We hired Leigh & Co. for month of coordination for our wedding this past April. I'm a very organized person, and I came in with spreadsheets and lists and layouts to make our weddi...ng setup as smooth as possible. We relied on our coordinator, Jaden, to help us put together a timeline, manage the timing on the actual day, and to set up decor.
Things were okay until the timeline went out to our vendors. Unbeknownst to me, one of our vendors had responded to Jaden with concerns about the timeline. They never got a response from her. I only found out when I sent my own round of emails a few weeks out from the wedding to check in with everyone and make sure we were good to go. The vendor was clearly stressed and let us know that they wouldn't be able to render their services in the timeline as established, and we ended up hashing out a plan to make it work with them directly. I communicated all of this to Jaden, she apologized, we adjusted the timeline, and we moved on. Mistakes happen. I would've let it go.
Unfortunately, on the day of, the time management became an issue. We had a very tight timeline that I knew we'd probably stray from during the morning, which I was fine with. What was extremely frustrating for us (and our wedding party and families) was that very little was communicated to them when that did inevitably happen. I had assumed a printed version of the timeline would be made available to everyone, and for things to be frequently communicated. Neither happened. I hardly saw Jaden or her assistant the whole morning and assumed they were making things happen, keeping folks on time and informed about any delays. As it turns out, nobody had any idea where she was most of the morning. The florist (a partner vendor of Leigh & Co.) was late - she should have built in more buffer time on the delivery - and it threw off the morning. Much of the timeline management fell to our photographer and my husband, who were both visibly stressed, which was exactly the sort of thing I had wanted to avoid in hiring a coordinator.
We had larger decor (an arch, and giant paper flowers) that we were told they could not help with for safety reasons, so we had some family friends help set those up. I'm not sure if they or the coordinators set up the signage, but they were too low and should have been something a coordinator would have caught and corrected. The table decor was set up well, at least.
I was unaware of most of this until after the wedding, when several people told me separately how frustrating their experience was with Jaden. They saw her assistant more than her. There were other small things that all just added up to a feeling that we might as well have not had a coordinator. It was disappointing and I ended up feeling like I could have saved a good chunk of money to just have myself and friends handle all of these things. I think we would've done a better job, to be honest.
I think a lot of it boils down to the fact that I was a very prepared bride, and that is maybe not the norm. So it's possible that Jaden assumed *I* had prepared for a lot of these things. If I were a more hands off bride she might have approached it differently, I don't know, but at the end of the day I wouldn't recommend working with Leigh & Co. We hired who we could on a budget, and thought we were doing better by hiring a professional company over an individual off of a Facebook group. We were wrong.