We hired Carrie for day-of coordination. When we first started working with Carrie, she was great! She has always been very nice and was initially helpful and responsive when we had few questions. She even recommended a florist, who we worked q...uite well with.
About 6 weeks before our wedding (the worst possible time), the service we received from Touch of Elegance and Design significantly worsened. We scheduled a phone call with Carrie only to have her stand us up for the call. She later e-mailed us to reschedule, and we had a helpful conversation where we talked through the step-by-step details of what we wanted to happen. We were taking our own notes, but she told us that she would send hers to us right after the conversation, so we didn't need to. We should not have listened. She did not upload our timeline or the notes from our call even after we emailed and called her several times over 2 weeks asking for it. We eventually ended up re-doing the timeline ourselves.
After three weeks of leaving multiple messages and sending many e-mails, she finally had an intern upload our notes to the Planning Pod website once we left a voicemail threatening to take legal action. (Said intern pretended that she had done so right after the call, even though Planning Pod timestamps uploaded documents, and we could see that it was done minutes before her e-mail.)
About a week later, Carrie called us apologizing and saying that she was out of the country. By this time, we had been frustrated for about a month, with no idea what was going on, and we had done most of the work we paid Carrie to do. Since our wedding was so close, we were deciding whether to find a new person for the day-of or just pray that our remaining service would be reliable.
It was awful to be in this position, because we had already paid for her services and we did not think we could find anyone else who was supposed to be as good at the last minute.
Carrie showed up at our wedding rehearsal on time with (we found out later) her father, Gail. Gail mentioned that he and Carrie would be working together for our wedding. It was a strange dynamic because Gail was trying to run the show, but this was our first time meeting him and Carrie was pretty quiet most of the time. Nevertheless, we went through the run of show and things were fine.
On our wedding day, Gail showed up on time and was helpful in setting up for the wedding and reception. Carrie, however, never even showed up and gave us no indication that she wouldn't be there ahead of time. Gail was accompanied by a young gentleman; the young man was helping, but he was in athletic clothing--not dressed for a wedding.
Because Gail wasn't the person we had been working with, there were several things that my bridesmaids had to fix once we arrived at the venue. He stayed for the amount of time we paid for, but most of the actual coordination and help was done by the owners of our venue. This was a really disappointing and ironic experience because of all the vendors we worked with, the one whose primary responsibility was to ensure that we were not stressed made us stress the most.
We would have loved to be able to give Touch of Elegance five stars, because that would have meant that they contributed to the amazing wedding we had. However, if not for the support we got from other vendors, this could have been a disaster if we had solely trusted them with the day-of coordination.