Cara C.
Yelp
I've been a longtime customer of HayleyCakes because their cookies look and taste great, and their cakes are usually really well done. However, this weekend I picked up a custom order where the writing on the cookie cake was completely wrong, and this is the *second time* this has happened to me. The first time, they misspelled the name for the person whose birthday it was. This also happened to a close friend of mine who ordered a cake for her husband, and they misspelled her husband's name. This time, they just completely overlooked the custom text request and wrote "Happy Halloween" when it was supposed to be a birthday cookie cake that said "Happy BOO-Day, Hallow-Queen!" (lol, I know).
When I flagged that the writing was wrong on Saturday, the gal who was working in the store was apologetic and very sweet, she said she would make a note of the issue so that someone would call me on Monday to speak to me about it. No one called me on Monday. I called toward the end of the day and didn't get an answer, so I left a message. Someone called me back Tuesday morning, and I wound up speaking with Mason and explained the issue, and I mentioned this was the second time this has happened.
Mason said Hayley decorated the cookie cake herself and joked that he was going to chew her out for messing it up - I honestly don't know if he was just kidding, but he got a good laugh out of it. He wasn't very apologetic about the mistake, and he didn't ask if there was anything the bakery could do to make it right or make it up to me. I asked if I could have a refund, because I placed a custom order and the cake I got was basically not what I ordered. He agreed to give me a refund, which I'm glad about, but overall the customer service experience was just not great.
I think all he had to say was something like "I'm so sorry about that, I totally get that that must've been disappointing, I'm sorry our team made a mistake! What can we do to help make this right? Could we offer you a refund or a gift certificate?" Instead, he was nonchalant, made some jokes, and asked "Other than the writing, how was the cake?" It's unfortunate that this is the second time a mistake like this has happened to me -- when the personalized writing is messed up on a custom order, it almost doesn't matter how good the cake is; a misspelled name or a Halloween message instead of a birthday message kind of kills the effect of the gesture.
I really like this bakery and I've recommended it to a lot of local friends and visitors from out of town, and I'll probably still drop in and get cookies from time to time, I just don't know if I will trust them with any custom orders in the future because this isn't a good track record and I wish they would've handled it better.