Desserts By Dana Delaware

Desserts By Dana Delaware

Delaware, US

0
Welcome lesman
shan star rating
shan 7 months

MY BIGGEST WEDDING REGRET: Hiring Chioma/DURE Events for my wedding. If we continued to work with her up until our wedding date, I fear it would have been a total disaster and we would have been out of so much more money. I feel like my fiancé and I have been completely scammed. I wish I would have taken the advice of the above 1-star review posted on 11/22, but was fooled by all the other 5-star reviews that are now leaving me bewildered after having worked with her. I barely have had time to write this review because I am so busy picking up the pieces of my wedding that Chioma and DURE Events left in shambles after almost complete neglect, disorganization and deceit from day one. My wedding is now less than 2 months away and I am beyond stressed as a result of Chioma’s procrastination and unprofessionalism; not to mention, I am short THOUSANDS of dollars and even after Chioma committed to giving a portion back she has gone completely unresponsive since that communication (almost 4 months ago now). I now have to resort to taking legal action to reclaim my funds that I basically gifted to her because she absolutely did NOT do the job that was promised in our contract, and because of her neglect I have had to pay more to make up for the damage she has inflicted on my wedding planning process. She has put us in a predicament in which now we are shelling out extra money, time and resources to scramble to save our wedding which is the exact OPPOSITE of what we expected when we hired a full time planner back in December, 2022. Hiring DURE has put a strain on our finances, relationship, and careers. I wish I would have NEVER hired Chioma and just planned this starting in December on my own instead of wasting time trusting her. There was so much damage done over the months that we were working with Choima that I would have to write an essay to capture it all, so I will just list the main shortcomings below: - Missed calls that she scheduled for us - Late on calls that she scheduled for us and calls with other vendors that she was expected to attend (wasting their time as well) - Failed to book makeup artist, hair stylist, DJ, emcee, and hotel blocks for guests. - Claimed she had reached out to vendors and bridal shops that I later discovered never happened (I confirmed the lies by contacting them myself) - Delegated my engagement shoot dress and wedding dress search to a friend of hers who did not even work for the company; the result was a terribly ugly and ill-fitting dress that was nowhere near the measurements I provided, shipped from Nigeria. It arrived only 48 hours before the scheduled photo shoot which ultimately had to be cancelled because I had nothing to wear, nor did she book anyone to do my hair or makeup. This pushed back our wedding invitation send date. I never got a refund for the dress and ultimately planned all aspects of the photo shoot myself because she proved herself incapable of doing it. - Failed to book a hairstylist ahead of photo shoot, and in desperation took me to a hole-in-the-wall hair salon by the projects that we spotted while walking to a tailor (another failed attempt to try to salvage the terrible dress sent from Nigeria mentioned above) to ask if anyone in there “did wedding hair” – I have never seen anything more unprofessional in my life - Committed to getting me a custom wedding dress and not only made no progress on actually executing on that, but also wasted 4 months of our time so that in the end I had no choice but to resort to ordering my white dress from a store, had to put a rush on it and will be left with hardly any time for alterations before the wedding date. - Wasted couple’s time and money by saying that she is working on something that she has made no progress on or simply did not do (i.e. communicating with vendors, researching vendors, booking hotel room blocks). After 5 months of her doing research and “making progress” nothing had actually been booked or planned successfully. I have never seen someone so effectively WASTE time and convince people that progress was being made behind the scenes. - Although in our contract we had a minimum number of vendors that she would introduce us to, she never did the research to find appropriate vendors for us. Instead, she pushed a select few vendors on us who were very highly-priced and many of whom did not fit our budget or criteria. I understand that many wedding planners do this to get a fee on the back-end from their “preferred vendors”, and do not truly put the clients’ best interests first. - Before our scheduled calls, quickly “updated”/edited our googledocs to make it seem like something had been accomplished since our last meeting (we have timestamps!) when in reality there were no updates to report I can’t express how disappointed we are in both Chioma and DURE Events. Toward the very end when my fiancé was ready to be done with her, we still were generous enough to have a very transparent conversation in which we gave her one final chance to redeem herself. We kindly asked her to start correcting some of her mistakes before the next call (which required minimal effort), and even after that final chance she still continued to be untruthful and pretend to be doing things that were not being done. The fact that she didn’t take that additional opportunity to make things right was the final straw on the camel’s back and 5 months after booking her we finally separated with her and started to make progress on our own (despite our hectic full time jobs!). We were super patient with her the entire time and gave her multiple chances, and she continued to prove herself to be unprofessional, unreliable and deceitful. The least she could have done after all she put us through was return our money to us, especially after putting in writing that she would (she has since been completely unresponsive – shocker!) I am African-American and my fiancé is Nigerian and we were really excited to work with and support a Nigerian-owned business, but now I would think twice before doing that again because I would never want to put myself or anyone through this. It is SHAMEFUL.