Our wedding was in May 2023, so it has taken me a few months to decide if I wanted to leave a review or not. I relied on a lot of reviews when planning my own wedding, so I decided... to leave this review and explain why I would not recommend hiring Willow and Thistle for your big day. We originally hired them because they were listed as a preferred vendor from our venue. A year and half later, our wedding came around and we learned that W&T was no longer the preferred florist for our venue. This now makes a lot of sense.
Communication was extremely lacking. Whenever I had questions, I had to send multiple emails to receive any responses. I never received any invoices unless I specifically asked. I had to ask a few times to be sent the form to make my final payment. (Why should I have to ASK to pay someone?). When it came time to do our final meeting before the big day, it felt incredibly rushed. We were in and out of there in no more than 5 minutes and it left me feeling a little uneasy, but I trusted the process.
I was asked to provide a phone number for our emergency contact person, someone other than the bride/groom, so that if there were issues on the day of, we wouldn’t need to be bothered. We appointed my maid of honor as our contact person. The day before the wedding, W&T sent a preview photo of my bridal bouquet to my maid of honor for approval, instead of sending it to me. A simple mistake I guess, but still frustrating when running around the day before your wedding. Although the flowers were beautiful and in great shape, I was disappointed at how small my bouquet turned out to be when seeing it in person the next morning. Simply put, it did not feel like $300 worth of flowers. I didn’t mention it at the time as it was a busy morning, and I acknowledge that. But the more I looked at it, the more I realized how small it was.
When we had our initial meeting, we had seen a beautiful vintage couch they had available for rental. We decided then that we would rent it for the day-of to use for photos and our sweetheart table seating. Fast forward to our final meeting, I was hoping we’d get to see the couch again just to confirm it was the one we wanted (this did not happen). On the day of, the team dropped off not a couch, but a small chair only big enough to sit one person. As if that wasn’t frustrating enough, they refused to talk to my maid of honor (contact person) while my husband and I were taking pictures, and instead kept insisting they needed to talk to the bride. What was the point of having a contact person at all??
W&T did come by our venue with two couch options to show us, neither one was the original couch or anything close to it. I appreciate them trying to make it right, however, they took back the small chair, both couches, and still kept the $250 that we paid for the couch, despite the fact that it wasn’t used (or provided). If anything, they should have verified at our final meeting which couch we had signed up for. This was the one thing that went wrong on our wedding day, and for that I am grateful, but it does leave a bad taste in my mouth regarding our choice in florist.
In all, I feel like what we received was not worth what we spent. The quality of the flowers was great. The arrangements and candles were beautiful and achieved our vision for the ceremony/reception. However, I think the stress of working with W&T was just not worth it. It was clear why our venue (who we LOVED) no longer prefers them.