How to choose your wedding florist.

This is for the engaged couples out there, from one soon-to-be-married person to another. We found our florist pretty quickly as our wedding flowers were really important to me – after choosing the husband and the dress, of course!

Here are my top 5 things to consider when choosing your wedding florist. My tip at the end really helped with picking my the majority of my own wedding suppliers!

1.       Style

You need to like the style of the florist you choose to work with. A florist’s style is normally obvious when looking at their website and social media. You will need to figure out whether you like something more wild or neat, elaborate or rustic, traditional or modern, even whether you want super colourful or more neutral.

Finding the right style for you both is super important as wedding flowers will have a big impact on your day and will forever be in your wedding photos. Don’t pick a florist whose social media is full of neat balls of roses if you actually want a natural looking bouquet with lots of seasonal local flowers, because it probably won’t turn out how you want it to.

Last thing on assessing style, it’s the style you (both) want, not the bridal party, not your parents, what you want is most important!

2.       Budget

When you start planning your wedding, discuss the budget for each vendor, not just the overall budget. There are a few reasons why I say this.

Mainly, the majority of florists have a minimum spend in place for bespoke services. This is normally clear from their website, so worth assessing this against this against the budget you have set for your wedding flowers. The minimum spend can range from a couple of hundred pounds all the way to £25k plus. However, even if the florist primarily looks like they only do big weddings, still look through their website as you might be pleasantly surprised on some florists’ minimum spend.

Two additional points.

If you’re struggling to decide on your floral budget, unless you only want personal flowers (bouquets, buttonholes, corsages), expect your spend to be between 10-30% of your wedding budget.

The other is to try and have a clear number before talking to your florist as it will save time on both sides. There is no point having a conversation about big floral installations when you don’t have the budget to allow that.

3.       Personality/communication fit

For me, I needed to like the person who is going to be creating a major part our wedding day and very likely being one of the first people to see me in my wedding dress (when the bouquets get dropped off)!

I also needed someone who will do what they said they would do, when they said they would do it. This was mainly so I can trust them to deliver what they said they would on our wedding day, but also to lessen the admin load that comes with planning a wedding. You don’t want to be chasing suppliers all the time.

You will very likely have a consultation with your florist, and you’ll quickly be able to tell if they are the one for you.

On the other hand, you may be one for minimal communication and your wedding flowers might not be high on the list of what you’re excited about during the planning process. There are lots of florists who can provide a service where you pick from colour scheme, a list of items and you can arrange it all via email or website order.

4.       Availability

If you’ve found a florist you love, message them as soon as possible to check if they are available. Some will get booked quickly and I regularly get requests from couples about dates where I am already booked.

5.       Location

There are two points to make here. The first, the closer your florist is based to your venue, the more likely they have been to the venue before and have experience of setting up there, which is always useful. Use the social media sites for your venue to see which suppliers have worked there before – they are quite often in the tagged view on Instagram.

Secondly, the further away your florist, the further/longer their journey – and time is money – so you will likely have a higher travel fee added to your quote for florists who are based further from your location. But all florists operate differently so it’s worth checking.

My main tip for choosing wedding vendors.

I did the below and it helped a lot with trying to make vendor decisions - especially if you have a lot to make all at once.

Create a collection/board on Instagram or Pinterest called ‘Wedding Flowers’ and when you see an image from a florist that you like straight away, save it to that board. Continuing doing this over a few days/weeks/months depending on your planning timeframe.

Then when you have a spare half hour, go through the images on the collection/board and you’ll quickly see the ones you like and the ones you don’t.

For the ones you don’t like, just delete them. For the ones you love, save them to another board called ‘Wedding Flowers shortlist’. At this point you should have a shortlist of florists whose style you love. You can then work through each of these assessing them against the other four criteria above: Budget, Communication, Availability and Location.

There’s my ramble for today, but I hope it helped.

All the flower love,

Amy x