If you haven’t noticed, weddings and flowers are our thing. We love them—even in the dead of (the fifth or sixth) winter this year in Edmonton. We absolutely understand the stresses of planning and funding the entire occasion, including all the little side events (like bridal showers and brunch) and all the extra little touches (shoes, hair, accoutrements, booze, etc.) that make your wedding day a dream.
In this post, we’ll talk about what we know—the flowers—and why they’re priced the way they are.
What’s the Deal with Sales and Discounts on Flowers?
Whoever is on the hook for the bill, whether it’s dear old dad or your badass self, anywhere you can save a buck or two is always exciting. We see what you see when you’re scrolling through Instagram or strolling through the bridal shows: 20% off here, 15% off there.
Bridal discounts are one way that florists try to increase bookings. We get it. It sounds enticing in the thick of wedding planning (forgive me Visa balance for I have sinned), but, that being said, you want to be 100% sure where this 15 or 20% is coming from.
We have racked our brains to see where we could offer a discount and, truly, we drew a blank. The way that we price at FaBLOOMosity is fair and honest and every penny is accounted for. We will always tell you exactly what you are getting for your money, and we can assure you that there is not enough room in the budget of the average floral studio to discount the cost of flowers at all (let alone 15 – 20%).
So where are these discounts coming from? Is the quality of flowers or number of stems being compromised? Or is the “original” price simply being jacked up 20% so that the client can still feel as if they are getting a discounted price? (That last one about misleading ordinary selling price representations is illegal in Canada by the way.)
How Do We Justify Our Prices?
The main thing we do here at Fab is make sure every detail is perfect for our brides, even if we have to use blood, sweat, and tears.
Speaking of tears—we only like to see that happy kind. And because of that, if your blush peonies arrive to the store in a blinding bubble gum pink, your Fab florists will be searching far and wide to ensure you get the blush peonies you asked for. We go above and beyond the job description so that our brides are the happiest ones around. These little incidentals are accounted for in our pricing.
When those perfect blush peonies arrive to the store, they require a lot of love. Proper processing will ensure that your bouquet is perky and perfect on the big day—this is something we will not compromise on even if it means spending an hour on the floor on our hands and knees smashing stems with a sledgehammer (yes this is something we actually do). It takes time, a state of the art refrigeration unit, and lots and lots and lots of water to keep your blooms perfect.
We’ll Cover You From Consultation to Reception—and Then Some
How do we know that blinding bubble gum pink peonies won’t do when you asked for blush? We really get to know our brides—we spend time learning every aspect of their special day, right down to the colour of their groom’s socks. This is why we cannot provide a quote without a consultation of some sort—our pricing is based on itemized floral recipes that take into account every flower and all the foliage.
After our consultation, we keep in touch throughout the planning process to ask questions and double-check numbers, to remind you of which flower we chose for your Mother in Law’s corsage, to remove a bridesmaid bouquet after you fired her, to add that bridesmaid bouquet after you hired her back. The list goes on. No adjustment is too small or too large and we will always accommodate for our brides.
Something else that sets the FaBLOOMosity wedding process apart is our preview. We bring in each bride the day before the wedding to make sure that everything from bouquet to boutonnière gets the bride’s seal of approval. We are proud to say we see quite a few of those happy tears! But on the off chance something doesn’t look quite the way you imagined, we do whatever we need to do to make sure it fits that vision—no matter what.
We share all this not to toot our own horns (okay, maybe a little bit), but to break down the cost of a flower into more than just a beautiful bloom that will last you 5-7 days. When you buy your flowers with FaBLOOMosity, wedding or whenever, you get a lot more than just a pretty bouquet. You get our care, attention, time, and effort. You get the countless hours our growers spend weeding and watering, and the freshest flowers from around the globe, flown on the red eye, destined to be a part of your bouquet.
Why Are Wedding Flowers So Expensive?
People often assume that a wedding bouquet costs more than a Happy Birthday bouquet because there is an arbitrary mark-up attached to the W-word—which is crazy because the occasion doesn’t affect pricing.
The pricing of wedding flowers is determined by the cost of many things during the flowers’ lives, including:
· Planting the seeds
· Caring for the plants
· Harvesting the flowers
· Packaging and bundling the stems
· Shipping to the delivery warehouses
· Prepping the blooms at the flower shop
· Arranging the flowers for the event
The cost of a flower starts to add up from the time the seeds are planted; the plants watered, pruned, weeded and cut; and the flowers bundled, wrapped, and packed in a refrigerated airplane or truck (and they haven’t even crossed any borders yet).
Then we have to pick up the flowers from floral delivery, process and prep them, water them, and then get to the real work of designing and arranging. Keep in mind, every person working on that single bloom along that journey from seedling to centrepiece has to get paid for their work.
The Case for “Buy Local Only” Flower Shops
Why aren’t you guys like the florists on Instagram who buy local flowers only? To put it bluntly, we just can’t do that as a full-service florist in Canada—and if your florist is somehow getting you peonies in August, we can guarantee you they didn’t come from Canada.
We absolutely love the amazing product that we get from our neighbours in BC during spring, summer, and fall, but the variety of blooms and longevity of the growing season cannot sustain a full-service flower shop like FaBLOOMosity.
To start with, the length of time it takes a rose to grow to the size we are accustomed to simply does not fit within the Canadian growing seasons. We like big blooms and we cannot lie… those big headed, gorgeous garden roses we love take one full year to grow to size. That’s one full year of warm balmy, humid weather—making Ecuador a much more suitable place for these beauties to blossom. That also means a farm is planting, propagating, pruning, and caring for a bloom for an entire year. All that labour adds up and is rolled into the cost of flowers themselves.
The floral industry is a worldwide operation. We get flowers from nearly every continent on the globe. One of the benefits of our global floral hunting is that we can find almost any bloom at almost any time of the year due to the varied climates and growing seasons. If you want ranunculus—you get ranunculus.
