I wish I had read all of the reviews prior to going to this place. It's obvious that Akunna and the rest of the employees at the store monitor and dispute negative comments on their different platforms, so the negative experiences can be a little hard to find. I'll start by saying Akunna is a wonderful saleswoman. We felt very welcomed and attended to early 2019 when I went to try on wedding dresses. However, there were a couple of odd things about how they ran their business that gave us red flags:
1) We weren't under any circumstances allowed to take pictures of the dresses until the papers were signed to buy it, and
2) we weren't allowed to know who designed the dress.
However, I ended up trying on a dress I loved, and we went ahead and bought it. But we still felt weird about not having been allowed to know the designer. Every other wedding store provided this information to give the designers credit. We then read through all of the reviews for this place and dreaded November when my dress was supposed to arrive. It's very likely that A Formal Affair has these dresses made cheaply overseas to mock actual desigers' dresses. SO many negative reviews complain their dresses didn't look like the original, weren't sized correctly, etc. On the day my mom and I went to pick up my dress, they weirdly had us do a 'dress check' to verify it was what we ordered, and we had to sign papers after looking at it and BEFORE even trying it on.
My mom and I had already decided to probably have the final alterations done by a personal seamstress, but A Formal Affair repeatedly would mention their "neighbor seamstress" in the business "next door". The seamstress' building is literally connected to A Formal Affair. I tried on my dress (which, thankfully, was the fit and look of the dress I tried on... I think we were one of the lucky ones in that aspect), and she mentioned changing to go next door to the seamstress. I asked if I could just keep the dress on and walk through the connecting door, but she said they don't use that door. We didn't think much of it, so I got out of my dress, put it back in it's bag, changed clothes, and Akunna walked my mom and I up the stairs, out the door, and down the side of the building to the front entrance of the seamstress. We walked into the seamstress' office.... and the seamstress was the same lady who was just working as the receptionist upstairs at A Formal Affair??? She clearly had just walked down the stairs and used the connecting door. My mom and I felt SO uncomfortable. Several negative reviews mention issues with alterations, but A Formal Affair tries to make it very clear that this is a "separate business" - most likely so that customers won't hold them liable/write negative views specifically for A Formal Affair, even though it's clearly run by the same people. I changed into my dress to have her figure out what alterations were needed, and this lady could not pin my dress. It was as if she's never pinned a dress for alterations. She struggled so long to pin parts of the dress that I stopped her before we were finished and told her we were going to go elsewhere for the alterations.
I would NOT recommend this place to anyone, but ESPECIALLY to a bride. In reading through their negative reviews (specifically on Google Reviews), you'll notice they only respond to some of them. They don't appropriately address the concerns regarding their policies that I've stated above. Instead of simply apologizing, they actually will argue with a customer's experience, which is something that I think is unprofessional. read more