Why Become a Wedding Farmer-Florist? Exploring the Benefits and Rewards
From Suburban Dreams to Flower Farming Reality
Initially, when I began toying with the idea of becoming a flower farmer, it wasn’t the giant bunches of blooms from the field that enchanted me alone. Nor were the sunset photos of a field with a sea of endless flowers in the background. Living in a suburban neighborhood at that time with 1500-2500-ish square feet of growing space and my neighbor’s fence blocking the picturesque sunset, those images were out of my reach.
That amount of flower volume was out of my reach. It made me question how I could realistically turn my flower-farming dream into a successful reality.
Then it hit me: I wasn’t seeing the full potential of the flower farming business model.
I have always loved creating. Give me a piece of paper and a pencil, and it will soon be engulfed in various doodles. I have also always been drawn to nature. Escaping the paved roads of the city to beaten dirt paths or sandy beaches brings clarity, calmness, and inspiration. I can also be very analytical. I thrive with spreadsheets and task lists.
Growing cut flowers and floral designing melds all these sides of myself together. To select a cultivar, take their seed and pamper it for months until it becomes a robust plant offering lush stems of flowers that are tucked into designs; the process never gets old.
This is essentially the “wedding farmer-florist” business model. If you’re reading this, it might be the perfect fit for your flower-farming business. By the end of this post, you'll have a solid foundation to decide if this model is ideal for you to explore further.
Thinking about becoming a wedding farmer-florist? Get started on the right foot by downloading our free checklist.
What Entails Being a Wedding Farmer-Florist?
The Farmer-Florist Journey
Being a wedding farmer-florist requires a lot of juggling. You are not only growing the flowers but also using your skills to create advanced designs with them. To provide luxurious designs, you need to cultivate various flower varieties and ensure they bloom together. Mapping this out before the first seed is sown is essential for achieving the ultimate design. As a wedding farmer-florist, you are doing double the work by taking on double roles.
This model allows you to grow unique and stunning flowers and see them through to completion, handing them over in a finished design to your wedding couples. If you love the challenge of wedding work, the farmer-florist model can be incredibly rewarding. Wedding floral design breaks up the repetitive tasks of farming, while farming breaks up the repetitive tasks of wedding floral design.
Enhanced Creative Control
The wedding farmer-florist model offers significant control over your floral designs in terms of color, variety, and timing. While some factors, like weather or pests, remain unpredictable, you gain immense oversight compared to relying on a wholesaler or another grower. As the grower, you have access to unique components that are difficult to source from wholesalers, such as zinnias, sweet peas, and dahlias, which are best when cut directly from the field and used locally. This model also allows for creativity, enabling you to surprise couples with unusual ingredients like tiny tomatoes, raspberries, or blushing lanterns.
Each flower can have incredible nuances that make an arrangement look stiff or bring it to life; fresh from the field, the flowers breathe life into a floral design. Imagine walking your field at dusk, finding that particular stem that inspires you and is just right to be tucked into a bridal bouquet.
Beyond the creative satisfaction, weddings can be incredibly lucrative, even for a small-scale grower. Embracing this model allows you to combine your love for growing and designing while maximizing profitability.
Weddings are Profitable
A single dahlia stem can either be sold wholesale for $1-3, placed in a mixed bouquet for an average of $3-7, or tucked into a bridal bouquet for $10-25. In conjunction with my love of growing and designing, I also looked at my small-scale operation and knew I needed to maximize the profitability of my crops. Since I was limited in space, added-value products, and services through weddings became my solution, and they have become our most profitable offerings, carrying our flower farm.
Not only are weddings profitable, but they also bring a sense of certainty to your season.
Weddings Take the Guesswork Out of Your Sales
The big difference between some of the more casual product offerings and weddings is that with the more casual product offerings, you are removing the negotiating process where you name a price, discuss vision, and come to terms with your client. In booking weddings, both parties agree that you will receive X for Y. Ideally if negotiated correctly, you and the client should be very satisfied with the product and services rendered in exchange for the cost. Selling flowers at a farm stand or the like, there is no negotiating. You name your price, often guessing, and the potential customer decides on the spot if they find value in your flowers in exchange for the cost.
Flowers are ethereal. They have a certain shelf life that can be increased with proper storage and such, but eventually, they will fade. It’s not like selling a pumpkin-shaped mug that didn’t sell one fall that could be placed in storage to sell for the next fall. Selling what I consider more “casual” products, such as mixed bouquets, creates a tricky balance of being profitable while selling quickly. If the price is too high, they won’t sell. If the price is too low, you are not profitable.
The idea behind these more casual offerings is that you can grow various colors and varieties, assemble them into mixed bouquets, and sell them at a lower price point due to less labor and design complexity. Ideally, the varieties grown for these products are cost-effective and fill a bouquet quickly. While some varieties intersect between casual and wedding work, they often don’t. For example, I rarely use statice in wedding designs, but it’s great for casual products. Similarly, I grow standard yellow sunflowers for casual offerings and more creamy varieties for wedding requests.
