Hi babes! Today’s post is going to be an interesting one. A few weeks ago I was openly complaining on my Twitter about the poor experience I was having with printing brand LaLaLab but on this post I’m telling you all: the good, the bad and the ugly. Time for tea, my friends! 😉

So, LaLaLab* is a photo printing online service in the form of website and app where you can upload your own pics and transform them in Polaroid-kind of photos, calendars, magnets, cases, photo books, frames or cards. You can customize some details like background color of your photos or add text as well.

THE BAD

For this post I ordered the Biggie Box, which is a box of 70 photos. Unfortunately my problems started straight away while I was selecting and uploading the pics and they would take ages to upload or, by the end of the selection, when I was trying to add text in some of them, the page would freeze and get me back to the previous step. Another frustrating thing I found was the fact that I couldn’t center my photos. As the format was square, I wanted to center some of my horizontal or vertical pics but I simply couldn’t.

THE UGLY

Anyway, once the first two steps of the process finished (which I had to do in two days because I was wasting too much time that first day) it was the time to pay. I had been given a gift card for that purpose and now HERE comes the part that really sucked. They weren’t accepting my gift card code. I got an error message saying that it had expired, when I could clearly see above my gift card code that it expires in a year. So I contacted the person who gave me the gift card, he apologized and gave me a second gift card.

So the next day I tried paying with the second gift card and guess what… I got the same error message saying that it had expired too 😮 I knew that no matter how many gift cards I tried I would always get that same message. This time I tried looking for help through different channels, so I messaged them on Facebook and I had no reply that day. The next day I commented in one of their Instagram pics, I tweeted about them (tagging them of course) and sent an email to a generic Customer Service email address. The guys from Twitter were the quickest ones to reply, probably because my tweet was a bit straightforward. They first said it was problem with their code generator, while the guys on Facebook where asking me once again which were my codes (which I had already given on my initial message but whatevs). Also, I got a reply from the customer service email where they asked me to pay with the gift card codes but through their app instead of website because they were ‘primarily an app’. I downloaded the app and tried using my codes there but they were still invalid. I deleted the app straight away. :/

Another day passed, no reply from Instagram, but at least someone was doing something on Facebook and Twitter. I got a new message from the latter now saying a completely different thing than the day before. This time they said that one of the codes was already used and the other one was deleted (?). Luckily for me, I had another message but this time from the Facebook guys, saying all the opposite: that the latest code was okay and ready to be used (???). I checked, and in fact they were right, I had no idea what happened but now my code was finally working. I completed the order (after almost a week lol) and got the parcel on time. Funnily enough, a week ago I got a reply from their Instagram, but I had the parcel with me by then.

What can you think of this company, as a consumer, after all this? Well, the first thing I noticed is that they had zero internal communication, like literally one person is telling me that both of my codes are useless while the other one is telling me that I can use them, and another one asks me to download their app. Secondly, I don’t and will never know what was the real problem why I couldn’t use my codes. If I hadn’t complained to them all over their social media, I wouldn’t be even reviewing their product right now because I would have no product to show at all! And what about all the amount of time I wasted trying to make this work from the moment I started uploading the pics to the moment I finally placed the order?

THE GOOD

As for the photos, well, the box is extremely cute, and the printed photos themselves are okay as expected, too bad some of them are not centered so some selfies cut the top of my head or some landscapes don’t look their best, but trust me, that’s the smallest issue here. I do love going though all these physical photos that have a special meaning for me, though. I smile every time I see each one of them because they bring back moments of pure happiness and joy with the people I love the most. There’s definitely something about physical photography that can’t be replaced with phones, that’s for sure.

CONCLUSION

I rarely give bad reviews and it’s always a sad thing to do when it happens but the truth is, I wouldn’t recommend you guys to use LaLaLab. Yes sure the presentation of their products is super cute but there are tons of printing services out there that would save you the headache and wasted time that comes with ordering from LaLaLab. Maybe some bloggers had positive experiences with them but this is my personal review and I’m not going to give you any bs, you guys know that about my reviews. I did some cute pics because I care for my blog aesthetics and it was my part of the collaboration to review their services and products, which I did, but always from a completely honest place.

xoxo

Deb