected to get what I had paid for.
Overall, I would not recommend Debroni Events due to the issues I have had.
