Mardee's Design and Consulting

Mary and her team were excellent to work with. Right off the bat I could tell she has a lot of years of experience bu knowing the right questions to ask me as well as the vendors we worked with. She documented everything really well, stayed organized, attended my tasting, provided suggestions on the day-of timeline that made a lot of sense, offered to help set up the decorations and really pulled off the entire day seamlessly. My family really enjoyed meeting her and her team as well. She was really professional and attentive to my during the wedding and helped pull off one of the best nights of our lives! Highly recommend booking her, she’s also very reasonable with her prices and tailored a package that met my needs. Thank you so much!

BUYER BEWARE!!! This planner promises to give the bride and groom a stress-free wedding (she's even written it in the contract), however, that was far from the case! Working with Mary was disastrous from the beginning. There were several instances when we thought we should pull out of the partnership and find another planner. Knowing how poorly the execution of our wedding turned out, I really wish we had ended the relationship even if it meant losing 50% of the service fee. From the beginning, Mary was unorganized and we frequently had to remind her of items we'd previously discussed in prior meetings. She is a mediocre events coordinator/planner at best and we found ourselves having to follow up with her several times before she would take action on things. Against our better judgement, we decided to move forward in the hopes that she would knock it out the park on our big day. Epic fail!!! Putting our faith in Mary turned out to be a huge mistake. She dropped the ball on some critical aspects in the planning process and is clearly not adept at managing crisis. Unfortunately for us, our wedding got rescheduled due to covid-19, so we relied on Mary to communicate the postponement of the wedding to all our vendors as well as follow up with them to communicate the new date. As it turns out, Mary dropped the ball on following up with the bar tender who was an hour late to our wedding as she had not been told of the new date (it's a small miracle that she was even able to drop everything she was doing to come and earn her check when she got the call on our wedding day). Furthermore, Mary didn't communicate effectively with the bakery to let them know of the new date, so when our friend went to pick up the cake, it was nowhere to be found. After some back and forth over the phone, the bakery realized that the cake was in the freezer since our wedding had been postponed. But that's not all, folks - there's more! Mary did not bother to follow up with the caterer to confirm whether he knew what time to arrive and that he needed to bring staff with him to manage the buffet line. Not only did the caterer show up over an hour late, but he also didn't bring a single staff member with him and also forgot to bring a menu item. The fact that the caterer was late isn't Mary's fault, however, I can't forgive the fact that she didn't follow up with him once in the days leading up to the wedding. Needless to say, our wedding was almost ruined primarily because of sub-par project management on Mary's part. Because of all of these blunders, we experienced significant breakdowns in our wedding schedule, including dinner service being delayed by an hour, the cake arriving later than planned (at least it arrived), the bartender being late, and some key elements needing to be cut from our schedule. After spending so many months planning our special day, we never anticipated we'd be looking back on our wedding with such deep regret and anger about all the things that went wrong. It'll take a while for us to get over all the ways in which this planner completely let us down. All we can do now is share our story so that another couple doesn't have to go through what we did. If you want to have a stress-free wedding or other large scale event, I would strongly advise you to steer clear of this planner and take your business elsewhere

Mary and staff were amazing to work with. She made this whole process straightforward and easy. Her connections with other vendors were very helpful and made the decision process seamless. I couldn’t have been more happier with how our wedding reception went.

I hired Mary from Mardee’s in advance of our summer wedding. She worked with me on our tight budget (hiring her was already an unanticipated expense – and I absolutely DO recommend hiring a day-of coordinator for your event!). She was willing to negotiate the final rate for day-of coordination upon learning how much I’d already done and would continue to do to plan the entire event, coordinate all vendors, manage all communications, and coordinate our wedding party. In that rate, she included access to the online planning software (Aisle Planner), which was very helpful and kept everything in one place for me the months leading up the wedding (another strong recommendation from me to other brides!). During our rehearsal and set-up, she needed a few corrections from me (the planner) regarding materials I’d provided or changed since meeting with her virtually to walk through the set-up and rehearsal details, but those were quickly remedied, and I provided her with all the printouts to check throughout the day in a binder. When you do hire Mary, though, her husband (Spencer) comes with her. It means you get additional help on the day of the event – and Spencer was very helpful indeed with multiple random tasks that needed attention throughout the day, including retrieving various items for the ceremony, photos, etc. The only negative I heard after the wedding about this arrangement was that Spencer did make some off-handed remarks to my husband about “[Mary] planned this event”, which was quite untrue, to get the groomsmen to stop cracking jokes while lining up for the ceremony to start (because “It’s not that kind of event”). My husband decided to hold back a stern correction at that comment, as he knew I had in fact planned the entire wedding, but he was understandably put-off about Spencer speaking out and lacking some professionalism when the groomsmen were just expending some extra energy with appropriate humor prior to standing for a formal ceremony for 20 minutes. Otherwise, we had no problems hiring Mary. From our viewpoint (and feedback from our wedding party) on the big day, we experienced no problems with Mary’s coordination with the group, and she blended well with everyone’s activities throughout the event.