After designing florals for many weddings, our flower farm decided it was important to do things differently in order to create options for people. Too often, in magazines, you only see the floral designs from very expensive, extravagant weddings. I get it, there are lots of flowers and expensive flowers from around the world in those photos and those designers have done amazing work creating them, to which we all can admire! Who wouldn’t? However, the majority of people in the world do not have those options.
This really was the start to our wedding floral design business …Using local certified organic flowers and providing options for people with all kinds of wedding budgets. Many people do not realize the time, prep, artistry, delivery, building, and service floral designers provide and often do not realize the price it takes to craft and create these arrangements. This is how the Build Your Own Bundle of Blooms on our Farm was created!
Let’s look a little deeper into floral design wedding costs…
The cost of weddings is a touchy subject that many businesses do not want to discuss. It is hard to sometimes understand unless you are in the industry behind the scenes and understand all of the time and effort that goes into creating botanical designs for a big event. The hardest thing that people lose sight of is that floral designers, flower farmers, and florists are artists. You are paying for their skill, craft, and art. A floral designer for a wedding is an artist that uses plant materials and flowers to create an aesthetically pleasing, balanced, and composed piece.
So often, people get confused and think that if a flower costs one dollar that is all the floral designer should charge and the answer is… not at all. Let’s look at some costs that are behind the scenes for your floral design budget…This can be a touchy subject for many, but here we go!
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Consultation: One to 3 hours spent with the designer to discuss your ideas and plans for your event. For us, the initial consultation is free, but this may not be the same for other florists. Sometimes, the first hour is free and then there is a fee for time after that. It takes a lot of time to do consultations during wedding season.
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Options: Designers take your consultation and create a recipe with lots of hours and time spent on developing options (determining availability of particular flowers you wanted on your special day, prices of these stems often times a year out need to be researched) in your price range for your arrangements, bouquets, ceremonies, and more. This often takes a lot of time to make sure we capture the feel and budget you are hoping for.
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Emails with options delivered to you with often some back and forth about options, which is time.
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Order Placement: Making sure we grow out the colors you need in time on our farm or time spent ordering some flowers that the couple wants that we do not grow in our climate.
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Materials: Costs of flowers, plants, containers, foam, chicken wire, pins, floral tape, accessories and more.
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Flower prep: Picking, harvesting flowers, cooling them properly before use so that they last longer, prepping flowers properly so that they last beyond a few days, de-leafing, changing water often, cutting underwater to avoid embolisms, heating stems, etc. This process takes time and creates flowers that last! You are paying for your flowers to last and look good!
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Design Time: Time creating arrangements. Some people have 20+ tables with 20+ arrangements just for dinner not including arbors, floral table runners, ceremony arrangements, cocktail hour tables, bridal party bouquets and boutonnieres etc. Do not get me wrong, I am not complaining, we LOVE designing for people, but all of these steps take time and often are overlooked in a client's idea of what things cost.
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Overhead: The cost to run the walk in coolers, electricity, taxes, repairs etc.
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Labor: The cost of the designer’s time, plus benefits like insurance and taxes. So often people forget to pay themselves. Do not forget! What is your time worth? How many hours did it take you to do all of these steps? Remember to pay yourself because if you do not, it was basically all done for free.
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Delivery and take down: Arrangements have to be delivered in a cold temperature and set up during a certain time window from the venue and then many places have you come back to take it all down so that they can prepare for their next event.
Jackie and I know that not everyone has the same budget for events and we wanted to create options for people who wanted to be crafty themselves or did not want a full service wedding package. So we created the Build Your Own Bundle of Blooms! Customers can order buckets of flowers from us in certain color palettes we have and use them to create their own bouquets and arrangements for their special events. We typically have anywhere from 60 to 100 stems per bucket which can create about 6 to 8 mason jar sized arrangements. We love making buckets of blooms for customers and so many of you have done great with them! You get to be the artist on your day!
We also offer a wedding farm package on our farm through our prime season. We grow a lot of flowers and this flower package is a great way to get a flower service wedding using only flowers we have grown on the farm. This particular package is different from our full service wedding package because it only uses the flowers we grow from the farm in the color palettes we have:) and it can save you more money during our peak season.
Take a look at our wedding options!