Hi, I'm supposed to get married at Garrapata State Park in exactly a week. Obviously, with the fire situation I'm not really sure how things are going to go. We have a permit and we were supposed to take photos up and down the coast. Trying to think of alternatives - we mostly wanted photos of the coastal bluffs and water, so if there any backups I should be aware of would appreciate it!
I had been going to Alts for years to get my dresses altered and had no issue until right when I was about to schedule my wedding dress alterations with them.
I've had jeans, dresses of all kinds done with them, but the latest experience was so horrible I feel obligated to warn everyone about them.
I'm recovering from a knee injury so I had brought in a dress I needed hemmed for a wedding I was going to, and I wore platform sandals to get fitted for the dress because I could not wear heels. This is important, as I could not have worn any other footwear for this dress. They charged me $222 for a hem...which was steep but I thought I trusted them at the time.
The dress came back 2 weeks later with an extremely uneven hem. I'll add photos in the comments. It was so egregiously uneven it looked like a child had done it. The dress was now too short - even letting the hem out wouldn't have fixed the issue as I had a rolled hem. When speaking with the head tailor, she said it was probably uneven because the dress had a tighter bodice (????) I pointed out that as the expert, she should have taken the draping into account when pinning me.
It's important to keep in mind I'm a short person, so I was not going to be able to wear even shorter heels with this dress. It needed to be altered to the platform height (2 inches) so it could go with all my other shoes. If they went ahead and evened out the hem, the dress would have been too short for any of my heels. Given this, I left the dress at the studio because in my eyes it was ruined. My event was also in 3 days and I didn't trust them to fix it so I rush ordered a new dress to get taken somewhere else to be tailored. I didn't trust alts to fix it anymore.
I then emailed customer service to try and find a resolution. I got back emails trying to get me to come back and pick up the ruined dress, but I explained to them I had no use for it anymore as it was too short for any of my uses. The customer service people also told me to acknowledge that the head tailor steamed my dress (as if that's supposed to fix the botched hem job). I explained to them they ruined a $600 dress, which wasn't as expensive as a wedding dress (thank god) but I wanted to be reimbursed for it. In return, they sent me a letter that they wanted me to sign which they would only give me a partial refund for the hem job only, and had a bunch of stipulations that I could not post anything negative about them on social media. Obviously I refused to sign.
I ended up disputing the charge with my credit card, and got another email from them which I didn't respond to asking me to please remove the chargeback and sign the form so I can get my refund right away. Not sure why they thought anyone would fall for that.
I took my dress to another tailor and was charged less and they did a speedier and better job. I'm just glad that I did not end up taking my wedding dress here, it would have been a complete nightmare.