Perfect Touch Custom Weddings
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Address
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Wedding Galleria
330 S Pattie
Wichita, KS
67211
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Phone
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(316) 524-3131
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Your Dream Wedding Deserves a Perfect Touch!
Experienced Wedding Officiant and Professional Bridal Consultant offering a complete menu of wedding services at every price range.
Specializing in creating a unique experience for every couple and stretching the budget to get maximum value for the dollar!
Member, Association of Bridal Consultants
Discounts on Carlson Craft Products
Proposal Planning Service
Available for Event Planning
316-524-3131
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User rating: 
"Some big raves and some big disappointments"
Tara Honolulu, HI
August 12, 2009
My husband and I were married on July 25th, 2009. The reception was a great success--everyone raved about how beautiful the hall looked and about the entertainment. We are grateful for Ronni and her staff's help that evening, and for the decoration ideas. Our wedding budget was $15,000 (though we exceeded it by quite a bit), and we chose the Full Service package for $1800 base price. By far the most expensive part of the wedding was the planning itself (including all of the consulting hours). Now, the hours spent shopping, assembling decorations and serving at the reception were well-spent and worth every penny. But the base price: what are you really paying for? Here is the the service from the contract itself, with my comments: 1)Unlimited email and phone consultations. Yes, this was included and very helpful for the first several months. Toward the end my emails were often unanswered. 2)Generous in person consultations. I was a special case as an out-of-state bride, and it was difficult to secure Ronni for meetings in the two short months I had in Kansas. There was always some emergency or something that came up and my meeting would have to be put off another week (couldn’t they have me meet with another consultant?). Hence the problem with the florist (more on that later). 3)Professional Planning. Excellent service here. The whole day went off very smoothly thanks to the planning, which was mainly deciding the timelines of arrivals, photographs, cake cutting, etc. and coordinating vendor arrivals. 4) Wedding Notebook. Yes, I got one of these. It’s a very nice binder to keep copies of all of the contracts. However, we didn’t receive copies of all of the vendor paperwork—I had to ask Ronni about many vendor deadlines and such because there was only one copy of some of the contracts, kept by her. 5)Vendor referrals. The cake vendor she found was amazing. AMAZING! I highly recommend her, Pam from WOW Cakes. The videographer she found was also in our budget, which was very helpful. The DJ was great. Also, Ronni singlehandedly got our church, which was very difficult to find and secure. However, I used my own photographer, caterer, and eventually “supplemental florist” (more on that later). The moral of the story here is to DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH. Don’t rely on Perfect Touch alone to pick the best vendors for the best price. I wish more than anything I hadn’t trusted them about Flowers By Robert. I should have done my own research. So really, vendor referrals are not the greatest selling point for Perfect Touch. Most of this could easily be done by word of mouth or even Google reviews. 6)Vendor point of contact: Yes, it was very helpful to not have to call 10 different vendors, get prices and coordinate deadlines. Any vendors with problems or questions went to Ronni rather than to me. This was helpful since I was an out of town bride with a 5 hour time zone difference. I don’t know what kind of “negotiations” went on, though. Get clarification on this. 7) Budget Breakdown: This involved allocating a certain percentage of the total budget to each item in the wedding. We didn’t even remotely stay close to it. THERE IS FREE SOFTWARE ON THE INTERNET THAT CAN DO THIS FOR YOU. Even bridal magazines have a page suggesting general percentage allocations for each part of the wedding. “Support on self-tracking” means that she will print out the sheet with the payment deadlines and send you a reminder if something is overdue. Some of the deadlines were inaccurate and we couldn’t double-check them ourselves because we didn’t get a copy of every vendor contract. 8) "Decorating Services - Set up, tear down, design plans, decoration ideas, walk throughs, floor plan." THIS IS DISINGENUOUS. We were not charged for discussing decoration ideas and for the walk-through (literally, walking through the site and saying this will go here, this will go here). But we were charged labor hours for set up, tear down, decoration/centerpiece assembly, etc. All you are paying for here is talking about the décor and a paper floorplan, nothing more. 9)Day of Services: This was the MOST HELPFUL part of Perfect Touch’s services and they did a fantastic job coordinating vendors and moving everything from the ceremony to the reception, although labor hours were charged for all of this. There were no emergencies to handle, luckily, and I’m not sure what “support bridal party” means. You DO pay labor hours for people to be on site before the ceremony, so it seems to me “supporting the bridal party” would cost extra in labor hours. Honestly, I would recommend brides just get a “Day of” service package rather than a full one. 10) Invitations: We didn’t look around for our own invitations since we were out of town, so it was nice to have a website link/examples from Ronni. We told her how many guests and what design we wanted and she ordered them online. Instructions on self-assembly aren’t really necessary…this took all of 45 seconds to show me how to put stuff in an envelope. 