This is part 1 of 2 in our money saving series
Dear Petal’s Edge,
I’ve heard that using seasonal flowers, buying wholesale and DIY’ing my flowers can save me money. What are other ways to bring the costs down?
– Amanda R.
Dear Amanda,
This is a great question for us to address because so often we see advice – primarily in wedding magazines and blogs – that just seems plain wrong. Like many myths, it gets repeated over and over regardless of the truth. It often feels like they didn’t consult a florist when writing the article, or if they did, they snipped out the best quotes and left the salient parts on the cutting room floor.
So as actual florists who have done literally thousands of weddings, we’d like to take a moment to blow up a couple of those myths. In fact, we’ll make this a two-part series, and in our next Ask the Florist post, we’ll actually answer your question and give you some suggestions on how be realistic about how low you can go on your wedding flower budget, and where are good places to cut back and adjust design and style expectations to get those costs down.
Myth #1: DIY will Save You Money.
This really should be called DDIY, where the extra D stands for DON’T. While we have seen magazine articles that suggest buying flowers and vases wholesale is the way to go, take a moment to ask yourself who is going to cut, clean and assemble all of those flowers in the two or three days before the wedding? Beyond even knowing the basics of arranging flowers, what are you going to do when the wholesaler can’t get the specific variety of flower you asked for? Or if instead of substituting something else, they gave you a refund leaving you short on flowers? What happens when some of the flowers come in broken or moldy? What if you haven’t ordered enough flowers for all of the arrangements you need to make? These are all things we deal with weekly and for which we have fail safes. Beyond getting and making the floral arrangements, where are you going to store them so they stay fresh? How do you plan to transport them to the wedding site? Flowers don’t stack nicely; you’ll need a van of some kind with a flat bed. Keep in mind also that many wedding venues do not allow the vendors (including the caterer, who puts out the tables and linens) access to the site until about 2-4 hours in advance of the wedding. Some places, like hotels, will require you to go through the loading dock. If you haven’t been in one before, you really don’t want to know… Trust us. EW. Two words: Dumpster Juice.
If your budget really doesn’t allow for floral centerpieces, and DIY is truly your only option, then go with something very simple and timeless with little to no assembly. We’ll talk about what that might look like in our next post in this series.
Myth #2: Seasonal Flowers are Less Costly.
This one really has to end, as we hear that idea more often than any other for how to bring costs down. We see it in magazines all the time, and then hear it from clients when we first meet with them. I have to tell you, with rare exception seasonality has very little to do with the price of flowers – at least in our part of the world. What does have to do with the price of flowers is transportation costs, or more specifically, the cost of gas. While seasonality might mean something if you live in Florida or California (where many of the greenhouses are only a couple of towns over and it doesn’t cost much to move to your area), if you don’t live in a region where cut flowers are grown, the growing season has very little effect on the price tag as they all have to be shipped in.
What seasonality does impact is availability and quality. If the flowers aren’t currently being grown anywhere in the world at that time, we can’t get them for you, regardless of how much you are willing to pay for them. It is the same in reverse: just because tulips are growing outside in your garden does not mean that they are going to be cheaper than any other flower choice, unless, of course, you live in Holland where the bulk of them are grown.
Myth #3: Just Substitute Some Cheaper Flowers.
While it is certainly true that using a less expensive flower type in your arrangements will bring your costs down, we often feel that when our clients ask this, they are asking us to create the look they want but with less expensive flowers. The myth here is that there is no magic “cheaper” flower that will give you the exact same arrangement style for less cost. We often say that flowers fall into three price tiers: there are the very expensive flowers, like garden roses, peonies and some orchid types; the middle of the road flowers like roses, stock and tulips; and then there are the least expensive flowers like carnations and baby’s breath. Wedding flowers most typically fall into that second price tier. Generally our clients do not want flowers in that lowest cost tier mixed into their arrangements, even though, in truth, using carnations in their arrangements would bring the cost down; however, substituting carnations would also completely change and cheapen the look. A carnation, like most less expensive flowers, simple doesn’t look like roses or tulips or stock. They look like carnations, and they always will.
The best way to use cheaper flowers and bring the cost down is to focus the arrangement on those less expensive flowers to show off their greatest qualities, which is something we will talk about in part two of this series. But that does require changing your expectation for style and look, and might not be for everyone.
I hope that helps! Best wishes with your wedding!
Do you have a question about flowers or wedding planning? Send us your question in the comment field or by email (to info@petalsedge.com, subject line “Ask the Florist”), and we’ll include it in a future round of Ask the Florist!
Some important points here. It’s important to trust professionals to know these kinds of things. Thanks for dispelling these myths!