I believe XO the Girls employee Marcie is very dishonest and I have several experiences to which I will list below.
First, they refused to answer my calls and would instead email me back saying “you have to book through our website” … meaning,... pay $25 otherwise we won’t talk to you. Which I did the first time, but then I had a couple of follow up questions, which I figured it would take 2 seconds to discuss over the phone, but Marcie refused to call me back. So of course I booked another session. It was disappointing to have to pay $25 in lieu of the common courtesy of returning my phone calls.
Second, I believe they are dishonest about their prices. Marcie quoted me one price during our first virtual call. However, when I did end up booking with her, I noticed on the bill after the fact she had charged me a higher price for the linens I had rented. In the high stress environment of wedding planning, I wasn’t about to argue with her a week before my wedding day since I already had a million other things to do. But no customer deserves to have their prices raised at the last minute without any explanation, hardly an ethical business practice.
Last but not least, after the wedding, I received a $900 bill from Marcie saying there was wax damage on all of the linens and they are all unsalvageable. ALL OF THEM. She was charging me 3 times the price of the rental. I was shocked. I called my florist and she said “we use these candles all the time, we have never had any issues before”. We tried to negotiate with her, but she wouldn’t back down. I did truly believe her at first and I did feel bad as they are a small business and I wanted to be fair. She even said “you can come get them after you pay, since we can’t ever use them again for an event”. So anyway, we did pay her in full. Since I was away for our honeymoon I had my father go pick up the linens. When I get back, I noticed the color was off. I had ordered 16 of the white lamour linens, but only 6 of the linens she gave us were actual white color, the rest were ivory… almost yellow/cream color. See picture. These were NOT even my linens. I was APPALLED. I emailed Marcie asking about it and at first she didn’t reply. I followed up and eventually she replied saying “Linens come in all different shades” that is an exact quote from her copy + paste. Followed by “this case is closed”. How rude! I planned every aspect of my wedding day meticulously—I was insulted that she thought I wouldn’t notice the difference in color.
Based on what I just mentioned, I have strong reason to believe I did not receive the same linens as I rented. It is my belief Marcie pulled a fast one on me, and handed me whatever old lines she had laying around and charged me a fee for linens that were not even damaged. In fact, after a thorough investigation, some of them don’t even have wax on them, despite Marcie insisting that all the linens did.
As a customer, I do not believe I was treated fairly by XO the Girls. Especially, once I confronted Marcie about this situation, I thought she handled it very poorly and was very dismissive. She even countered with “the linens you got are all white” when I have a picture of them next to each other and are very clearly NOT white. After this experience, I would personally never consider hiring them for any of my future events, and I would urge anyone considering using them to take the above into account.