WHAT GOES INTO BEING A WEDDING FLORIST?
Our work begins the moment someone inquires about our services. Before someone even hires us, we spend several hours learning about a couple’s vision for their wedding day, creating a custom proposal + inspiration board, and going back and forth to get the floral plan just right. Writing emails (on average 20 to 100 emails are exchanged throughout the planning process), having an in-person or phone consultation, visiting the venue, and meeting with a planner takes many hours of time that must be accounted for in our pricing.
Once we book a client, we plan what flowers to use and how those will blend together to create balanced arrangements and we create a custom color palette. At Flourish, we do not use pre-fixed recipes and every single wedding is completely custom to each client. We reserve flowers from our farm’s inventory (and this doesn’t even cover growing the flowers, but the bottom line is that farm-grown flowers are not cheaper. It takes a lot of time and money to grow high-quality flowers!) and we also order them from other local growers and a floral wholesaler as needed. The planning and ordering process takes many hours and often days. Flowers and greenery are highly perishable and a 10% loss is standard, so that must be accounted for too.
We maintain an inventory of vases and vessels that all need to be kept clean, in good condition, and stored. A few days before the wedding, we receive the flowers from the wholesales, and pick them up from other growers and from the wholesaler. We process the flowers, make sure they are properly hydrated, and handle them to make sure they are in the perfect stage of openness for the wedding day – no one wants a droopy dahlia or a peony that is still in the tight bud! We start designing 2-3 days before the wedding, depending on the size of the wedding. Knowing how to handle the flowers, how to keep them alive and looking their best, how to organize which arrangements to design when, how to manage a skilled team and also how to actually create gorgeous designs takes years of practice and professional development.
make everything look perfect. And then we come back to the venue late at night to clean up. The following day we cleaned our studios, washed buckets and cleaned vases. It is such a labor of love and when all these pieces come together, we create magic and elevate your wedding day with beautiful florals.
Hopefully this provides a little more insight into why floral designs are not inexpensive, especially when hiring a seasoned professional. I can assure you that there are plenty of “florists” who DIY-ed their own flowers or flowers for a friend and decided to offer services as a florist… but they have no actual industry or professional experience. Their prices are often so low because they do not know how to price correctly and it makes the professionals’ prices seem out of range, when its actually the other way around.On the day of the actual wedding, we carefully (and I mean ever so carefully!) pack the vehicle for transport and spend all day on ladders, carrying buckets, bending, squatting and standing while we create your wedding flowers.
