How wedding florists price

Wedding pricing is where event floristry either works as a business or quietly doesn’t. Plenty of studios with more bookings than they can handle are making very little, because the pricing was set by what felt askable rather than by what the work costs.

The figures below are the conventions the trade publishes and talks about, not survey data. Treat them as a starting structure and check them against your own costs, in the same way the salary figures on this site are attributed rather than averaged.

The multiplier

The standard approach prices flowers as a multiple of what you paid for them.

Fresh goods are commonly quoted at 3.5 to 4.5 times the wholesale cost. Hard goods, meaning vases, containers, foam, wire, tape and ribbon, are usually lower, around 2.5, because they involve less loss and less handling. Complex work sits at the top of the range or above it, and pieces like suspended installations or heavily structured arrangements are where 4 and 5 times get used.

The multiplier isn’t profit. It is covering shrinkage, the stems you throw away, the substitutions, the conditioning time and the margin. A studio applying 2 times and calling the difference profit is losing money on every event and won’t notice until the year ends.

The design fee is separate and it isn’t optional

Labour priced inside the flower multiplier disappears, because the multiplier scales with the cost of the stems rather than with the hours the work takes.

The convention is a design fee on top, often 30 to 50 percent, set by how demanding the work is. A simple ceremony piece and a cascading installation with the same wholesale cost are not the same job, and only a separate fee captures that.

Freelance rates give a sense of what the hours are worth. Design time is commonly quoted in the region of 20 to 60 dollars an hour, with assistants lower. If you are pricing your own time below what you would pay a freelancer to do the same work, the business is subsidising the client.

The costs that eat a proposal quietly

Four, in rough order of how often they get missed.

Travel and delivery. Not just fuel. The van, the hours, and the fact that a two-hour venue consumes most of a working day.

Install labor. An install crew on a Saturday morning is a real payroll cost, and a proposal built on the assumption that you and one other person can do everything is a proposal that breaks when the piece is bigger than expected.

Consultation time. Three meetings and four rounds of changes before a booking is confirmed is common. Some studios charge for design consultations against the final invoice. It filters enquiries usefully.

Waste. You order more than you need, on purpose, because the date can’t move. That over-order is a cost of doing event work and belongs in the price rather than in the surprise at the end of the month.

Say no to the wrong bookings

The hardest part of pricing is declining work.

A studio that accepts every enquiry at whatever budget arrives will be busy and poor. Setting a minimum, and holding it, is what separates the studios that grow from the ones that run hard for years and stay the same size.

If the number you need is above what the enquiry expects, say the number anyway. The alternative is a Saturday given away at cost, and there are only so many Saturdays in a season. The broader picture of what that season looks like is in working in wedding and event flowers.