Woman seeks wedding dress that she claims laundry service lost

How far would you go to get your wedding dress back?

South Philadelphia womanLevana Layendecker is putting out the call on social media to enlist the public’s aid in finding the beloved wedding dress lost while being cleaned byWash Cycle Laundrya few weeks ago.

Layendeckerwrote a detailed post on her blog about her frustrations dealing with Wash Cycle Laundry.

Layendecker claimed she was “wooed by WashCycleLaundry’s marketing” into using the service, which offers laundry pick-up via bicycles that are often seen traveling around Philadelphia, for the first time.

But days after they picked up her laundrybag with clothes including the wedding dress, on June 3, she was told it had been lost.

“I spent the next week following up with them every day and begging them to let me come to facility and look for it myself,” Levendecker wrote. “They refused and on June 8, over the phone they offered to pay me $350 for my items. I refused and asked to speak to a supervisor.”

Wash Cycle’s marketing director Leigh Goldenberg confirmed Layendecker’s complaint was filed, but says the company has been “sleepless” in the past days while searching for the dress.

“What we are here to do is clean laundry and deliver it back to people. We came up short,” Goldenberg said. “We have a procedure for missing items, which we went above and beyond at her request and because of the sentimental nature of the item.”

The search included reviewing security footage, revisiting all delivery points from the day Levendecker’s items were picked up, and searching through Wash Cycle’s five Philadelphia locations. Goldenberg estimated that various staff members invested about 40 hours into searching for the dress before concluding it was irretrievably lost.

“We did everything we could do to try and recover the dress. When we determined that was not possible we took the step of cutting her the check,” Goldenberg said.”We understand that no amount of money would make up for the fundamental loss.”

Goldenberg said that based on their records, Wash Cycle estimates that one item out of every 4,000 pickups is lost and not found.

Levendecker was sent a refund check for $300, she said in her blog post.

She believes the dress was accidentally delivered to another Wash Cycle customer. Now she is spreading the pictures of the dress on Twitter and Facebook to hopefully catch the eye of the person who received it.

“My hope is that enough people see it, maybe someone will realize they have it and get it back to me,” she told Metro.