Price the recipe, not the guess
Florist Heaven is a working reference for florists who sell flowers: what a recipe costs, what to charge for it, where the margin goes, and how to run the wedding job once the deposit clears.
FreeEverything here is free to read. Nothing is gated, nothing is for sale, and there is no account and no email required to use the calculators.
Four pillars, in the order the work happens
What a recipe costs, what to charge for it, and where the margin goes. Markup, margin, cost of goods, and the arithmetic behind a quote you can defend.
Buying wholesale, conditioning what arrives, holding it in condition, and keeping the design together when a flower is not going to show up.
Contracts, deposits, cancellation, planning, and the paperwork that keeps a flower business standing between weddings.
The job itself, from the first consultation through the proposal, the build, the day of the wedding, and the strike.
Shown work, named sources, no sales pitch
Every figure on this site is one of two things. Either it is derived, and the arithmetic that produced it is printed beside it, or it is attributed, and the publication it came from is named and linked. There is no third category, and in particular there is no category for a number that sounds about right.
The stem count chapter is the first kind: every count comes from a recipe you wrote, with the arithmetic printed. So are the floral pricing formula and the florist markup calculator, which prints its formula under every result. The chapter on cold storage for cut flowers is the second kind: its temperature bands are quoted from a university extension fact sheet and linked.
That means this site will not tell you what florists typically mark up, what the average wedding spends on flowers, or what margin you should be running. Those figures are everywhere in this trade and almost none of them carry a source. Where a number depends on your own costs, the page asks you for the cost rather than assuming one.
There is nothing to buy here and no course at the end of the chapter. We publish under a house byline, we claim no floristry experience, and we do not pretend to be a florist who has done your job.
Pricing questions, and what we can honestly say
- How do I price a floral recipe?
- Cost every line of the recipe at what you actually paid, freight included, and add the hard goods the piece consumes. Multiply that wholesale cost by your markup, or divide it by one minus your target margin, which is the same arithmetic read from the other end. Then price the hours the piece takes and check the margin before the quote goes out. The pricing calculator runs each of those steps in your browser and prints the formula under the result.
- What markup should a florist use?
- We do not publish one, because we have no citable source for a standard florist markup, and a made up figure would be worse than none for somebody pricing real work. What we can show is what any multiple does. Gross margin is one minus one divided by the markup, so a 3.0x markup keeps 66.7 percent of the price and a 2.0x markup keeps 50 percent. Which of those you should be charging depends on your own costs, not on ours.
- Is the 3:5:8 rule a real florist pricing standard?
- Not one we can source. The shorthand circulates in versions that disagree with each other, and we could not find a named, citable authority that states it. The 3:5:8 chapter sets out the arithmetic instead: what any multiple does to your margin, and how to find your own number from your own invoices.