The cost of wedding flowers is affected by everything from your color palette to your must-have blooms to your guest count. However, many “behind the scenes” aspects play a role in the cost of wedding flowers, including the time and expertise it takes to create these living works of art. Hiring a florist who specializes in wedding work is worth every penny if you have dreams of flower walls and Instagram-worthy “wow” moments for your wedding day!

Why Should I Hire An Event Florist?

If flowers are a top priority for your wedding day, you’ll want to hire an event florist who specializes in wedding work. There are different types of florists with different areas of expertise. Your local flower shop can design bouquets and centerpieces for you, but they probably don’t offer the extensive rental selection a wedding florist does, and elaborate custom pieces probably aren’t an option. The type of florist you’ll want to work with depends completely on your vision for your wedding flowers!

At Belli Fiori, weddings are our passion, and our team has years of experience creating custom designs to reflect our couples. Lisa or Sandra sit down with each potential client to discuss their wedding day wish-list, priorities, and budget so they can create a proposal specifically tailored to that couple. The proposal is just the beginning, however: weddings are productions that require a great deal of time, skill and effort to bring a couple’s vision to life!

A Product and a Service

When you hire an event florist, you’re investing in a product and a service. Between consultations, crafting custom proposals, sketching concepts, answering questions throughout the planning process, and then actually designing and setting up the wedding, there is a lot of time and skill that goes into making a wedding event!

Many wedding florists, like Belli Fiori, are actually floral and event designers. This means we are often involved with the overall design of a wedding, and not just the flowers. By collaborating with décor companies, lighting techs and wedding planners, we can ensure all visual elements of the wedding work seamlessly together.

Our team regularly creates custom backdrops, ceremony structures and other large floral installations. We also help many of our clients with linen selection; this involves pulling swatches, ordering samples and then hosting a showing to help the client select their favorites. These things all take time, experience and skill that must be accounted for in your florist’s fees.

Floral Design is an Art

Floral designers hone their craft over years of training and experience, much like a master carver or concert pianist. Watching Sandra design a bouquet from a pile of loose stems is truly mesmerizing, and while she makes it look easy, it most certainly isn’t! Even the most seemingly haphazard, organic designs are created with thought and precision; in fact, these types of designs are often the most time-consuming. So the next time you see a gorgeous bouquet, take a moment and appreciate the time and talent it took to create it!

The Flower Journey

Before a flower ever reaches your wedding venue it has already had quite the journey! While California is the largest US distributor of flowers, most blooms actually come from Central America, Holland and Kenya. Flowers are grown on large-scale farms, then packaged and cold-shipped around the world in an impressive feat of logistics and technology. By the time a flower reaches us here in St. Louis it has traveled thousands of miles, but still has a long way to go before it makes it to a wedding!

Once the flowers reach our studio they are unboxed, thorns and excess leaves are stripped from the stem, and each stem is given a fresh cut before being dipped in a solution that helps the flower to rehydrate. For a large-scale wedding, processing can involve thousands of stems and take up to 2 days of team effort! It’s a tedious but essential step before design work can even begin. And because flowers are a perishable product, there is always some amount of loss during travel, which means your florist is ordering extra flowers to ensure they have plenty of product. Outdoor temperatures can wreak havoc on flower shipments, there can be delays at customs and flights can be rerouted due to weather; the longer the flowers sit in boxes the higher chance they won’t rehydrate. When these stressful delays happen, your florist is working behind the scenes to secure backup options and make sure you are none the wiser!

Once flowers are processed and hydrated there is still work to be done before designing can happen. Floral foam, vase liners and other materials are prepped, and flowers are organized and sorted (we always start by pulling the prettiest blooms for the bride’s bouquet!) From there flowers are allocated to different designs to ensure the design “recipe” is followed; this is especially important for large events where we have several designers working at once. You don’t want to get to the last designs and realize you’ve used up all your flowers, so organization is key!

Designing typically takes 2-3 days, depending on the size and scope of an event. For our largest weddings, we bring in an amazing group of freelance designers to help get everything done. Our freelance designers are not only talented, but understand the Belli Fiori style and workflow, which helps keep things organized and running smoothly. As arrangements are finished, they get stored in our two large walk-in coolers so they stay fresh. We continuously spray them down, check water levels and double check according to our ever-important checklist to make sure everything is accounted for!

More Than Just Flowers

While the flowers are the star of the show around here, there are a lot of other elements that go into a wedding as well. A large wedding can incorporate hundreds of rental items! From vases to candles to ceremony structures, everything we’re using for a wedding has to be pulled, checked, double-counted and packaged for transport to the venue.

Logistics also play a big part in what we do. Some ceremonies take place at a church across town from the reception venue. Some clients need their bouquets early in the day for photos. Some events require a ballroom to be flipped from ceremony to reception. Whatever the schedule for your day looks like, you can count on our team to make sure your flowers are in the right place at the right time.

Wedding Day

One of the biggest advantages to working with a wedding florist is that you don’t have to worry about a thing on your wedding day! Our team is working behind the scenes to bring all the little details together, so you can relax and enjoy the day with your family and friends. Your bouquet will arrive when you need it, the ceremony will be set and ready for a sneak peek before any guests arrive, and every detail of the reception will be perfectly placed.

Event day setups can take up to 8 hours, and our crews range from 2 to 10 people. The more complex the design, the more people it takes to execute! Some weddings even require that Sandra and a team of design assistants create onsite. Ceremony backdrops and structures are often designed at least partially onsite due to their elaborate nature, but sometimes centerpieces are created at the venue as well. Not all weddings require elaborate on-site setups, but even a simple wedding takes time to execute, since we always want to be sure everything is just right for our couples!

At the end of the night, our team is back at the venue to box up all the rentals, pull linens when we provide them, and remove any large installations. Most Saturday nights our crew gets done off-loading at the studio between 1am-2am, leaving the shop looking like a bomb exploded. Mondays are for re-shelving rental items, cleaning glassware and flower buckets, and generally putting the place back together before we start the whole process again!

People often think florists just get to play with flowers all day, but in reality there is a lot of hard, physical work that goes into bringing Instagram-worthy weddings to life! By hiring an event florist like Belli Fiori, you’re investing in not only beautiful floral designs, but also a team who is dedicated to taking the stress out of the planning process and ensuring you can relax and enjoy your wedding day. So while wedding flowers might seem expensive at first glance, just remember that there is a lot that goes into something that looks so effortless!