The Flower Budget Has a Published Floor

The first email you send a florist is nearly always the same email. Three photographs off the mood board, the date, the venue, and then the question everybody asks. How much is a bouquet?

Back comes a number. Three hundred dollars, near enough, for something loose and garden-ish in whites and greens. You write it into the spreadsheet, multiply by four for the bridesmaids, add the buttonholes, and sit back with about $1,400 in the flowers row feeling like you have done a piece of work. What you have priced is the flowers people will hold. Nobody holds the aisle, the arbour, the bar, the eighteen tables or the thing hanging over the bridal table, and that is where a floral budget goes.

Which would be nobody's fault, except for this. Of the 176 florists in this directory, 61 put a real dollar figure against wedding work. A dozen have gone further and written out the whole ladder, band by band, with what each band buys and what changes on the way up. It is, I think, the most useful document any wedding supplier publishes, and hardly anybody reads it, because you asked about a bouquet instead.

A bouquet is not a wedding

Some florists price a wedding line by line, and one of those pages will finish the sum you started. A Newcastle studio publishes a bridal bouquet from $285 and a table arrangement from $185, under a footnote saying every price on the list is a minimum.

You have eighteen of those tables. Eighteen times a figure that starts at $185, and nothing has been hung from a ceiling yet. That is the arithmetic you were going to do standing up in a studio with your coffee going cold, and you can do it now instead, sitting down, before you have fallen in love with anything.

The ladder is the document

So go and find the ones who answered the question you should have asked.

A Canberra studio publishes four bands with the contents written under each. Under $2,000 is elopements and micro weddings, or a bouquet and buttonholes with one feature at the ceremony or the reception. $2,000 to $5,000, where it says most full weddings begin, buys every personal flower plus either something on each reception table or one standout moment such as an arch at the ceremony. $5,000 to $8,000 buys both of those together. $8,000 to $15,000 adds an installation at the reception and styled guest tables.

We know flower pricing can feel like a mystery: here's a transparent breakdown so you can plan with confidence before you even reach out.

It names the decision, which a bouquet price never could. Somewhere around $5,000 you stop choosing between the tables and the ceremony and start having both. That is the sentence a couple spends an evening reverse-engineering out of other people's wedding photographs, and it is on a florist's own site, free.

One more thing worth stealing, this time from a Melbourne studio: it keys its tiers to the guest count, not just to the money. Eighty to a hundred and twenty guests is $6,000 to $8,000 there. The guest list is the number a couple has months before they have anything else, and it turns out to be enough to find your rung.

The ceiling is on the page too

The top of the ladder is published too, and worth reading at a budget nowhere near it. From $30,000, an Adelaide florist adds house flowers for getting ready, flowers on the bar, the wishing well and the reception entrance. What the money buys up there is not a better bouquet. It is flowers in the places nobody would think to put on a list.

A Perth studio says it in a sentence instead of a table.

As a guide, for full wedding florals - bouquets/buttonholes, ceremony & reception flowers and on the day services - we start at around $8,000 with most couples spending between $8,000 - $12,000... For weddings with big installations, large bridal parties & abundant arrangements you should plan to budget between $12,000 - $20,000 on flowers & our "on the day" services.

Most couples spending between $8,000 and $12,000. That is not a price. That is a florist saying what her customers actually do, which is the one thing a price list cannot tell you.

Read the list from the top

This part is easy to get exactly backwards. The smallest number on a florist's website is not the smallest wedding she will do. It is the smallest thing she sells. On one Port Stephens wedding list, thirty-one priced lines long, the cheapest is a candle from $2.50, which is an honest price for a candle. Build upward from there and you arrive at the consultation with a number that was never going to be enough, and leave thinking flowers are a swindle.

Go the other way. Find the largest complete thing on the page and start there.

A Bellarine Peninsula shop needs one line for it. Its bundle is $4,000 including GST, itemised down to the ten glass vases you keep and the set-up on the day. Twelve extras are named underneath, and so is the year: the price, it says, is current for 2023/2024. That is a whole wedding of flowers with a floor under it, published, by somebody who has never met you.

A guide is not a quote

None of which makes a villain of anybody. Fifty-three of the 176 here publish no priced wedding item at all, and most of them say why: the quote follows the consultation. They are not being coy. Wedding flowers are made to order and the number really does move, with the ceiling height, with whether the arbour is yours or hers, with what the growers actually had that week. Publish a number, then walk into a room with its rafters up in the dark, and you have either broken your word or eaten the difference yourself.

So read a ladder as what it is. A Port Macquarie studio publishes its levels as what a budget can achieve rather than as fixed packages. A far north Queensland studio's guide carries the month it was last updated, September 2023. Read the label, read the date, and then notice that a labelled guide still beats silence. You can check a date. You can hold an example against your own list. Nothing at all can only be guessed at, usually at eleven at night, and low.

Change the email

So send a different one. Not what does a bouquet cost. Send the date, the venue, the guest count, the number of tables, and the number of people carrying or wearing flowers. Then ask the question that gets you something usable: which of your budget levels does a wedding like this land in, and what does the next one up add?

A florist with a ladder will send you the page, and you will learn more in ninety seconds than in a fortnight of scrolling. One without a ladder can still answer you, because she has done a hundred and twenty people in that room before and knows what it came to. Nobody has ever asked her to write it down.

Then go back to the spreadsheet, to the cell with $1,400 in it, and delete it. The bouquets were never the number. They were the only part of a wedding small enough to answer in a single line, which is exactly why they were the part you asked about.