This vendor was everything that I was hoping would not happen to me for a wedding. Do not let the…read moreinitial prices fool you - their pricing structure feels dishonest. We were quoted over $5,000 on wedding florals. Based on our quote, we were provided a dollar figure for day-of setup. I paid the deposit based on this quote.
When I went to pay the rest, I didn't notice, so that's on me, but the vendor doubled the setup from $300 to $700. When I asked, the rationale was that they increase the fee based on difficulty of setup and whether or not they would need an additional employee. A reasonable expectation would be to have 2 employees show up day of wedding. We were wrong. I find this pricing structure intentionally deceitful, especially because this invoice was changed after we already paid the deposit.
After accepting this, the day to receive the bouquets came. The bouquets we received were nothing like what was pictured on the site. While I understand that there is going to be some variance, the quality of the flowers overall was just poor. The buds that were supposed to be fresh and bloom in time were dried out, and pictures show this. You can see one of the leaves being dried out fully. When we emailed about, the vendor offered to replace only those flowers, without acknowledging that the bouquet itself was also just poorly done. We refused, because the next day was going to be too late. Instead, we had to resort to making bouquets ourselves from Costco flowers.
And so, wedding day. We paid $700 for setup, and 4 hours of time. So please, explain to me how the decorator showed up over an hour late? Additionally, to reiterate, we paid $700. Only 1 decorator showed up after Callia already more than doubled the setup charge. My coordinator had to reach out to the vendor first to get any sort of clarity for the missing decorator. When this was brought up in emails, the vendor did not take any accountability and instead blamed miscommunication - this is false as we have proof on our end that there was no communication, let alone miscommunication. Additionally, the decorator didn't fully heed our coordinator, and so some setup was left incomplete. Our coordinator, bless her, felt bad and relieved the decorator a little early as she was stressed due to external circumstances. However, care should have been taken to make sure everything was set up before leaving. As a result, our wedding guests had to step in and assist our coordinator for setting up. How is any of this acceptable for $700?
Unfortunately, the flowers on the day were also not the quality you'd want for a wedding. We have pictures, with petals in the water in vases, bent stems, etc. The vendor took no responsibility for what was bad quality. And this is after our coordinator already disposed of a fair amount of flowers she deemed were unusable. We also paid for 10 vases, but only 8 delivered so we weren't able to use those for their intended purpose. We sent proof, and Callia denied it, but never actually proved on their end that they sent 10. They offered a refund on the 2 as a "gesture of goodwill."
I don't recommend this company, especially for something like wedding florals. You are honestly better off going to Costco and purchasing flowers yourself and DIY-ing it; you won't be out $700 for setup and multiple thousands of dollars worth of florals. I am not one to write a bad review. But if they apologized for sending poor quality, instead of claiming that it met their standards and really just doing a lot of non-apology apologies, I could have probably looked past this. Our requests for partial refunds based on what we felt was fair were also denied - we were met with polite refusals saying that they reviewed and concluded they were fine. Really feels like how when a police department says they investigated themselves and found no wrongdoing. I will say that the corsages and boutonnieres were excellent though!
Please don't let the reviews fool you. We trusted the reviews from years ago, and from a more recent review I saw with a similar experience 3 months ago on Reddit, it's pretty clear to me that their quality has fallen lately, and they don't really abide by their 100% guaranteed policy. My wedding was perfect aside from this issue.
