Wedding Flowers 101, Part 3: How much do wedding flowers cost?
If this question has been weighing on your brain, friend, let’s dive in!
It’s not a great feeling to want beautiful fresh flowers for your wedding and then hit a wall of confusion once it comes down to budgeting.
You might have questions like…
How do I know what a good price for a bridal bouquet is?
How much does a ceremony arch cost?
Why are wedding flowers so much more expensive than grocery store bouquets?
Unfortunately, your online search for those answers may yield a pretty far range. Which is frustrating if you have a strict budget to make your fairytale florals happen for your once-in-a-lifetime event.
Photograph by Sam Bond Photography
I don’t believe there should be any secrets about wedding flowers, especially when it comes to making an informed purchase. That doesn’t do any favors for anyone.
And yes, floral designs are art and the value of art lies with the beholder, or some such saying, but the basic cost of materials and labor and expertise should be relatively similar.
So what does go into the cost for a wedding design?
Both domestic flowers and imported ones are sold to florists, grocery stores, and in-house designers from that dreamy venue at wholesale cost.
And that is where the similarities stop.
Did you know? Grocery stores sell flowers as a ‘loss leader.’ Yes, you read that correctly: loss. Grocery stores actually don’t make money on the pretty flowers they stock in the front windows. Those flowers serve a very different purpose than flowers for wedding designs: selling more groceries. Photograph by Ace Photography
For floral designs, the next step for those stems is to be aggregated at a designated studio space in cool storage to begin their journey into becoming the breathtaking flowers for your dream wedding.
Each flower type has an optimum moment of peak beauty, usually when it is fully opened. The stems are expertly conditioned for a lasting display and opened to the perfect stage, arranged into a practiced and breathtaking design, temporarily stored in cold storage once again, delivered to the venue with care with maybe some extra stability supports, setup or installed if they need to be, transported from ceremony to reception if needed, and finally taken down and potentially composted and vessels cleaned.
Photograph by Sam Bond Photography
And a florist provides much more than simply beautiful designs full of lovely flowers.
Your florist will bring their experience and expertise to the table to take any vision of wedding flowers and elevate it: they both optimize and maximize. That know-how will be able to get you the most bang for your buck.
If your florist is a farmer-florist (Hi! That’s me!), or someone similar who values locally-grown flowers, you’re in for even more of a treat. They’ll know how to source the very best flowers during every season to create designs on a whole other level of loveliness, with some portion of those flowers being grown on their farm. Locally-grown flowers offer shapes, movement, colors, and textures that are unrivaled because of their low tolerance for shipping.
Your florist will maintain good relationships with each grower or vendor they source their flowers from, or with mother nature herself, so that you get the crème-de-la-crème of beautiful flowers for your wedding.
Photograph by Sara Cassidy Photography
So, if you’re opting for stunning, fresh wedding flowers to make your wedding day unforgettable, purchasing designs from a professional should definitely not cost the same as grocery store flowers. If they do, that’s a red flag, friend.
Want to learn how to achieve fairytale-level wedding florals with any size budget?
Check out the blog post Wedding Flowers on a Budget to see all the smart strategies and decisions you can utilize to get UH-mazing fresh flowers for the dreamiest day no matter if your flower budget is $150 or $15,000.
Ready to test out your budget to see how far it can go?
Visit my interactive Wedding Flowers Calculator page:
Wishing your floral dreams come true,
Sara
