Weddings

There are 3 types of weddings that flower growers get involved with

Fully Bespoke floristry
Buckets and bouquets
DIY flowers

People can assume that as soon as weddings are mentioned, the price goes up. but is that fair?

These things need to be taken into account

Time spent on consultations / quotes / explanations / site visits
The need for perfect flowers, second best won't do for a wedding day
The time and date are immovable

Considering just the bride's bouquet, so often, the number of stems may be the same as for a gift bouquet but the price is different because:

A higher rate of wastage needs to be accounted for to achieve perfection
There will be a higher proportion of luxury flowers, the Roses, Peonies, Dahlias and Hydrangeas etc.
Your Time is focused on just one customer, the bouquet is bespoke
You will have already spent time in preparations e.g sourcing specialty ribbons that you don't have in stock
You will need to have a back up plan to be able to provide the brides flowers if anything goes wrong

Before you can work out your costings for a wedding quote, here's the series of questions you need to ask yourself.

Are you working to precise flowers types, a general colour scheme or whatever's flowering?
Will you only be using flowers you've grown or will you be buying in?
How long will you have spent picking the flowers, conditioning them, and making them up?
Have you had to get in additional help?
How will you be presenting the bouquet? To the same place as the rest of the wedding flowers?
Will you be delivering the flowers to the venue and picking them up afterwards?
Will you have to do any floristry on site?
What vases / props / accessories will i need and will i need to hire or buy them? Whose are they after the wedding, yours of the bride's?
What tools and equipment will i need, and is that different from your every day items?
What proportion of your expenses will you need to cover with this wedding?
What profit do i want to make?

When I make a normal gift bouquet, i'll have it in my diary that i'll need to make it at some point in the day, but it will normally be fitted in around the other jobs that i'm doing, and will be delivered on the way home. For a wedding bouquet, I have an immovable deadline as to when it will be collected or delivered. This means I block out a complete section of time from my day for that particular bouquet, and arrange the rest of the jobs around it.

So here’s how i’d plan my costings for

1) A set of DIY wedding buckets

This video is of me putting together a set of 2 wedding boxes (it’s been put in 3 buckets not to squash some of the flowers)

I’ll need to add into my prices

Initial email contact

Consultation (for just DIY buckets, I wouldn’t normally do any in person consultation, they are invited to the farm on an open day)

Picking flowers

Conditioning and collationg them

I put 80 stems of flowers in a bucket, and the buckets cost £75. I make sure that I put in a mixture of focal flowers, secondary flowers, spires and filler. I need to make sure that I get the mix right, as using too many focal flowers will ensure that I don’t make a good profit.

So in 80 stems, there would be

8 Focal flowers @ average 80p cost (Note this will not allow for Roses to be used!) = £6.40

12 Spires @ average 60p £7.20

24 secondary flowers @ average 50p £12

36 fillers @ average 40p £14.4

total =£40

It will take me 30 minutes to pick and condition, and another 15 minutes to collate the bucket. = £15

I’ll take into account that one in 4 buckets don’t make it back to me (most people recycle them, but not all of them come back) = £1

i’ll have spent 30 minutes contacting them via my bridal email system / sending invoices / seeing them in a group at an open day = £10

So total costs = £40+£15+£1+£10 = £66

Profit on one bucket = £9 and that’s not taking into account any of my expenses.

BUT I will make a lot more if I add in additional buckets (picking / conditioning /collating costs are lower) and get orders for added value floristry, like Bridal bouquets and buttonholes.

2) A DIY bouquets and buckets wedding

Lets take the example of a 4 bucket DIY wedding with a Bridal bouquet, a Bridesmaid bouquet and 5 buttonholes.

This would need 1/2 hour of planning to work out which flowers i’d need to use, in addition to the time spent on the emails / invoices etc- (the single bucket would be done while I was walking round the field!) = £10 + £10

I’d use 4 times the single bucket figures for the flowers, i.e Wholesale price = 4 x £40 so £160

I’d pick all the flowers together, so instead of taking 1/2 hour to pick 80 stems it would take me 1 1/2 hours to pick 400 stems = £30 plus collation time of half an hour = £10 so £40 in total.

I will make up the Bridal bouquet with more focal flowers including Roses or Peonies or Dahlias, but to the same theme as the buckets,

9 Focal flowers @ £1.80 cost (will allow for Roses to be used!) = £16.20

5 Spires @ average 60p £3.00

9 secondary flowers @ average 50p £4.50

11 fillers @ average 40p £4.40

Wholesale cost of flowers = £28.10

Also cost of ribbon / floristry materials = £10

And the bridesmaid bouquet along the same lines, but less focal flowers = £20.40

I’ve got 5 buttonholes to make, so i’ll use 2 focal flowers for each of those, but i’ll probably use side stems, / seed heads / foliage that are waste from collating the buckets

Cost = 5 x £3.60 = £18

I will allow one hour to make the Bridal bouquet, and 1 hour to do the 5 buttonholes and the bridesmaid bouquet. i’ll also allow 1/2 hour to get them packaged and presented = £50

So

Time allocation @ £20 p/h =

1 hour for planning, 2 hours for picking and collating, 2 1/2 hours for making = £110

Wholesale cost of the flowers and sundries = buckets + bouquets + buttonholes = £236.50

total costs = £346.50

Wedding prices 4 x £75, = £300, plus £105 for bridal bouquet, £85 for Bridesmaid and £10 per buttonholes = £500

Which means I can cover £100 of my expenses, and make £53.50 profit