Becoming a wedding florist: the paths in

The two jobs

The design job is the one that shows: choosing material, building pieces, making a room look like something. It is the reason almost everybody comes to this trade.

The logistics job is buying, conditioning, storing, scheduling, loading, driving, installing, and striking, against a date that cannot move, in buildings that belong to other people, with a product that is dying the whole time. It is the larger share of the hours, and it is what separates people who can produce a beautiful bouquet from people who can deliver a wedding.

Neither is optional. Anybody deciding whether to enter the trade should be deciding about both.

The paths in, and what each teaches

Working in a shop

Volume and speed, mechanics, and exposure to a very wide range of material through the year. A shop teaches your hands. It teaches less about pricing a wedding, because the pricing decisions are usually somebody else's.

Freelancing for other florists on event days

The fastest way to learn the logistics job, because you are dropped into the compressed part of it repeatedly, in different venues, under somebody else's system. You see how several studios solve the same problems and which solutions hold up. What it does not teach is client work, because you never meet the client.

Studio or design led work

Closest to the work you will do if you run your own weddings: fewer, larger, more designed jobs with a longer lead time. It teaches sourcing to a specification and holding a design across a whole event.

Courses and workshops

Useful for technique and for concentrated exposure to material, and they are a business selling to you, which is worth remembering when the marketing suggests they are a route to a career. What they cannot supply is repetition under real conditions.

What a wedding week is actually like

The shape of the week is worth knowing before you commit to it, because it is unlike almost any other creative work.

1. Early in the week the order is placed and the plan is fixed. Nothing looks like flowers yet.
2. Product arrives and everything stops for conditioning, which is unglamorous, physical, and time critical.
3. The build compresses into the last day or two, bounded at one end by when product is ready and at the other by when it has to leave.
4. The event day starts very early, runs on someone else's schedule, and includes at least one problem you did not plan for.
5. Strike happens late, after everybody else has enjoyed the event you supplied.
6. Then the studio has to be cleaned and reset, usually the next morning, usually while quoting the next job.

It is physical work with early mornings, cold rooms, heavy wet product, and a hard deadline that does not care how the week went. People who love the trade tend to love that structure rather than tolerate it.

Building a first portfolio honestly

You need images of work before anybody hires you, and the ways of getting them differ a great deal in how honest they are.

• Document your own work properly, including work you made for practice. Say what it is.
• If you freelanced on somebody else's wedding, credit whose wedding it was and what you did on it. Presenting a studio's job as your own is the fastest reputational damage available in a small trade.
• Photographs belong to the photographer. Using a wedding image usually needs their permission, and crediting them is the minimum.
• Do not imply experience you do not have. A client who discovers the gap mid planning is a much worse outcome than one who hired you knowing.

This site holds itself to the same rule. It publishes under a house byline and claims no floristry experience, which is why it derives arithmetic and cites horticulture publications rather than telling you what it does on its own jobs.

Questions this chapter answers

How do you become a wedding florist?

There is no single route and no required qualification we can point to. The common paths are shop work, freelancing on other florists' event days, studio work, and courses, and they teach different halves of the job. The chapter describes what each one gives you and what a wedding week actually involves.