Complaint Review: Catalyst Design

We hired Catalyst Design for the launch of our new online retail clothing company.  We signed a contract with them to design the new website, do a photo shoot and print shirts. We hired Catalyst in December 2011 and were planning to launch the company in June 2012. In the signed contract, they told us our website would be done in 6 weeks. In the months to come it was becoming apparent that we would not be receiving a website on deadline. We emailed them, called them, and drove three hours out of our way to have meetings with them to find out what was going on. They were unresponsive, cancelled meetings at the last minute and just ignored us. When we did get a hold of them, they told us everything was fine and that they were sorry for being unresponsive and they would change. A photo shoot for our website was scheduled in March, in May when I asked them to see the photos they told me they were on someone’s camera that was out of the country.

Needless to say, we never received a website or photos. We launched our business in June 2012 at a very large event without a website. When we returned from the event, we contacted them and asked if our website could be completed in two weeks. They said no problem. Two weeks came and went and nothing. So we contacted them again several time and they promised we would have it the following week. We never heard anything from them. We finally contacted them in July 2012 and told them we couldn’t wait any longer and we were ending our relationship with them. We asked them several times to return the money we paid them for the website and the photo shoot and we asked them to send us back the over $7,000 in t-shirt inventory they were holding at their location waiting to print.

We never heard anything from them again. They never sent our money back and they stole over $7,000 in t-shirt inventory from us. They ruined the start-up of our business and we were devastated we lost all of that money and inventory. I can’t tell you how heart breaking it is to hire a partner for such an exciting time in your life and find out they are common criminals and thieves.

We took them to small claims court and won, however the max we can collect is $5,000 and they have not made good on their court ordered obligation to pay us. So far, this has been a year-long battle we have been fighting and even if we do get some of our money back, we won’t recover thousands of dollars they stole from us and the business momentum we lost from launching a product no one could purchase online.