On the daily many, many brides come to us for wedding flowers and design. We often get the line “We are on a budget…”. Being in this business for many years I know that EVERYONE is on a budget. It would be everyone’s dream to have an endless wedding budget to have all your dreams and desires on that special day. And though, we would love you to have your dream wedding without worrying about cost, but that is not that realistic. So we posted this little ditty to inform you. I hope it finds you well!
This entry edited from Nancy Liu Chin
The answer is pretty straight forward. Cost of flowers reflect
1) Supply v. Demand.
2) Availability.
3) Overhead costs of suppliers.
4) Shipping.
5) Source.
6) Geography.
7) Seasonality or time of the year.
And a few other things.
Avoid flowers that are
1) High Maintenance
2) Out of Season and must be imported from Europe
3) Low in Supply but High in Demand.
4) Rare and hard to find.
5) Tight buds, doesn’t open well.
6) Wilts or bruise quickly.
Let’s give you an example. This morning for around $50(at wholesale not retail), you could take home 5 stems of white Peonies, 10 stems of locally grown Garden roses, and 5 stems of imported South American creamy Hydrangea from one of the best wholesalers.
Before I go on, this is not a joke, this is what $50 at wholesale costs(repeat – not retail). If you were to buy this from a floral shop, I would assume that it would be 2 to 3 times as much depending on the area. If the flowers were old and the shop needed to sale them, you might find a better deal but for our example, let’s see this from the floral designer/florist shop standpoint.
I, a boutique floral designer studio, paid $5.00 a stem of peonies, roughly $2.50 for one stem of hydrangea and $1.50 for one small stem of garden roses of which many probably won’t open by this weekend. Note, since these are garden roses and not a hothouse variety, not all of them will open at the same time. Some are already open others remain tight.
Keep in mind, the cost of a designed arrangement also needs to factor in all sorts of other costs including the time to select flowers, clean flowers, delivery flowers, vase, overhead, labor charges. This is why it’s possible that 5 peonies, 10 garden roses, foliage, 5 cream hydrangea could easily be $100 to $200 in today’s market.
If you factor that these are for a wedding, then you also have to add more overhead and design costs. On top of the other factors, wedding flowers should include a designer’s time, creativity of designer, proposal writing skills, and the overall delivery and setup costs. One factor that is rarely mentioned is the cost of the “used” flowers. Many floral designer(not floral shops) buy flowers for a specific event. If the flowers do not open, the floral designer has to overbuy to ensure that they have flowers in “wedding” condition.
As you can see from the picture available, not all 5 stems of those peonies are perfect or large and open enough to be presented in a bouquet. Because we cannot deliver tight buds, we had to overbuy this particular flowers by 3 times. That means that we actually paid for 3 times as many peonies that we needed so that the one bouquet would be in great condition, I call it delivery wedding condition. Thus, experienced wedding professionals will anticipate this and budget accordingly.
Unfortunately, the cost of flowers often fluctuates, and with the effort that goes on to preserve and present these flowers, although we would love to, we cannot offer them at wholesale prices to our brides. After the gas and time to buy them, the time to process them, water, preservatives and other maintenance needed for them, as well as the time, electricity and space to hold them until time to deliver. The flowers for one special day could take up to a week of preparation which gets added to the initial cost of the supply.
We hope this is informative and helps you to understand, what happens when you are paying a professional to help you with your floral design.
