The gentleman’s outfitters Moss Bros invites bridegrooms to “start [their] forever looking [their] sharpest ever”. For some of its customers, however, the only sharpness is the pain when their hired suits fail to turn up in time.
Londoner Barry Koolen was supposed to be celebrating with friends on the night before his wedding. Instead, he was battling crowds in a shopping centre to buy an emergency outfit for the big day. With 18 hours to go until the service, Moss Bros’s hire division had failed to deliver two of the Ted Baker suits he had ordered for himself and three groomsmen. “I thought I had got organised super-early when we were fitted two months before the wedding day,” he says. “But two days beforehand when I was due to collect them, I was told the branch was closed and the suits would have to be couriered to me that afternoon.”
Koolen cancelled plans for a prenuptial get-together and waited in for a delivery that didn’t come. It wasn’t until 9pm that the order arrived, and two of the suits were missing. He was told they would follow on at noon the following day. Again he cancelled social arrangements and waited in vain. Moss Bros informed him that the suits had been mislaid and that replacements would be with him by mid-afternoon. By 6pm there was still no sign.
“In desperation I headed to Westfield shopping centre to purchase a suit for the groomsman from Ted Baker in a matching colour and design, resigned to the fact I would be wearing an unmatched lounge suit of my own on the day,” he says. The missing suits finally turned up at 8pm, with just hours to go before the service.
Moss Bros, which claims to offer more styles and sizes than any other British retailer, says Koolen’s case was an isolated incident. However, he insists the company only contacted him to offer compensation after Guardian Money got involved. And his “isolated” case has a familiar ring to it. On the same day on the other side of London, Cathryn Fuller was due to collect five suits for her wedding, also two days later. Only three had turned up to the Moss Bros Bromley store. The outfits were eventually couriered to the branch the evening before the wedding, and it was discovered that her father’s suit was the wrong size.
“Luckily, my dad had bought a back-up suit, but this meant he had to give me away in a suit that did not match the rest of the wedding party,” she says. “This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of our problems with Moss Bros – from lost measurements to lost orders, and confusing our wedding with someone else’s. When I phoned up to complain about our awful experience I was told that they were too busy with Ascot to deal with my complaint.”
Moss Bros, after weeks of chasing by Fuller, offered a refund of her £617 order, but she says that doesn’t compensate for the distress caused. “They completely ruined the run-up to my wedding, and the look of all of my photos,” she says.
Also with a similar tale to tell is James Andrews (not his real name), who ended up marrying in his own lounge suit when his outfit failed to arrive in time. Andrews had ordered seven suits for his wedding, which was in London on the same day as Koolen’s and Fuller’s. When he went to collect them two days beforehand, his outfit was missing.
“The store’s idea of helping was to offer me smaller items of clothing they had in stock,” he says. “I had to call customer service myself and was assured a courier would deliver the items the next day. When it arrived, the trousers were the wrong size and I ended up having to wear my own clothes, which didn’t match my groomsmen.”
Moss Bros at first merely offered to refund the cost of the trousers plus £100 compensation. It has since refunded half the £579 hire cost. “The time it has taken to get this resolved, and communication along the way, has been shocking,” he says. “Customer services gives you a reference number and a link, which enables you to respond to messages and twice my link was closed, leaving me unable to reply.”
The company says that over the past year it has significantly extended the ranges offered for hire, but its stock and systems have at times been unable to cope with demand, especially during the summer wedding season. In its delayed response to Fuller’s complaint, it explained that it had “identified a failure in our hiring processes, along with a failure in the business process between our stores and our customer services department” and admitted that its complaints monitoring system is “in its infancy”. It promised to review its hire procedures before launching a new online system later in the year.
However, it told Money that there were no problems with customer service. “Our hire service operations are an extremely important part of the business and we are proud to be a market leader in having built a very strong reputation based on excellent customer service and satisfaction,” says a spokesperson.
Koolen begs to differ. “Staff were mostly incompetent and insensitive to the stress and anxiety caused,” he says. “They weren’t helped by seemingly hopeless systems – they had no tracing system in place, and no visibility on order status with the warehouse or the couriers. Despite the promises, no one ever called back. The two days before the wedding should have been filled with hassle-free last-minute preparations and socialising with friends and family, but they were completely spoiled by the incompetence of Moss Bros.”
It looks as though a chastened Moss Bros is making up for lost time, however. In the weeks since the Koolen’s wedding, couriers from the store have twice turned up with unwanted wedding suits.
