What to expect from your wedding florist

So, you’re planning your wedding and getting quotes for your flowers and are probably wondering why wedding flowers are so expensive. After all, you could just go to the supermarket and get a few bunches there. Well, I wanted to take you through a florists process throughout the lead up to your wedding.

It all starts with a consult. Consults help not only the florists but you to figure out if we’re the right fit. We go through your vision, what arrangements you would like included, and based off that we can figure out a very rough budget. For florists who have a flat price, you’ll get a more concrete idea of how much everything will cost, but for us florists who price based on seasonal availability and customise everything, we can only offer an estimate right away.

After the consult, the florist puts together an official quote, which involves a lot of maths! I personally have a spreadsheet to help me out, as well as rough prices for each season. Once the quote is ready, we send it off and wait for the deposit.

The deposit is required before we can put a preorder in with our wholesaler. The reason we require a deposit is because it is very risky to buy perishable items that haven’t been ‘secured’ by the buyer. If a client falls through and we have already bought flowers without a deposit, we have just spent hundreds of dollars to now not have anything to do with them. A deposit secures your date and gives florists some security if something were to happen.

We order flowers in advance to make sure we can secure the right flowers from our wholesaler. Depending on the florist, time of event, and arrangements needed, we may pick up, or get shipped, the flower order a few days before, the day before, or the day of. If we are doing a lot of different arrangements or a big installation, we will have to get started on things we can do a day or so before the wedding. This means conditioning all the flowers and foliage, preparing flower vessels, greening arrangements so we have less work to do on the day.

On the day of your wedding, we will be running around finishing arrangements, often before you’re awake. We’ll get to the venue early so we can work on the arrangements, cleaning up and being out of there before any guests arrive. If there’s a second location for the reception, we’ll head over there and do the rest of the arrangements, cleaning as we go.

It takes a lot of hours to put together wedding flowers, not to mention all the planning that goes into them. So, when deciding whether to have a florist create your arrangements or DIYing them yourself, please remember all the work that goes into it and whether you will feasibly have the time while doing the rest of the wedding planning and preparations.

Althea xx