The tale of the cursed dress

I found that when I turned 40-ish, I was always wearing a “shirt of invisibility”. I can creep around undisturbed, although it’s annoying when you have some stuff you want to buy and they won’t come and take your money.

LaLa said :

Yeah, I think this “I bought my first pair of Tour pants there” is a dead giveaway that someone that is affiliated with Momento and Soho wrote it.

Totally.

When I was an “impoverished student” I shopped at Koomarri and Big W. Not at designer stores in Manuka.

I was recently in Soho in Civic looking for something to wear to a wedding. I was in normal office wear which apparently rendered me invisible to the shop assistant. I now refer to it as my “shirt of invisibility”.

Yeah, I think this “I bought my first pair of Tour pants there” is a dead giveaway that someone that is affiliated with Momento and Soho wrote it.

ilovedresses said :

I have been shopping at Momento and Soho Dezigns for 12 years and they have never missed a beat. I am treated now exactly as I was treated when I bought my first pair of Tour pants there as an empoverished uni student in 1997 – like an important customer who is valued as much as every other client in the store. I am a major dress lover who frequents the best Sydney stores and have never found a store that goes the lengths that the Momento and Soho staff go to to keep their clients happy. Special order? No problem. Hard to find dress? No problem. Cusom altering by the best tailor in Canberra? No problem.

You should all stop your whinging.

You lie like a rug.

I know this an old post however I only just came across it and wanted to chip in my 2 cents worth. I will soon be a bridesmaid at my Mum’s wedding and and Mum flew down from QLD for the weekend so that we could find a suitable dress. We were particularly interested in Matthew Eager designs, and Soho and Momento are the only 2 stores in Canberra to stock them.

I checked their opening times on their site the night before and Mum and I turned up 5 minutes before opening time. 1 hour, a phone call to their Civic store and 2 coffees later we finally we let in. No apologies but the girl in the Civic store said the owner always turned up late as she “has a family”. None of the dresses where what we were after but the owner was extremely pushy and in my face the whole time praising dresses that quite obviously did not suit me and standing in between my Mum and I when we were trying to talk.

We stopped by the Civic store later on that day, an hour before their closing time (again, according to their site and the signs on the doors) and surprise, surprise… closed.

I have worked in fashion retail and customer facing roles for over 15 years and was quite amazed that BOTH of their stores can’t stick to their publicised opening and closing times. Add the pushy staff and lastresort’s post and I certainly won’t go there again.

After reading

I have been shopping at Momento and Soho Dezigns for 12 years and they have never missed a beat. I am treated now exactly as I was treated when I bought my first pair of Tour pants there as an empoverished uni student in 1997 – like an important customer who is valued as much as every other client in the store. I am a major dress lover who frequents the best Sydney stores and have never found a store that goes the lengths that the Momento and Soho staff go to to keep their clients happy. Special order? No problem. Hard to find dress? No problem. Cusom altering by the best tailor in Canberra? No problem.

You should all stop your whinging.

Same thing happened to me at Soho. I bought an expensive dress two weeks before flying out to Brisbane for a wedding and they said it would be altered in a week. I went back in a week to pick it up and they’d lost it. Eventually (the day after) they found it and it hadn’t even been altered yet. Luckily I still had another week to get it altered myself!

and if you badly treat enough of the customers, then go for a job at another store, the spectre of your behavior follows you.

canberra is too small for bad service. I work in an industry that changes daily.

I buy my suits from sam catanzaritis as the proprietor looks after me, every time.

granted, i don’t buy one each week, but I do ensure i go back to see the gent who has kept me in suits for the past 20 working years.

Giving refunds and gift vouchers by way of recompense has more good effects than just appeasing an angry customer.

By inflicting a cost on your own organisation you also create an expectation that systemic failures will be fixed.

The extreme case being pizza delivery in Neal Stevenson’s Snow Crash. If the pizza is even a minute late Uncle Enzo will have to get out of his underwear-model-filled jacuzzi and go and personally apologise to the customers.

The very thought of being responsible for ruining Uncle Enzo’s Friday night makes the pizza boy’s blood run cold.

If you just brush off the customers problems remain problems.

Ingee, WTF? Seriously. Of course the retail staff are supposed to care, it was their mistake. They told lastresort it would be ready on time, they gave an incorrect location to pick the dress up from. As far as I’m concerned, whether you’re spending $5 or $5000 on an item (whatever it may be) you should be given the correct information in regards to your purchase.