I have so much empathy for couples planning a wedding. COVID or no COVID, there’s a lot to think through. With so many other expenses to cover, you'd often find them wanting to spend the least on flowers - wondering what the reasonable price for wedding flowers would be. 

When it comes to thinking about flowers + budgets at a wedding, there is so little information available. What little information is available is so confusing or utterly misleading.

Some of what is available to our clients lead them to believe they need $250,000 to create their dream wedding florals. Or, the opposite, they only need to spend $250 at the grocery store and can DIY everything.

But what about the giant opportunity between those two extremes? What about that space where 99% of floral designers make money? 

What about your typical couple who is spending anywhere from $10,000 - $80,000 on this once-in-a-lifetime event?

Something is out of alignment here. It’s time for us to show up differently and be the ones to educate our clients on what’s possible. To be proactive and be helpful.

What Is a Reasonable Price for Wedding Flowers?

Canstar.com.au published an article a few years ago, providing a summary of typical wedding expenses. In that summary, they said the average couple spent just under $3000 on flowers and decorations. That was based on an average spend of $36,000 for the wedding day.

Sounds reasonable. Why? It follows the commonly taught industry norm of allocating 10% of the total wedding flower budget to flowers.

However...in most cases, that 10% will only cover the essentials. Bouquets, boutonnieres, maybe a table arrangement or two.

These days, a lot of couples of looking for a feature ceremony experience or a "wow factor" for their reception. Those require an additional investment and likely won't be accessible if only 10% of the budget is reserved for flowers.

So, if your clients are the type to fall in love with something they saw on Pinterest or Instagram, their floral budget needs to be closer to 20-25% of their overall wedding budget.

Of course, every couple gets to define what their dream day budget is. Every couple as different priorities. 

So, the next time you’re looking for something to post to Instagram, answer your client’s biggest question:  What is a reasonable price for wedding flowers?

And give them a clear guide to follow – 10% to cover the essentials, 25% if they want flowers to be a focus of their event.

Be The Courageous Leader

One of the most frustrating parts of trying to plan a wedding is figuring out all the things. The list of to-dos is long. Real long. And most couples will spend hours and hours and hours sorting through the details for the big day.

But when they get to the part of the process where they’re looking to see what is a reasonable price for wedding flowers, they will likely come up empty-handed. They’ll be presented with those blog posts telling them how to save money on their wedding flowers. There is little to no information provided by actual florists, presenting budget and cost options.

The result? Our customers have no idea how much to budget for their wedding flowers and we floral designers are inundated with price shoppers. It’s a vicious cycle.

Let's Talk About Wedding Flowers Price Shoppers

When you Google, “Price Shopper”, this is what Google offers up:

A cost-conscious consumer or price shopper is a person who works diligently to learn how much things cost, and who also generally avoids buying expensive things. They engage in comparison shopping, which is the practice of comparing prices (to find the best deals) often in advance of actually shopping.

This definition got me thinking, I’ve never met a customer who isn’t “cost-conscious”.

I don’t mean that every client is after the lowest priced option, but every human does have their upper limit. They are cost-aware and in every instance, have a specific threshold for what they are willing to spend. And this is true in any situation, no matter what we’re selling.

This experience isn’t limited to weddings. It’s something we deal with on a daily basis. Because the price is one of the key attributes humans use to make decisions. That means that every single one of your customers is price-sensitive. They are “cost-conscious”. 

It’s time to just accept it as part of the deal.

Instead of labelling that one distinct, slightly irritating group of customers as “price shoppers”, what if we decided every human on the planet is a price shopper? 

What if we accept it as part of the normal human shopping experience? What if we decided ahead of time that every potential wedding client is going to reach out to 3+ florists for a quote.

Because that’s precisely what happens. Particularly when it comes to buying flowers.

We’re asking our clients to spend the most amount of money they’ll ever spend on flowers in their life. Like ever. And they’ve never done this before. 

In addition, everything in our industry is so secretive, totally hush-hush. Which is incredibly unhelpful for our clients. So, why do we expect them to know how much to budget for their flowers?

Unless we tell them, they can’t possibly know.

Make It Easier For Your Customers

I learned early on, one of the best ways we beat the competition was to approach things totally differently. Like, literally, do the exact opposite of what was seen as traditional in our industry.

So, when I see that no one in our industry talks about pricing and budgets, I decide it’s all I’m going to talk about.

I challenged myself to do the courageous thing. What if we took the leadership position and proactively and openly talked about pricing. 

The results were amazing. By simply approaching our marketing from a customer-first perspective, we started to win their trust early on in the relationship...like they fell in love with us before I even knew they existed.

Shift Your Perspective

We spent hours and hours and hours thinking about our clients. Thinking about what they struggle with and how we can be the most helpful humans on the planet.

When we started to look at wedding planning from our customer’s point of view, we came up with a set of super helpful tools to help our clients sort through their budget.

It worked wonders.

We started receiving enquiries that praised us for our transparency and helpfulness. Soon we were booking $7,000 + clients with little to no back and forth.

And we were rewarded because we made it easy for our customers to price shop from the luxury of their own sofa at whatever time suited them. 

Want to hear more about how we set up a system to effortlessly navigate price shoppers? Check out this week’s podcast episode (play on Spotify at the bottom of this post).

Want Help With Your Flower Business?

I teach floral designers how to take charge of their business inside my Flower Boss Bootcamp. We dig into all things marketing and money and learn the ins and outs of running an empowering flower business.

The moral of the story: Flowers are fun. But so is making money.

My Flower Boss Bootcamp is the only program available to floral designers focused entirely on the business of flowers.

Yes, we talk about navigating price shoppers and setting up simple sales systems to avoid you wasting heaps of time going back and forth with potential clients.

We talk about feeling confident with your pricing, learning to manage your costs, and growing your business.

This program will change the trajectory of your flower business. I promise.

Click here to learn more.