COQUI DESIGN ELIZABETH WEBBER, DENISE MERKEL, COQUI PAPERIE & GIFTS BOUTIQUE MISSED DEADLINES STAINED INVITATIONS MISPRINTED ENVELOPES BAD CUSTOMER SERVICE BROOKFIELD Wisconsin

I know Coqui Design probably deals with a lot of bridezillas but I promise you I was not one of them! I was polite, responsive and understanding of Elizabeth's unique process. The process is the reason for my review. I first saw Coqui Design on Fox 6 News where Elizabeth was doing a segment where she showed off her business in 5 minutes. I can't remember what it was called but it was Elizabeth with a woman at a table. That's not important. I called Coqui Design a couple days after I saw the Fox 6 segment. This was a little over 1 year now. It's the first I've had time to sit and write this, with the honeymoon, moving into the new house and starting treatments to start a family. I left a voice mail for Elizabeth and didn't hear back for a few days so I called again. I got the voice mail again. I left another message and was feeling already like something was off. A couple more days went by and I went to the coquidesign.com site and sent a message on the web page. I got a reply to my email in a little over a day. Elizabeth said she never received my voice mail messages. That was strange but okay. She suggested we meet up to go over what I wanted, and so I could look at her portfolio in person. That made sense so I asked where her office was. She said no one was going to be at the office that week so she wanted to meet up at a Starbucks close to me. I HATE business meetings at coffee shops. I can never hear anything and it doesn't feel comfortable airing your personal things with so many other people in your space. But I really needed these invitations done and she didn't seem to give me any other options.

We met and Elizabeth seemed like a nice enough young woman. We decided on a paper, pattern and style and she said she would email me a quote. Well 9 days went by before I got my quote! She said she had some personal things happen with her house and so she wasn't able to attend to business at that time. The quoted amount was close to $1,100. My two other quotes were $750 and $880. I tried to see if she could come down in price and she agreed to $999. I liked her paper and design aesthetic so I decided to pay her higher pricing for the $999 vs. my other choices. She said it would be about a week until she would email me a proof to sign off on. It was 2 1/2 weeks. Elizabeth said they were having some problems at their office and she apologized for the delay. I was starting to get second thoughts on if Coqui Design is who I should have gone with, but my wedding was in 2 months and I wanted to get this done so I didn't back out. There were some issues with the proof, including misspelling some names and not using the font I had originally picked out. Over the next week we went back and forth by email and she fixed those problems. I went ahead and authorized her to order the paper and do the printing. She said it would take about 7-10 days to have everything ready for me to pick up.

It took over 2 weeks. She said the paper we decided on was out of stock at her paper company, and that it shouldn't have been because when she did the proof she first verified the paper was in good stock. SMH. Anyway I wanted to come to her office and go over the invitations and envelopes to make sure everything looked good and to be able to thank her without the risk of some person bumping into me and spilling coffee on my $1,000 wedding invitations. I made an appointment to come by the office. The day of my appointment I had a call from Elizabeth saying the landlord at her office was doing some emergency work on all the units in the office space and she wanted to meet me at the same Starbucks we originally met at. I was very, very annoyed and wondered if Coqui Design even had an office, though I did see an address for an office now on their web page. I said fine but asked if we could meet at a more off-peak time so less people would be there and we could hopefully get a booth and some quiet. I got to Starbucks and the place was of course packed. No booths and we did find a small table by the bathrooms. I swear to God I just wanted my invitations and to be done with this young woman, but there had to be something else. She handed me the invitations in a nice little box, I opened and started looking at them. The paper felt nice and it was really what I had envisioned for announcing my special day. Then about half way into the invites, I saw three of them had something around the front side's edges, like a juice stain or blood but I'm guessing it was juice. She didn't know how that could have happened and apologized. We ordered too many invites anyway so 3 off the top was workable, though she didn't offer any discount which really churned my stomach.

The last straw leading to me taking the time to write this lengthy review was the last 15 envelopes were messed up. We had paid extra to send Coqui Design our guest list by email so they could print the addresses on the envelopes in a style matching our invitations inside. The last 15 envelopes had their address printing going off the right side of the envelope. Like they were aligned right in the printer or something. I really wanted to throw these invitations in her face and go get some at Shutterfly or something but I didn't. But again she didn't offer any discount and when I asked for one, she hesitantly said she could credit me for the 18 mistakes back to my credit card. I said okay, I guess I was hoping she would do the right thing and offer more of a good faith credit to not just make up for the tangible errors, but to send a message that they really didn't want me to walk away thinking this is how they did business. So I got that small refund and she brought me 15 blank envelopes that I addressed myself and she reprinted the 3 stained invitations.

I will never do business with them again and I would not recommend you or anyone else do business with them. There are plenty of other options in the Milwaukee area for less than or around the same price that have their acts more together. I view this experience as an experiment gone horribly wrong. Amazingly this was the only really poor experience of my entire wedding, aside from the wedding hall running a little late but that happens. Good luck.