'House of brides' in the USA, any experiences?

chrikoff

Hi,

we have ordered some bridesmaids dresses from the above company, initial investigation via the web seemed favourable, but now the delivery date for the dresses has come and gone..

customer service at this organisation is virtually non-existant and they never return calls or emails, you can call their main nuimber but it is just a callcentre, they cannot actually put you through to anyone.

last night my fiance (she is much more persistant than me ) managed to get through to a supervisor, who 'promised' to get back by the end of the day today..

however time is tight and we have paid them a lot of money so its a BIG worry..

does anyone else have experience of this company and how to deal with them?

chrikoff

update.. it appears the dresses have been shipped.. hooray..

i guess the advice is to hassle the call centre to put you through to a manager who it seems may be able to escalate the issue..

i would urge anyone considering using this company to be aware of the customer service black hole.. and to perhaps reconsider..

malkie76

Sadly I've been very unimpressed. Fiancee bought two bridesmaid dressed based on the recommendation of her sister who bought a dress previously from them.

Ordered in Jan, with a delivery estimate of mid April. It's now mid May, and still no dresses. (wedding is on the 28th of May)

Unfortunately their customers services department are deliberately set up to prevent direct interaction with the company, so you are unable to actually get any updated information or talk with anyone who can help.

[They have a firewalled call centre who can merely email 'House of Brides' for more information. The call centre has no information, and are unable (unwilling?) to actually put you incontact directly with the people who could actually help - I'm assuming this is because the failure to deliver occurs on a regular basis]

A quick google lists countless complaints about failure to deliver and inability to reply to emails, and a useless customer services department. I didn't appreciate that my fiancee had ordered from such a poor company.

I called them myself last night and made it clear that if we didn't have updated information today that we'd be forced to buy bridesmaid dresses elsewhere and do a chargeback on the dresses we've ordered with them. I genuinely don't believe they care, but I'm giving them every opportunity to actually complete their order as fiancee desperately wants the dresses.

Bottomline? Untrustworthy and lacking in any useful information.

chrikoff

update:
the dresses arrived, and as described.. but boy what a hassle to get through to this company to get them to send them.. if we had ordered them 'just in time' for the wedding we would have been scuppered..

plus with the duty and VAT added by customs the price is only marginally less than if we had ordered them here in the uk..

lesson learned i think.. :cool:

malkie76

I'm glad it worked out for you. I'm sure they are a reasonable company, but the test is how good they are when things go wrong.

We've sadly had no response to our calls and emails, and the call centre are unable to actually put us directly in contact with someone who has helpful information.

We've bought alternative dresses last weekend, and started a charge-back process with the creditcard to recover the money.