Let’s talk pricing!
Recently I raised the price of my complete wedding rental collections from $1,300 to $1,500. I felt tremendous guilt doing this, but I had to. My time, labor, and the quality of service provided is worth more than what I was charging. I watched other florists raise their minumum spend from $4,000 to $5,000 in 2024 (in some cases more) - and so the subtle increase I added seemed reasonable to cover the increased costs of supplies, gas, fees, and other expenses vendors have, like taxes.
The question is, why the feeling of guilt? Well, often times vendors are made to feel like we’re price gauging couples. We see messages constantly making us feel like we aren’t worth it, or are asking too much. Whenever I scroll through Facebook wedding groups, I constantly see messages like: “ISO reasonably priced photographer.” or “ISO a budget-friendly videographer”, often accompanied by extremely low budgets.
First of all, what is “reasonably priced”? That is surely different for everyone given their circumstances. There are budgets of all sorts. And here’s the thing: you get what you pay for, always. If you’re looking for cheap, you can and you will get cheap. Most vendors who value their reputation and quality of their services are not going to lower their product quality standards to meet unrealistic pricing expectations. For example, if I bought Dollar Store flowers, I could probably charge less on the supply front, but I am not willing to do that, because I stand by the quality of the materials I use. (Love the Dollar Store! But not for flowers).
At the end of the day, what you (as the client) see on the outside is a pretty set up on your wedding day… and beautiful photos you get to cherish. What goes on long before and after the wedding, though, is what you’re paying for in large part: the time. I wanted to shed some light on how I personally set my pricing.
I book weddings anywhere from 3 months to 1 year in advance. This is, on average, everything that goes into the process from beginning to end.
Consultation - 30 minutes to an hour
Quote creation - 1 hour, plus additional to make adjustments and changes
Booking - 1-2 hours of contract preparation, scheduling, and payment arrangement(s)
Time, gas, and money spent sourcing your flowers - I typically go to 3-4 stores in the Pittsburgh area, often times a second trip to some of those places to buy more
Time and money spent on non-floral materials - vases, arch backdrops, candle holders, candles, batteries, extension cords, foam, chicken wire, floral weights, ribbon, hot glue, adhesive, spray paint, tools, and storage.
Taking all of the above materials and designing/creating your arrangements to match your inspo photos as closely as possible - this usually takes several days worth of time, and it begins 60 days before your wedding. Creating the bouquets, boutonnieres, and corsages, hot gluing them together, wrapping them in ribbon, gluing on the pins, setting up your ceremony backdrop, and creating the badkdrop pieces mounted on chicken wire or foam. Creating rows and rows of table arrangements, snipping petals off flowers to make a petal basket (I do this because the store bought petals are junk). Making swags, planning the mechanics of how they will attach to mirrors, signs, and so on.
Checking in with you the week of the wedding to finalize your plans, so that I can build my schedule according to the latest day-of timeline - 30 minutes
Time spent creating a wedding day timeline, often requiring synchronizing plans with other vendors - 1 hour
Reviewing the day-of timeline with my assistant(s) and dividing up tasks - 30 minutes
Time spent the day before the wedding loading vehicle(s) with all your florals, and carefully packing and loading breakable materials like glass vases and candles - 1 hour
Money spent on assistants for the wedding day (nearly always on a weekend), 1-2 people for anywhere from 4-10 hours
Time and labor spent on the wedding day for delivery, load-in, set up, room flip / relocating pieces, and tear down at the end of the night. Let’s break this down. I arrive (on average) around 11am for set up on a wedding day. Once I find parking, several trips back and forth to the vehicle(s) are required to carry in all of the materials. To give you an idea of what this is like, it often involves sprinting across streets downtown to the car, having to carry heavy and large items longer distances than we’d like (it’s always nice if you can park close, but it isn’t usually the case)… sometimes up and down flights of stairs. Once everything is loaded into the venue, I follow my timeline/checklist and begin setting up the space. If the reception is somewhere else, I drive there next and do the same. Set up takes 2-3 hours. I will stay on-site for up to a few hours at this point if a room flip is required, or pieces need to be moved around, otherwise I’ll go home. I then go back to pack up anywhere from 9pm-10:30pm. Pack down and removal takes about 1 hour.
The wedding day probably seems like the end, but it is not. The next day, I unload the vehicle(s). This takes several trips to carry everything inside.
I spend the next 1-2 days disassembling all of the arrangements - this is about 2-4 hours of work.
Once the flowers are separated, I sort and clean them. Some need to be thrown out (for example, if they were stuck in the cake, or were floor arrangements that got stepped on). Some need to be reinforced by hot gluing the flower heads back on the stems (1 hour of time), and some need to be replaced (broken vases, items not returned). Then everything gets sorted by color and organized into buckets. At that point, I’m done. There’s still a lot of work to go later: photo uploads, updating my website, and coordinating my social media and marketing posts - but as the client, you don’t pay for that.
When you factor in all of the above, my new price of $1,500 seems, well… quite low. Especially when florists who use real flowers (around the same cost material-wise) require a minimum spend that’s 3-4x that amount. But, I do this because I enjoy it and I take pride in being able to give couples pretty decor at a “reasonable” price.
If myself - and other florists - wanted to price gauge our clients - well, personally, I would have gone into just about any other field, and in fact, that’s why I have a full time career outside of this. Flowers have a high material cost and low profit margin. You can Google the average florist salary, and I will tell you that I don’t even come close to that, being rather new to the Pittsburgh wedding scene. Now I’m not talking about everyone - there are many florists in town who are far ahead of the average and making a very good living. But that isn’t the average. That’s why myself, along with many other wedding vendors, have to continue to work full time to support ourselves.
I’m not saying this to cue the violins. I love what I do. But I think there needs to be more understanding behind what goes into vendors pricing. I hope this helps bring some transparency and clarity. And as always, I’m available to help answer questions any time!
