Weddingbee Blog

My fourth grade teacher was notorious for informing us that “spelling counts!” every time we handed in an assignment. My senior year AP English curriculum included Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style (and incorporated weekly quizzes to test our knowledge of said “elements” and “style”). Admittedly, I’m kind of picky when it comes to spelling and grammar. Luckily, Mr. French Fries is picky about these things, too. I guess we are a perfect match in this respect!

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I know that I am far from grammatically perfect when writing on this blog, but in my profession, spelling and grammar definitely count. I equate these things to being a professional, and most of the vendors that we have talked to so far have communicated with us in a professional manner. That said, I’ve been through my fair share of “vendor dead-ends”, but the worst by far came when were looking for a wedding cake vendor.

I visited a local shop, and while the woman at the bakery was a very nice woman, she lacked severely in professionalism. She handed off cake samples to me, gave me her business card, and told me to email her for a quote when we decided on which flavors we liked. Simple enough, right? Um, wrong.

I took the samples home to Mr. FF and we figured out which ones we liked best. I promptly emailed her telling her which flavors we liked, the number of guests we anticipated, and how many tiers of cake we would like. And then… I waited. For three weeks, I heard nary a word from the bakery. I sent a follow-up email, and received a slightly apologetic email from the bakery a few days later. Not only was it annoying that they didn’t follow up with me in the first place when I gave them ample time, but the email that they sent was completely riddled with grammatical and spelling errors.

To give you an idea, “to” and “too” were confused regularly. The word “until” was written as “intill”. Capitalization and punctuation were completely absent. And, even though I had previously provided the number of tiers and number of guests to the vendor in my original email, the response lacked pricing information and asked us for our guest count again.

I chalked it up to someone not being very computer-savvy or a spelling-bee champion, but the email still irked me. The bakery had great prices, however… so I ignored the things bothering me and re-sent the bakery our information. I also asked about an online gallery link that was promised to us in the original conversation I had with the bakery, but it was never sent to us.

The next email that I received was even worse than the first. Again, there was no capitalization or punctuation to be found – the email read as one long run-on sentence. The “to”/ “too” confusion persisted. The words “people”,” “pictures”, and “morning” were spelled as follows: peolpe, pitures, moring. And the cake gallery link was not provided again because they claimed that our “fires wall” prevented the link from being emailed to us. (They described this as a “tiwce failed attempted”.)

At this point, I knew that we could not, in good faith, give our business to a vendor that puts absolutely no emphasis on professionalism in their communications with potential clients (no matter how good their prices). Mr. French Fries attempted to call the bakery to see if there was anyone else that we could work with, but they only had one wedding consultant (the woman I had been emailing). We continued our search and found an amazing bakery with even better cake (albeit with slightly higher prices). They were professional from the start, and it’s worth it to me to know that our cake is in good hands (quite literally!). I guess to me, professionalism (and spelling, like my fourth grade teacher said) counts!

Have you come across any vendor dead-ends in your wedding planning?