Weddingbee Blog

The week before the wedding, everything was crazy busy, but going well. We had our DIY projects out of the way, all of our stuff was gathered in the guest bedroom, ready to be taken to Ladder 15, and all we had left to do were the flowers.

If you’ll remember, I decided early on to DIY our flowers. We ordered the following flowers from fiftyflowers.com:

Yellow Toulouse Lautrec Roses, Orange Ranunculus and Craspedia

I took the Friday before our wedding off from work specifically to put the flowers together, when lo and behold, the craspedia arrived a day early on Thursday. No matter, they were fine and would hold up until Sunday.

But on Thursday evening, I checked the shipping status of our other two orders, and saw that our roses were in Ecuador. They wouldn’t be delivered until Monday. Um…cue bride freak out.

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It was too late to call FiftyFlowers that evening, so I woke up at 6 AM on Friday and began calling their customer service line as soon as it opened. No one picked up. They were playing the song “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” until a voice mail picked up. Over. And over. I left messages. I left my number. I called again. And again. I called for a solid 2 hours with no answer, progressively getting into scary-bride mode.

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For serious. YOU listen to “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” for two hours and tell me you wouldn’t be doing the same thing.

Mr. Socks suggested I call the line to place an ORDER instead of customer service. Ohhh! Well of COURSE they picked up right away. That poor customer service woman really got it, though. Really. Because I had left how many messages, the office is open, she’s answering only calls that get them business instead of calls from customers with issues, our flowers weren’t going to be delivered until Monday, and “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” was the biggest slap in the face to listen to for 2 hours.

She insisted that our flowers WOULD be delivered that day, that FedEx was incorrect, but I wasn’t convinced. I asked to speak to a manager, and the manager eventually told me that the flowers probably wouldn’t be delivered that day, but might get to my house on Saturday.

Well, I hung up with the manager (getting her name and direct line while I was at it) and waited for our  flowers. Hoping that by some miracle, they’d arrive that day. And if they didn’t arrive, I thought I could make our bouquets out of the Orange Ranunculus and get a refund on the yellow roses.

Well, just the ranunculus arrived. I opened the box and found these:

Ohhhhhh Myyyyyyy Gooooooood.

BRIGHT, SESAME STREET GREEN FLOWERS. With red exterior petals.

FiftyFlowers now had me in dangerous, murderous bride zone.

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Where was I going to find comparable flowers in any flower shop in the Philly region in October? What could I put together for bouquets now? I buy fresh flowers almost weekly, and definitely hadn’t seen ranunculus available in months. No one had roses like those special Ecuadorian roses.

I demanded an immediate refund for both the roses and the ranunculus. I sent pictures in to Fifty Flowers of all of the ranunculus flowers that were delivered so they could review my case.

We went to every. single. flower shop around. Most of the roses we found weren’t in great shape, and the only yellow flowers were sunflowers or pom mums. I didn’t want them. And this will probably seem so silly to people, but there was a reason for my picking the flowers that I did: our wedding was a statement about who we were, what our tastes were, and honestly, I had no interest in settling. I thought it would be better to walk down the aisle with nothing than to carry flowers that didn’t represent us or the wedding. Yep, I just went there: I was a flower snob.

After a few hours scouting out the area for flowers, Mr. Socks and I came home empty handed. I called the manager back, and told her that because of the company’s mistakes, I’d be walking down the aisle without anything in hand. She was very apologetic, but as emotional as I was, it didn’t help. I also told her, in a desperate attempt to maybe, just maybe get something more out of the deal,  that I would not be giving FiftyFlowers a positive review.

Well, hive, she came through for me at that point: She had the roses delivered to me the next day, and still refunded me the money. The ranunculus were unusable for our bouquets, but we could work with the roses, even though it was a major time crunch.

And so I did. Mr. Socks and his friend Ryan stood in the kitchen with me all day Saturday, stripping leaves, trimming stems and thorns, and peeling outer layers of petals from the roses. By the time we had to leave for the rehearsal dinner, I had four bouquets ready to go. They weren’t perfect, and they weren’t professional, and I was definitely a stressed out bride, but…they did turn out pretty well.

Photo by Georgi Anastasov

Would I recommend FiftyFlowers? Part of me knows that my experience with them was probably extreme and not the usual case. They did end up giving me free flowers, but they also gave me more stress than I cared to deal with before the wedding. If you go the route of DIY flowers, I would suggest either another company, or if you do go with FiftyFlowers, definitely track your order closely, and even call multiple times in the week before to confirm your order. If your order is screwed up by them, I wouldn’t hesitate to tell you to go the mean, scary bride route. It wasn’t until I threatened to leave them bad reviews that they gave in, and seriously…if it means being a bit of a bitch to correct their errors…eh, what can you do? Oh, and maybe have a back-up plan in case something goes wrong.

Did you have a bad DIY flower experience? Did it turn out okay in the end?