If I could give zero stars, this is one business that I'd give it to. Our wedding occurred in October 2022 and we had an absolutely terrible experience with Kim / Ebeling Events as our wedding planner. Kim was incredibly unprofessional throughout, and it was clear that she did not prioritize our wedding day from start to end.
Throughout the planning process, Kim was unresponsive and disorganized, often leaving us feeling like our wedding was not a priority and ultimately adding an extensive amount of stress to the whole process. We had to constantly follow up with her to ensure that tasks were completed and details were not overlooked.
During our final venue walk-through, Kim began bad-mouthing another bride/client of hers (who was having her wedding at our same venue the week before ours) to my husband and parents. Kim continued to divulge that she also purposefully gave a ridiculously overpriced quote to a desperate bride that reached out to her at the last minute for her services so as to discourage the bride from hiring Kim's team since she "really did not want to work that wedding." We were completely shocked and appalled at the behavior and quite frankly, at the pride that exuded from Kim in giving a potential client / desperate bride such a hard time. All of this made us deeply uneasy about working with Kim but we felt stuck with her since we were one month out from the wedding.
About two months before the wedding, Kim offloaded us onto one of her associates for our actual wedding day. We understand that lots of wedding planners do this. However, this was an issue for us only because Kim assured us that she would personally be working our wedding when we initially interviewed her for the job months beforehand. This was our only deal-breaker when choosing a coordinator so we never would have hired her if she could not guarantee that she would be at our wedding. We felt bait-and-switched but at that point, we had such little confidence in Kim's reliability that we didn't push back. Even more, after meeting our assigned coordinator over Zoom one time, we were warned that we were not allowed to reach out to her until the day of the wedding or else we would be charged an extra hourly rate for the coordinator's time. We were forced to continue to liaise only through Kim, even though she wouldn't be the person on-site at our wedding. And believe it or not, Kim's communication actually got spottier and she became even more difficult to reach leading up to the wedding.
At one point, we had also opted to pay Kim's team to set up our dessert table. After a lot of back and forth insisting that her team could only set out our cake at the exact time we were cutting it (which was at 7:30 PM so it wasn't exactly that early in the evening), Kim snapped and told me that her team needed to focus on the job they were hired for that day--wedding coordination. It was baffling that Kim couldn't understand why we would want our cake displayed for at least 30 minutes before cutting straight into it (since we spent money designing the cake). It was all the more puzzling that she was acting like she was doing us a favor when the dessert table set-up as an additional $125 service that we paid for. Kim ended up apologizing to me on the phone for snapping at me because she was going through a personal issue. I can sympathize with a personal situation / off-day but her overall poor attitude and communication beyond just that one day is really not excusable. Our caterers heard about our situation and said "no problem, we will set out your cake and treats for free since it'll take us 10 minutes." I can't stress enough how our other amazing vendors filled in the gaps left by Kim.
On the day of the wedding, Kim's team actually forgot to set out the table numbers that we rented from her, which caused confusion and frustration among our guests. When we brought this to Kim's attention after the wedding, she didn't even apologize for the error. Instead, she blamed that there was a lot going on that day, even though managing the event is her job as the wedding planner. Our entire team of vendors hustled to make our day seamless and my maid of honor had just one comment about our coordinators-- "where were they? I think I saw your coordinator only a handful of times sipping on some lemonade and relaxing."
If you look at all my other wedding vendor reviews, you'll see that we gave everyone five out of five stars. Run for the hills when it comes to Ebeling Events and Kim. Even our venue owner called working with Kim a nightmare and did not want to see her working at his venue again. We were left feeling like we wasted our money on a service that was not delivered as promised, and that we had to deal with unnecessary drama, unprofessionalism and incompetence throughout the entire process. Overall, the experience was extremely stressful and dissatisfactory. We would never ever recommend Kim / Ebeling Events to anyone. read more