Weddingbee boards

(long post, sorry!)

Does this sound fishy to you?

I ordered my five bridesmaids' dresses (Jim Hjelm Occasions #5624) from a shop on May 17, 2008.  They told me I could have the dresses pretty quickly, like sometime during the summer.  However, my wedding is not until May 9 2009, and my wedding gown (bought at a different shop) was not due to arrive until January.  I asked the consultant if the dresses could be held until January instead, and she assured me that it would be no problem at all, and that basically what would happen is they would submit the order to the manufacturer but tell them to hold onto the dresses until January, when they would be "released" to the shop.

Cool, ok.

So last week I called the shop for an updated ETA on the dresses.  The consultant said that she would call the manufacturer and then call me back when she had an update.  I got that update via voicemail three days ago from the owner of the dress shop.  She said the estimated ship date is now MARCH 20.  That is only 6 weeks before my wedding!  And, that is only the SHIP date, not the delivery date!!

?!  Why would that happen?  If the order was indeed submitted by the shop back in May, are they really telling me that it will end up taking 10 months to make those 5 dresses?  And if they originally told me I could have had the dresses in my hands during the summer of 08, why is it now delayed until March 09??

What I suspect happened was that the bridal shop forgot to actually submit the order to the dress manufacturer, and only remembered when I called last week.

Technically, yes, March should give us enough time before May 9 for alterations and things, but a lot of things could go wrong... wrong sizes, delayed shipments, etc, and besides that, March is quickly becoming my busiest month between all the other vendor appointments I have to attend.  I was really hoping to have the bridesmaids taken care of earlier than March.  The owner of the shop said that she will call the manufacturer this Tuesday to try and get an earlier ship date, but my feeling is that if a shop promised me January, I should have them in January, period.

How would you handle this situation?  Are there any other brides out there who ordered Jim Hjelm bridesmaid dresses, and if so, how long did it take for them to come in?

Ha ha thanks ;-)

Actually it's pretty funny... my next step was to call a different bridal shop near me.  I asked them "If I were to come in today and order 5 Jim Hjelm bridesmaid dresses, what would the turnaround time be?"  Their reply?   "Usually between 8-12 weeks."  WEEKS.  lol not months!  OK, so the average would be 10 weeks, yes?  How INTERESTING that the time between the day I received the voicemail from the owner (Dec 31) and the estimated ship date (March 20) is exactly 10 weeks.  HMMMMM!!!!

lol ;-)  Yeah.  My other course of action has been to come up with a Plan B bridesmaid dress at David's Bridal, *just in case* things get ugly and I need to cancel the original order outright (which I will only do if I can get the girls' deposits back in full, of course, and only if the Plan B dress will be available to me much, much earlier than March 20.)

To be continued!!