Flowers St. Germain

We organised our wedding with Sonia from St Germains and were mortified with what happened. On our wedding day I had to ring her up as she provided 1-hour candles, opposed to 8-hours as we had confirmed. Even our venue manager was scrambling around trying to help us fix it! When I called her on the night she basically told me it wasn\'t her problem and she wouldn\'t come back to do any thing about it - my venue manager took the phone out of my hand because she could see how upset I was getting on the phone and finished the conversation with her. Because she had given us different candles to the ones we picked, the candles were far too tall and ended up setting 3 of our flower domes a light (our band was doing rehearsals and happened to be in the right place at the right time and had to put them out). We then noticed when we came home (our beautiful family packed up our flowers and filled our house with them) that we had no peonies in our arrangements (which we had paid for). On our wedding night before I had to walk out into my reception to greet my guests, Sonia emailed me blaming the venue for lighting the candles at 5pm (everyone arrived at 6pm) and I had that to read THAT on my wedding night. I still cannot believe it! It then got worse from there. I emailed her about the fact we had to remove all the candles and candle sticks off our table (as there was no candle left burning) so we had paid $1,285 for something we couldn\'t use. We also had to leave them on the guests tables as we didn’t want to have staff picking unlit candle sticks off their tables and make it even more obvious. So, in summary we had 3 domes at $230 each ($690) that were burnt on the guests tables, PLUS we paid for peonies $$$ that we never got (anyone that knows flowers will know they are EXPENSIVE). We basically spent $15,000 on flowers that looked like they were a week old and when I emailed Sonia back about my concerns they handled it by having Sonia\'s partner call me 5 times on a blocked number. When I picked up I thought something had happened to someone but it was Nigel (Sonia’s partner). He was rude and defensive before I could basically say anything! I told him I was at work and I couldn’t talk, so to speak to my mother-in-law. What was worse was he was extremely abrupt to the point were she felt very threatened and intimidated – which is shocking behaviour! It is just so horrible that someone could run a professional business and behave so badly. Sonia wouldn\'t call me back or respond to my emails until I said I would take it to Consumer Affairs for not delivering what was promised and she told me not to contact her anymore and just take it to them. Honestly, I have never experienced such a dishonest, rude and unprofessional business. Weddings are suppose to be a beautiful day and businesses like this should be proud of their work NOT be in business to try to extort money. I would not recommend her to anyone who wants to pay premium for products that won’t be delivered. If she is dishonest enough not to tell us that she couldn’t get peonies how would you have ever known (at your wedding you will be so busy and you are running around a lot. You don’t have time to stop and look at the floral arrangements in detail). We knew because they came back to our house… so we ended up catching her red handed. The level of unprofessionalism in the way they handled my situation was extremely disappointing and hurtful. I spent over 12 months planning the style aspect for my wedding and to have this happen was a complete shock to me as Sonia and I discussed the fact that I needed 8 hour candles. I truly believe this situation could have been handled in a better light however that just added to the frustration - after paying them almost $15,000 I at least expected an explanation as to why this happened but Sonia couldn\'t even give me that.