Working in wedding and event flowers

Wedding work is what most people picture when they imagine floristry, and it is the part of the trade with the least honest writing about it. The work is genuinely good. The conditions are specific, and they suit some people and not others.

What the work is

Consultation, proposal, ordering, building, installing, and breaking down.

The building happens in a compressed window. Flowers can’t be made up a week early, so a Saturday wedding is processed Wednesday and Thursday, built Friday, and installed Saturday morning. Install is physical: ladders, frames, heavy vessels, hot rooms, tight timings, and a venue that wants you out before guests arrive.

Then you come back and take it down, which is the part nobody photographs.

The date is the whole problem

Everything difficult about event floristry comes from one fact. The wedding is on Saturday whatever happens.

A retail shop that has a bad delivery can apologise and sell something else. An event florist with a bad delivery on Thursday has a problem that has to be solved by Friday night, at whatever cost, because there is no version of the day where the ceremony has no flowers.

That is why event pricing carries a margin that retail doesn’t, and it is why the ordering is more conservative. Experienced event florists over-order deliberately, because the cost of being short isn’t the cost of the stems.

How people get in

Almost always through retail first.

A counter teaches you speed, and speed is what event work runs on. Somebody who can build forty hand-tied bouquets in a morning can build a bridal party. Somebody who has only ever made one thing carefully can’t yet.

After that the common routes are freelancing on install days for studios near you, which is how most people get their first event experience, or moving into a shop that does both retail and weddings and volunteering for the wedding side.

Install crew work is the easiest door. Studios need hands on Saturday mornings and are usually short of them.

The year

Spring through fall is the season. Winter is quiet, and the quiet is real.

Studios that survive it plan for it: corporate accounts, Christmas installations, or a retail arm that carries the winter. People who work in events without that plan spend January wondering whether the business works, which it does, but on an annual cycle rather than a monthly one.

That is the opposite shape to a retail shop, whose worst month and best month are three weeks apart in spring. What florists actually earn sets out what the sector difference does to the pay.

What it pays

More than retail at the same level of experience, which is one of the few clear statements available about pay in this trade.

The pricing side is where the money actually gets made or lost, and it has its own conventions and its own arithmetic. That is in how wedding florists price.