We booked our ceremony with Ema at the Japanese friendship garden. She conveniently had written a 30 day no cancellation policy in her contract. Low and behold, after this time period came to pass, she informed us that she would not actually be able to perform the ceremony at the garden.instead, she would be able to do it BEHIND the garden. We were not happy with this, and requested a refund, and she would only refund about 35% of our money due to "services rendered." That was not satisfactory, so she informed that she could probably still perform it inside the garden. Anyways, we wanted our money back due to the change in circumstance, but she would not acquiesce. So we actually sued her in small claims court, and she actually flew to Southern California to defend herself (which probably cost more than refunding our money). Due to a technicality, the case was never heard, and I was not about to fly to Northern California to re-sue Ema.
The whole operation seemed like a bait and switch scheme. It was a huge waste of our time, money, and generally made our wedding experience suck. Like Brett said, Ema has touched the lives of many in a similar fashion.
It was not a pleasant experience. I would not use her service. If she can't make it to the actual wedding without changing a bunch of circumstances in her "contract, " I would not want her doing my wedding, as she seems to do what she wants.
Since I posted this originally, I've had about 5 people that I have known talk about had truly bad Ema acts.
Perhaps, since Ema Yelps, she can get on and explain why she created a blog and posted using my name? I had to contact Blogger.com and file a report saying she was posting using my identity. You can see it here: under my name. Now, she changed it to a site about her photography, but that's my name and not my site:
I think that going through multiple rounds of her ceremony with our requests being ignored, or her asking us to edit the ceremony "in poem form" were about all I need to know of her "services".
Not only that, for someone who is a writer, her grasp of the English language is horrible. She's like a 5 year old trying to spell and she has the grammar of a high-school dropout. Is that how you want to impress your wedding guests?
Here is my original review:
If I could do less than 1 star, I would. We hired this person to be our officiant for our wedding. After not showing up to the first meeting (we drove to novato and waited, while calling her cell phone) we, mistakenly booked her anyway. We sent a $300 deposit to, according to her website, "holds your date and time." After a disagreement about the ceremony, we asked for our deposit back and decided to part ways.
Of course what happened was... Nothing. No response, no email, nothing. So we asked for our money back again and then she responded saying that we might get it back, it someone re-books that date. Then we pressed her again, saying that the website says that it holds our date, never is it non-refundable. So her next email, she said she was taking over $200 out of our deposit for work she did and we might get the rest. Again, the website says nothing about her taking work costs out of the deposit.
In an otherwise happy wedding planning time, she was the worst person to deal with. She was rude, didn't communicate, didn't show up and then took our money...
More: http://www.yelp.com/biz/ema-drouillard-ceremony-way-san-francisco
Mackenzie
san jose, California
U.S.A.
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