What goes into event floristry?

A peek behind the curtain.

I love showing off the final product. Whether it’s a bridal bouquet, floral archway or a meadow installation. Photos of gorgeous flowers are easy to share. They get great engagement on social media.

But it only tells half of the story.

On Saturday I created a meadow installation to decorate the stage at Pollokshaws Burgh Hall. The venue is ten minutes from my home and the entry time was 2pm. A short commute and no early mornings? An absolute win!

The prep for this job started back in January though. The process I take with my customers always begins with a zoom call. One of the downsides of being based at home and not in a shop or studio means I don’t get to have a face to face chat with customers when they first enquire. IMO that’s the only downside of not having a shop. There’s not enough money on this earth to pay me to work in a flower shop again.

After a chinwag with a potential customer I put together a mood board with a personalised colour palette. This goes alongside their quote. For really creative briefs or when I don’t have example photos I even pull out my iPad and apple pencil to make some (very bad) sketches. It’s definitely a risk putting this much time into my quotes. And sometimes, when I’ve sunk a couple hours into them and get a ‘thanks, but no’ email it feels like such a waste.

There are definitely a few ‘thanks, but no’ emails, and there’s also a handful of people who just completely ghost me. But the ‘omg yes please!’ emails remind me that it’s worth it.

Do you remember me writing to you last year about my biggest job to date? Well, my bad iPad sketches were my secret to landing the job.

Once someone has chosen me to be their florist, lots of admin and emails usually follow this. This is my least favourite part of the job. Issuing invoices will absolutely be the first thing I outsource when I grow my business enough. Chasing invoices makes me cringe. I know people aren’t trying to avoid paying me, it’s just because people are busy. Especially people who are wedding planning. One of my spring brides said that planning her wedding felt like having a second full time job.

And then, finally, it’s the week of the event or wedding or funeral. There’s a couple of wholesalers I use, but I have a favourite one. They deliver straight to my door and I can order it all on their webshop. That probably doesn’t sound very revolutionary to you. But I know plenty of florists that still email their wholesaler with a list of flowers they want, without even knowing the cost of the flowers beforehand. One of the flower shops I worked in back in 2015 still used a fax machine to place wholesale orders.

I spent about an hour and half choosing my flowers for this recent event. Maths isn’t my strong point. Every item is listed as the price per stem. Some come as a wrap of 10, 25, 50 stems. This is really embarrassing but instead of working out the price of each wrap of flowers I add them to my cart to give me the exact price. I then immediately delete them from the cart. Anything that is in your cart for longer than ten minutes you are obligated to buy. Purchasing perishable items is really stressful.

There’s a reference book of flowers and their colours that stays on my desk whilst ordering. I’ll also use the colour palette I created and if customers have sent me fabric samples or inspo pictures I’ll also use these to aid the buying.

Two days later the flowers arrive. If I’ve been sensible I’ll have bleached all my buckets and filled them with fresh water. Usually I’m rushing to do this whilst the boxes of flowers sit in my hallway. It feels like a race against the clock. The flowers have been out of water for about 24 hours and need to rehydrate.

Each flower has the leaves removed from the bottom portion of their stem and then snipped at an angle before they’re placed in water. Certain stems require more specialist treatment, like hellebores or poppies. This process is called ‘conditioning’. I love it. I’ll stick on a podcast whilst I’m working.

Whilst the flowers are having a big drink I’ll start prepping for the event. For this most recent job that meant filling some pots with chicken wire and taping it all in place - this is instead of using floral foam. I also filled loads of big plastic bottles of water so I can fill up my prepped vessels on site. I also refill my toolbox with any materials I’ll need. As well as pack a bag with dustpan and brush, bin liners, kitchen roll and a kneeling pad. This was a small job, so there wasn’t a huge amount to do.

For weddings and funerals I’ll make as much of the arrangements as I can beforehand. But there are some things that can only be made on site.

My home studio is two stories up. So I load my car up as much as possible the night before. My partner is always roped into helping. One day he helped me on a big job and he ended up doing 21,000 steps. Usually loading the car is the worst bit, but you’d be shocked by how many venues don’t have step free access, so unloading can be a pain in the arse too.

And then I’m finally on site. This is the part that the customer sees and I often capture BTS photos to share online. For anyone on site they see this as the beginning of the job for me. It’s actually just the final step in a long process.

Often I have a very small time slot to make it all happen. I had two hours for this job, which felt like a luxury. The last fifteen minutes still had me sweating and swearing though. Despite my best efforts I am quite a messy florist, so I have to factor in plenty of time for the final sweep up.

Once I’m done setting up I usually just sit in my car for ten minutes to decompress. I was invited by my customer to stay for a couple of drinks and afternoon tea at this event. It was incredibly sweet. The event began with an organist playing show tunes. My two floral installations framed the stage he was playing on. I never normally get to see my flowers from this point of view. With a glass of prosecco in my hand and the organist playing songs from The Sound of Music I got to fully enjoy the sight of my hard work. It was incredibly special.

So even though it only took two hours on site on Saturday, many hours had gone into it before I even stepped foot into the venue.

I do also offer a break down service. This is where I come and take apart any big installations (like archways) and collect any items that customers have hired from me. If I’m lucky I can go the next day to do this. If I’m unlucky I have to go when their event ends, even if this is 1am.

I charge a lot for this service.

Are there any behind the scene bits of being a florist you’d like to see? It’s been really fun to write about!

With love and spring flowers,

P.S. I was thinking of doing a live video on Substack at some point. Maybe to answer some questions or do a wee floral demo. Would this be of interest to you? Is there anything you’d like to learn or know?