My wife and I hired Rachel J Events to plan our 2022 summer wedding. We are so happy to be married,…read moreand many things about our wedding were beautiful, but our experience with Rachel as a wedding planner left many things to be desired.
We spoke to a few different local wedding planners and ended up selecting Rachel because of the promise of experience and organizational programs she used. Prior to beginning meetings about our wedding, we agreed upon a set wedding budget.
After hiring Rachel, we first had an initial meeting to discuss our overall vision for the design of our wedding--prior to this meeting, Rachel had us upload inspiration photos to the client portal. In the second meeting, Rachel and her team presented us with the first design layout based on our requests. In this initial meeting, we were shown gorgeous plans that were well aligned with our vision, and we were so excited. Imagine our shock when after being shown this beautiful plan, we learned that the proposed design plan had already exceeded our wedding budget by 3 times, which didn't include other expenses such as food, DJ, etc. We expressed to Rachel that this would not work for us, since we had clearly expressed what our budget was. This was very early in the planning process, and we were already experiencing a lot of issues.
After we declined the cost in the design meeting, our interactions with Rachel began to carry a different tone. Rachel took zero accountability for overselling and over-promising the design elements of our wedding. She told my soon-to-be mother-in-law and then-fiancée that they needed to go over the design elements one by one: seating vignettes, table décor, signage, florals, lighting, and hundreds of other details, to figure out where they could cut costs to be closer to the proposed budget. This was very frustrating because the whole reason we decided to hire a wedding planner was to avoid this level of work-my now-wife's mother works more than full time, and my wife wanted to avoid stress as much as possible. At this point, we were blamed for our vision being over budget, when Rachel should have taken accountability for over-promising. After nickel-and-diming our way through the proposed design concept, we were exhausted fighting for the things we wanted. She also made "budget cuts" without consultation, resulting in choices we would not have made. Ultimately, Rachel got everything to be her way--but this wasn't her wedding, it was ours.
We felt pressured to pick the vendors that she wanted us to. In the paperwork before our initial meeting, we had given her a list of OUR preferred vendors, which she seemed to then ignore completely. Once it was time to start hiring vendors, she pushed her vendors onto us. We were sent countless emails with different stylists, bakers, and florists, none of which were included in our list. We were told this was because Rachel didn't have connections with the vendors we selected. Rachel claimed to have the perfect florist for our vision, but when the proposal was presented, the plan required 3 florists! The more we said no, the more pushback we received from Rachel. But if anything went wrong, my fiancée and her mother were blamed, and no accountability was taken by Rachel. At that point, we gave up on the wedding process being a fun, light, exciting time, because any communication with Rachel made us feel unheard or taken advantage of. We were just hoping that the day of the wedding would make up for all we went through to get there.
This is my first wedding, so I didn't know 100% what to expect, but after paying for a full-service day-of wedding planner, we at the very least expected her to be there to ensure the wedding day ran smoothly. We expected that she would corral the wedding party, help with minor makeup touch-ups, ensure that all wedding personnel had their flowers, and act as the point of contact for anyone needing assistance on the day of our wedding. Unfortunately, that is not how our wedding day went. In fact, we remember multiple people (party members, family members, vendors, and guests) asking *us* where Rachel was during the day, and she was very difficult to track down.
Our photographer ended up filling the role of day-of coordinator: he was with us the whole day, correcting timeline issues or ceremonial details that Rachel had neglected, and making sure that our day ran smoothly. We are grateful to him for making our wedding day feel seamless, but that was not the job we hired him to do. We are very happy to be married, but overall, our experience with Rachel was extremely disappointing. We felt that she consistently pushed her own agenda and prioritized benefitting herself and her business far above creating a perfect wedding day for us, her clients. We hope this review helps Rachel to improve, so that future couples can avoid the negative experiences we had.
