Do Not Recommend - £450 Wasted On Something We Could Have Done Ourselves
This is a long story.
We found Sarah on Instagram and we were fairly impressed by her page as we searched for a designer to create something special for our wedding newspaper. We were hesitant due to the potential cost but thought to give her a go and we initially had a good rapport and feeling about the potential outcome, but that quickly faded and unfortunately it didn’t work out for us. Guess there was a disconnect in communication, briefing and expectations.
I would say just make sure you do your due diligence and research the market before you sign up for her services as the value add really wasn’t present in our experience and the first red flag should have been when she requested full payment upfront before any work was done. She said she had to do this as in the past she had done for people and not been paid. Following our experience we can totally understand why and why people either walked away or refused payment.
Make sure you carefully read her T&Cs before paying anything as had I known better, I would have withheld part of the quote until we got something we were happy with or not bothered at all.
It was quite an unpleasant and challenging experience for us. As per her service agreement, we put trust in her to deliver and paid £450 in full, upfront - to cover design work and printing. What we hadn’t noticed was it was non-refundable - which in hindsight is another massive red flag.
We had our consultation call, and after this call we provided a very detailed word document with all the content, lots of inspiration, templates etc. and from the call we felt like she understood and would come back with a full draft for review so we could take it from there.
Weeks went by, granted she had annual leave and we still had some content missing, we took some time to polish the finishing touches - but what we got back was beyond disappointing to say the least. It didn’t reflect the time between briefing and initial delivery. The design was far off the mark and due to frustrations, our feedback may have been very harsh. With timing running out, we proceeded to provide endless mock ups, style guides and further guidance. Naturally, as you are putting these things together, ideas may change, content may change etc. and some things may get removed or added, so due to the process it became a bit frustrating for both sides.
After endless emails back and forth, continuously poor designs coming back with next to zero creative input or thought, we decided it was best to part ways and take this on ourselves as the standards of what we were getting back was really poor. We lost complete confidence in their ability to deliver something good and she was becoming increasingly frustrated with our feedback or amends.
After 2 months and only 3 weeks until our wedding, we couldn’t afford to waste any more time. We wish we knew what the process entailed before we paid. We asked for a refund as we were left with poor service, no creative output and no value add from their end. She was essentially just copy and pasting whatever we sent, so didn’t understand what she was actually bringing to the table.
Sarah refused to issue a refund, citing the amount of “work” she has delivered warranted only an £80 refund. Up until this point, all the “work” she had produced were very poorly executed mock ups of content and templates we had provided. We felt it was nowhere near a fair reflection of what we got out of this service so far.
In the end, we cut our losses and did the entire design of the newspaper ourselves and to be honest, it came out drastically better. We recognise when someone demands payment upfront you run the risk of them not delivering a service or product and refusing to issue refunds as they’d hold you responsible for cancellation - a massive learning for us and something we hope anyone takes on board.
We personally do not recommend Photo Press. From our experience, you are better off downloading free templates on the internet and designing it yourself on Canva, it’s super easy. We initially signed up as we thought she’d take a lot of the creative burden away from us, but the time we spent briefing, supplying content, style guides, feedback… It was a complete waste of time and money with zero value add. We managed to finish it ourselves within less than a week and gives you the freedom to tweak and amend as you wish without having to brief etc.
It felt like due to her T&Cs, and after the breakdown in communication, she was no longer committed to delivering quality work, as regardless, she had been paid. Her level of professionalism wasn’t great, sending long combative emails and often not taking accountability for the output.
Wish you all the best, but extremely disappointed and unhappy with the service. £450 out of pocket, countless hours wasted and lots of late nights having to get it done ourselves.
She did kindly end up helping with getting the papers printed, ensured all things were aligned but considering we ended up doing the entire design work ourselves, we should have been given some form of refund given had paid for design AND printing, and only the printing was fulfilled.
