Pricing a bridal bouquet, end to end
Everything in this pillar, applied once to a single piece. The figures are illustrative throughout: the point is the sequence, which does not change when the numbers do.
The Florist Heaven desk / Chapter 5 of 5
Start with the piece, not the price
Before there is a number there is a bouquet: a size, a shape, a palette, and a focal flower. Those decisions come out of the consultation, and they are what the recipe is written from. Quoting before the piece is decided means quoting a guess and then defending it.
The questions that settle scope and budget before a recipe gets written.
Read the consultation chapterCost the recipe
| Item | Stems | Cost each | Line cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Garden rose, standard | 24 | $3.10 | $74.40 |
| Ranunculus | 18 | $2.35 | $42.30 |
| Spray rose | 12 | $1.85 | $22.20 |
| Eucalyptus, seeded | 9 | $1.90 | $17.10 |
| Ribbon, wire, tape | 1 | $6.40 | $6.40 |
| Wholesale cost | $162.40 |
Note that the ribbon, wire, and tape are on the recipe. They are consumed by this piece, they cost money, and leaving them off is a small leak that repeats on every job you ever quote.
Order more stems than the recipe uses
The recipe says what goes into the bouquet. The order has to cover what goes into the bouquet plus what does not survive the trip, the conditioning, and the bench. Ordering exactly the recipe is ordering to fail.
stems to order = recipe stems / (1 - expected loss)
24 / (1 - 0.10) = 26.7, so 27 stems, which is 3 bunches of 10
Divide the stems the recipe needs by one minus the share you expect to lose, then round up to whole bunches because that is how wholesalers sell. The ten percent here is a placeholder for a figure only your own records can give you.
The third tool on the calculator page totals stems across every piece in a job and converts the total into whole bunches.
Open the stem count calculatorPrice it
flower price = wholesale cost x markup
$162.40 x 3.2 = $519.68
Your multiple, applied to what you paid.
labor = rate x hours
$45.00 x 2.5 = $112.50
A bouquet of this construction is not a fast piece. Whether this sits inside the flower price or beside it on the quote is your call, but it should exist somewhere.
quote = flower price + labor
$519.68 + $112.50 = $632.18
Before delivery, setup, and strike, which belong to the job as a whole rather than to this piece.
gross margin = (quote - cost - labor) / quote
($632.18 - $162.40 - $112.50) / $632.18 = 56.5 percent
With labor counted as a cost rather than as revenue, the same job reads at fifty six and a half percent. That is the honest number for this piece, and it is the one to compare against your other work.
This chapter is for the person setting the price
Search traffic for bridal bouquet pricing is dominated by couples asking what a bouquet should cost them. This chapter answers a different question: how a florist arrives at a number they can defend. Nothing here is a statement about what bouquets cost, in any market, at any time.
Questions this chapter answers
- How much should I charge for a bridal bouquet?
- Cost the recipe at what you paid with freight included, apply your own multiple, price the hours the piece actually takes, and check the resulting margin before you send it. The chapter follows one illustrative recipe through every step of that arithmetic.