11) Timelines: I believe this is disingenuous as well, since it should fall under #1, professional planning. They are really stretching here to include it as a separate selling point. 12) Rehearsal: Yes, this went fine. We had a very short, simple ceremony. 14) N/A, no rush planning here. 13) Discounted Rates for Assistant Hours and Additional Consultant Services. At the time it was $17/hr assistant, $35/hr for consultant. The total hours came up to an extra $900 at least. 15) Benefits Package: I have no idea what this is. The website claims we have free access to their inventory, but they didn’t have much of an inventory. I think we used bubble bowls and a couple of vases for free. We bought most of the stuff ourselves. 16) Discounted Rates on Rentals: They referred us to Ray’s Party Rental for our rentals, so I don’t know what their specialty line of rentals is. As you can see above, $1800 doesn’t cover a lot of services. Most of the real work costs labor hours. Our total bill to Perfect touch was about $2700. For a $15,000 wedding. They were more expensive than the caterer or the open bar or the reception site or any single other thing. Plus, the flower vendor they recommended was horrible. Even after I expressed reservations at the second meeting as soon as I came to Kansas (2 months before the wedding), she assured me that I would get what I want, even if we needed to find a different florist. But when I expressed dissatisfaction AGAIN with the ceremony decor ideas presented, she told me that she has a prior agreement with Robert and it would be difficult to cancel him and get another florist, but she promised I would LOVE the final result. Meanwhile, time was running out and it was going to get harder and harder to secure another florist. I suspected some sort of sweet kickback or commission for this florist, since he was more expensive than other florists (I was promised that he would deliver my “vision” and that he was really, really good--I guess that's what you're paying extra for). However, I received poor quality, and it was too late. It seems to me that if Perfect Touch knew I had a limited floral budget, they should have recommended a cheaper vendor like Dillon’s or something, rather than pushing Flowers By Robert on me. For $1000, I received simple white rose boutonnieres and corsages, small simple white bouquets in which the flowers kept falling out (mine had some blue), MY OWN starfish glued on to 8 of somebody else’s pew bows, and HIDEOUS ceremony decorations involving two fake green topiaries and a fake tree and MY starfish/sea creatures hung up on them like Christmas ornaments. I knew this is exactly what I would get from the prior meetings, and I had expressed unhappiness at it, and Perfect Touch didn't listen to me and simply continued to promise I would love the end result. I have never cried so hard in my life than the two days before my wedding. It was humiliating when family members came up to me at the rehersal and said “Oh, you did the church decorations yourself?” and I had to answer no, my florist did it. Everyone was shocked and dismayed. My bridesmaids and I ended up going to Dillons the day before the wedding and ordering two custom GIANT flower arrangements for $99 each, and picking up two columns to place them on. They were beautiful. I was told that actual flowers were out of my budget for church decoration, and large floral pieces cost $300-$400 each (Ronni’s words). Well, yeah, if you pick an expensive florist. DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH. I was amazed with the 21st and Maize Dillon’s florist. I would have had MUCH nicer bouquets and bouts for the same price had I not trusted Perfect Touch on this. But it's all over and done, the price and the flowers were the only unhappy parts of the whole ordeal, and in the end I still got married :) Conclusion: They had good services and they made the day run smoothly (minus the flowers). But the package deals are overpriced compared with other planners and you will pay a lot extra labor hours, more than 50% more in my case. Unless you have a large wedding or large budget, I suggest just day-of services or cheaper wedding planners via word of mouth. I could definitely see them being lifesavers for a $40,000 or 400 guest wedding, though! Don't fall for the sweet sales pitch, decide if you really need what's offered. Go home, think it over. Google reviews is a great place to check out vendors: type in the vendor name, city and state and when it pops up on Google maps there will be a link that says “Reviews: #” and you can see reviews from different sites.
This is the subjective opinion of an independent reviewer and not of Decidio, Inc.
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