First I have to say that I never write reviews but felt compelled to write this one after having experienced the worst business and customer service I have had in my entire life. Monica Chimes Floral, Inc. in West Harrison, New York was not only the worst wedding vendor experience I had while planning my wedding in June but Monica personally is one of the worst people I have ever met and dealt with. Wedding planning was extremely enjoyable for me and I fell in love with the process. I planned my wedding entirely on my own with the help of my wonderful mother. I really did my research and took my time finding what I thought were the perfect vendors for me. I practically became a botanist, learning about and planning the flowers for the wedding and for the bouquets for me and my bridesmaids. I am a very caring, personable person so finding vendors that were pleasant and I connected with was important to me as well. I was completely shocked about my error in judgment about Monica and her team and unfortunately when I found out it was too late and the damage had been done.
One of Monica's employees was assigned to my wedding. Clearly, Monica has terrible judgment to allow someone like this employee to represent her company. Right before our photos were to start, the bouquets were dropped off in the room where we were getting ready. We did not see them being dropped off. They were dropped off without anyone telling us, or calling us that morning, to let us know that the bouquets we thought we ordered, were not the bouquets we were getting! The flower colors in the bouquets for my bouquet and the four bridesmaids were TOTALLY INCORRECT. Not only did I clearly tell Monica and her employee that I ONLY wanted peach, yellow, white and blue flowers MANY times (they knew since the samples of the centerpieces were those colors) but it was clearly written in our contract. I even created and sent them my own booklet of pictures and descriptions detailing EVERYTHING I wanted specifically for the bouquets, aisle decorations, cocktail flowers, etc. Monica's employee even promised me that she would send me a picture of everything the day before the wedding, and of course this never happened. Not only did the bouquets have bright hot pink flowers but the "blue" was actually purple. These are two colors that I definitely did not want, did not fit into my color scheme and were not listed in the contract. Not only was there pink, but they picked the worst type of flower for a bouquet, ones that instantly fell apart. Another issue we had with the flowers was the vases they used for the flowers placed down the aisle were supposed to be in low galvanized buckets (also in the contract) and discussed with them numerous times, but instead they were in tall, smooth, silver vases.
Sadly, messing up the flowers on the most important day of my life is not even the worst part of it. The worst part of the experience was dealing with Monica and her total lack of customer service skills. I work in Sales and know just how important good customer service is. I was flabbergasted to find out how Monica aka Monica Chimes Floral, Inc. handled it. I was away on my honeymoon and out of the kindness of her heart, my mom decided to call Monica and let her know how upset we were about the bouquets so that I did not have to deal with it once I got home. Instead of apologizing for the crucial mistake, Monica was extremely nasty and defensive. She suggested that we contact the photographer and have her change the color of the pink flowers in all of our photographs! She said there was nothing she could do, it was over. She said she would refund $200 for the actual cost of the pink flowers that were in 5 bouquets. After this phone call, my mom realized how insulting this was and also, how rude Monica was on the phone. She wrote an email to her, expressing this and that she would write a negative review. Monica said during that call "I will refund you all of your money if you sign papers saying you will not write a negative review or take me to Small Claims Court." My mom agreed. Monica would not do this through the mail so my parents had to travel to Westchester when Monica herself did not have the decency to show up at the store, but sent another employee. My mom saw the check - it was for $275 - which was the price of all five bouquets. This was not what we agreed to. It was not worth $275 for us to not write a negative review and we were further infuriated that she misrepresented the refund on the telephone. We will admit, for the full price of the wedding flowers, we were going to agree to not write a negative review. But alas...
Do yourself a favor and do not do business with such a mean, awful person (when we were in the store to sign the papers, the employee called her to explain the misunderstanding, and she immediately started screaming at my mom over the phone) and add stress and uncertainty to such a special day? read more