The WORST mistake I made for my wedding was hiring Liz Coopersmith as a wedding coordinator.
I work as a director of an institution. I deal with many people with differing skillsets and personalities, Liz is the worst person I've ever hired. I found her unorganized, bad with communication, and bad at planning. I have no idea how she can call herself "a wedding planner".
I paid for "partial-wedding services" which she describes as "you will do some of the work, but I can help you with the most to make sure everything goes seamlessly." The truth? I ended up finding my own venue, my own DJ, my own florist, my own photographer, pretty much everything. Looking at other reviews, she seems to do well as a "day-of coordinator" but whole event planning is beyond her scope.
Planning was chaotic. She was late for appointments and blamed it on traffic. She often never followed up on the things I requested. I almost fired her a few times, but didn't in part because my husband convinced me to give her a chance, and in part because I thought my nervousness about the event was making me hard on her.
But it wasn't just me: vendors, bridesmaids, and multiple people in the wedding party complained about her as well . A few vendors had prior experience with her and wondered why in the world I chose her as my wedding planner. She kept calling them and asking them the same questions. A few weeks before the wedding, I reached out to few other wedding coordinators and asked their opinions regarding the wedding. They were surprised how poorly managed my wedding was. Some of them felt bad for me and offered help without any charge. (Without their advice, the decoration at the venue would have been horrible.)
Here are the list of the things didn't go as planned on the wedding day:
1. Timeline - she had an old version of the timeline. Vendors, ourselves, and Liz went over the finalized revised version of the timeline a week prior to the wedding, but with her outdated version, nothing was coordinated. She kept coming up to my table and asking me "what's happening next?" "Is the father-and daughter dance happening?" (This is despite multiple emails and phone calls stating that we are NOT doing a father-daughter dance.) The DJ realized her info was wrong, so he just bypassed her and spoke with me directly the rest of the night, not an ideal situation.
2. Procession orders - She did not know who was walking down the aisle until 3 minutes before the procession started. I myself finally had to line up the wedding party and had them walk down the aisle in the correct order.
3. Procession music - I gave a listing of my requested music 2 weeks prior to the event, and asked her to coordinate with the DJ. On the day of the wedding, though, Liz didn't know what was on the music lists, so right before I was to go down the aisle I was surprised to hear the wrong music was playing. I informed Liz, who insisted it was right, but finally went over to the DJ and found the right music/right list.
4. Cake cutting - Weeks prior, the DJ had asked me to pick a cake cutting song. When the time came, Liz walked us over to the cake without any announcement to the guests, without the song playing, and told us to just start cutting the cake. I told her it wasn't right, but Liz insisted that "other people usually don't have a song with cake cutting, so just go over there and cut the cake". The DJ ultimately realized what was going on and started to play the "cake cutting song". Liz just shrugged it off saying "oh I didn't know there was a song for this," without admitting she was wrong.
5. Dismissive to our parents - Liz placed the seating chart in a non-obvious place and my mother asked Liz to move it. Liz refused, insisting that the chart was fine where it was. When guests came to me saying they didn't know where to sit, I asked Liz to move the chart, and she again refused. I had to practically demand her to move it and only at that point did Liz FINALLY agree to move the chart, and only with great reluctance.
6. Parking - We reserved a paid parking lot for our guests and vendors, but Liz did not let the vendors know, so they ended up paying a parking fee (which of course they had to bill us for). I asked Liz to put up a parking sign so that wedding guests wouldn't miss the parking lot, but she forgot to do it. I reminded Liz and told her the vendors and the guests were confused about parking....but she still didn't do it. Additionally, the parking was not properly marked off, so we saw a lot of non-wedding guests using our parking spots, while a lot of our own wedding guests ended up having to park elsewhere.
There were additional incidents which happened both during the planning and the actual wedding, but I think you get the point. We were fortunate our parents, guests, and bridesmaids were all there to help out and enjoyed the wedding despite the glitches brought about by our wedding planner's ineptitude. read more
