Wedding Flowers - Why a Minimum Spend?
Wedding Flowers - Why a Minimum Spend
Are you wondering why there seems to be a minimum spend on your wedding flowers? Let me try and explain.
- When I buy my flowers from the wholesaler they come in what we call wraps, and I have to buy them in either 10s, 20s sometimes even 50 stems. There needs to be enough spend to use all these flowers and ensure there is no wastage. It's a fine balancing act.
- When you choose me as your wedding florist I use premium ingredients, the best foliage, flowers and vessels to achieve my design style. This is the look you see on Instagram, therefore I need to set a minimum spend for this.
- Peak season - There are only so many weekends in a wedding and they do come at a premium. Not only from a time perspective but also from cost too. The cost of flowers can dramatically rise at this time due to demand. Often a £1 flower stem can rise to £4 and we have no way of knowing until the week before
- Floristry may look pretty, however, it is labour-intensive work. A lot of prep goes in before the event but nothing can be made until 2 days before. This makes our work very time sensitive. We often need to hire freelancers and we also have to be able to pay our own mortgages.
- The rising costs of living is inevitably having an impact on our day-to-day running costs and you are likely to see this reflected in 2024 quotes especially. I try to honour all proposals, however, when the fuel crisis hit this did have to be amended.
I hope this helps to understand why some florists have minimum spends. It's certainly not a moan, I absolutely love my job, however, I do also have to pay my bills. If you're wondering why some florists have differing minimum spends, it's all down to individual overheads. Some of us choose to have shops and therefore the overheads can be more, but they will most likely be able to do smaller budget weddings as they carry more stock.
My minimum spend is £3000 during the summer months dropping to £2500 during off-peak months (Nov-Feb) If you'd like to get an idea of individual items I have a brief list here.
As a last side note, maybe something you might not have considered - We do charge separately for Delivery/Labour/Pack down - Maybe another blog post to follow on that one!
Photography Sara Ribera