When we were vendors at a farmer’s market, it was just as labor-intensive as a full-service wedding. Preparing for the market involved a marathon of harvesting and designing as many bouquets as possible, often guessing how much to bring and how many would actually sell. Then, it’s time to get up early in the morning, engage with customers, and hopefully make some sales. After a long day in the sun, both you and your flowers can feel quite worn out, and depending on how sales went, you may or may not feel defeated.
For a wedding engagement, on the other hand, the guesswork is taken out since the sale is already made. I know exactly how many flowers I need to harvest and arrange, and I know what my profits will be. At this point, it’s about executing what has already been paid for upfront. This certainty allows me to better budget for my season, knowing the weddings I have booked. It's challenging to budget effectively without knowing what you will sell, which is often the case with farmer’s markets
Though weddings come with their own unique type of stress, I find them much less stressful than the uncertainty of unknown sales.
Inspired by the benefits of the wedding farmer-florist model? Ensure you’re fully prepared with our helpful checklist!
Creating Wedding Magic
There is something so beautiful about creating designs for one of the most magical days in a couple’s life. The farmer-florist wedding model offers one of the most personal experiences a wedding couple can have with a florist. They are not picking designs out of a catalog, and their florist isn’t just grabbing available flowers from a wholesaler. It is a collaboration from seed to centerpiece. Since this is also such a labor-intensive model, usually, a farmer-florist isn’t taking on multiple full-service weddings on a weekend, which means the farmer and the designer are there front and center for the couple’s big day.
This model requires trust, especially from the couple. Trust that the farmer-florist will do everything in their power to hand over lovingly grown blooms in the most exquisite designs on their wedding day. Those blooms also have a grand story behind them. Many brides excitedly check in on the progress of their wedding flowers throughout the season. They are ecstatic when they see them all come together, like the last piece of a puzzle.
Where making mixed bouquets for more casual offerings is more in the domain of an assembly line of production and sales, wedding floral designs have a bit of that but in more interesting ways. There might be an assembly line for bud vases or compotes, perhaps boutonnieres. However, one area that gets to be completely customized and made incredibly special is the bridal bouquet.
The bridal bouquet is where the hopes and dreams of a flower farming business meet the hopes and dreams of the bride. Imagine roaming your flower field, hand-selecting each and every stem to go into a bridal bouquet. Brides have the dream of their farmer-florist doing just that, selecting each stem especially for them. Dreams and passions do not often align so perfectly with a client’s vision.
After refreshing your mind by looking through notes and the proposal, you walk the field, clippers and a small bucket in hand. A certain dahlia or peony stem usually begins the bouquet's inspiration—just the right unfurling of the petals or the shimmering color in the light. From there, you continue to walk the field, taking a stem of sweet pea here and an orlaya stem there until your bucket is full of all the potential ingredients special for the bridal bouquet.
With each wedding, I start the wedding designs with the bridal bouquet, as it determines the rest of the designs for the event. This process, much like taking a walk on a beaten dirt path, clears my mind and brings calmness and inspiration. Ultimately, it puts me in the right frame of mind as a creative to design something wonderful for the bride.
This approach has been invaluable to me, and it might be a valuable process for other farmer-florists as well, providing a structured yet inspiring way to begin the design journey for each unique wedding.
Making the Most of Extra Blooms
A unique benefit of being a wedding farmer-florist is having extra flowers. In my experience, there are weeks when I don’t have much time or product available due to wedding commitments, but the following week, I often find myself with a surplus. To grow enough for weddings, you will naturally have excess blooms. This basically makes it so you can have your cake and eat it, too!
The beauty of this surplus is that it provides additional revenue opportunities. Instead of panic selling flowers too cheaply or too expensively (which may not sell), you can take a balanced approach. These extra flowers can be used in CSA bouquets, business account orders, pop-up sales, or sold to other florists.
While these more casual offerings are certainly worthwhile, they don’t have to be the core of your business. They become an added bonus, a way to maximize your profitability without the stress of relying solely on them. This approach allows for flexibility and can help you make the most of your flower farming efforts.
Embracing the wedding farmer-florist model has not only allowed me to combine my passion for growing and designing flowers but has also provided a more stable and profitable business model. By balancing the creative, growing and business aspects, you too can find joy and success in this unique approach to flower farming. Whether you are just starting or looking to diversify your existing flower farming business, the wedding farmer-florist model offers an enriching and rewarding path.
Ready to embark on your journey as a wedding farmer-florist? Download our free checklist to get started today!
Until next time, we are looking forward to helping you hand blooms soon!
Jessica & Graham
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