Flowers are such an integral part of a wedding day! They are a beautiful decorative focal point and are the easiest way to incorporate your wedding colors to your day. We love flowers and will always advocate for real flowers over fake flowers. And I know that many people would prefer to use real flowers too except for the big downside – why are they so expensive?
1. Quantity
Weddings can be full of sticker shock. I mean, usually when you splurge on a dress for an event, it’ll be a few hundred dollars at the most. So when you imagine that a wedding dress will be at least 5-10x more expensive than that, you can assume that other things will be similarly priced. Flowers are kind of pricey in general, just one bouquet can range from $5-30 in the grocery store so if you can imagine having bouquets with even more flowers, made-to-order with your colors and certain types of flowers that may or may not be in season, it can add up! The sheer quantity of flowers that you’ll need also plays into the price. Nebraska is notorious for having the largest wedding guest counts (we’ve done multiple weddings over 300 people this year!) and in turn large bridal parties and you’ll need bouquets and boutonnieres and centerpieces for all of them!
2. Small Business
This is something that applies to more than just florists – the average person usually doesn’t support so many small businesses at once. So much as we try to support our local community, we’ll always hit up our Targets and Starbucks and Chick-fil-a’s. So it is a bit of a different experience when your wedding vendors are almost all small business owners. There is going to be a bit of a pricing difference because we aren’t the big box stores.
3. Wholesale
So here’s a little secret that I’ve noticed – wholesale flowers sadly aren’t *that* much cheaper than flowers from the store. We don’t get flowers for pennies. We do get a lot of different types of flowers that you can’t find in a local store or flower market in the midwest but the pricing for those more uncommon types of flowers isn’t cheaper. A lot of time and effort goes into growing flowers. They are affected by nature and weather and storms and even when they are grown in fabulous greenhouses, they have to be shipped to the middle of the country Nebraska. They are perishable (and heavy) which means hello overnight shipping! It is a hard thing for couples to justify spending money on, and to that I say that I totally understand! However, they will be remembered in so many wedding photos! Food and drinks only last a day, you won’t wear your wedding dress again, the whole day is an experience!
4. Labor
One of the reasons (I think) that wholesale flowers compare to flowers from Hy-Vee or somewhere else is that generally if you get flowers in a vase at a grocery store, they don’t cut off all the thorns or all of the leaves. That is one of the most time consuming processes in flower arranging. You have to hydrate them because they just got shipped across the country or from a different country and you have to cut the stems every few days to make sure they will stay fresh. Floral designing has meticulous and repetitive elements, increasing the time it takes to create the final product.
5. Labor and Expertise
Flower arranging is harder than you think! It’s an art and a science knowing how many flowers to use in a bouquet, what looks good and what doesn’t, and how it’ll all fare on a hot summer day in your hand outside of water or hanging on an arch and blowing in the wind.
5. Accessories and Other
The expenses don’t stop at just flowers – we also have to stock up on vases, ribbon, clippers, buckets and bins, a cooler or refrigerator, and safely deliver, setup, and tear it all down. And again when you talk about quantity of flowers, there’s just a lot involved in a florist’s day.
There so much more to flowers than buying them and throwing them into a vase and when I was planning, I had no idea about any of it! Even if you choose to DIY your flowers, there may be a lot more steps than you were planning for so be aware! I hope that gives you some insight into everything that a florist does!
Leave a Reply