The proposal and what goes in it

What the client is actually agreeing to

Three things have to be unambiguous on the page: what they are getting, what it costs, and what happens when something changes. A proposal that nails the first two and skips the third is where most difficult conversations come from.

• The piece list, with counts and enough size description that two people would picture the same thing.
• The price, and what it includes.
• Delivery, setup, and strike: named explicitly as included or not, because assuming is expensive.
• The substitution position, in plain language.
• What happens on a change of scope, a change of date, and a cancellation.
• What is due, and when.

Itemized against bundled

There is a real tradeoff here and no correct answer. A fully itemized proposal is transparent and easy to trust, and it invites line by line editing: a client who can see that centerpieces are twelve hundred dollars can ask for eight of them instead of ten, which is fine, and can also ask why a boutonniere costs what it costs, which is a longer conversation.

A bundled proposal reads as a considered whole and resists being picked apart, and it invites the question of what is in it. It also makes a scope change harder to reprice cleanly, because there is no published unit to add or remove.

A middle position that works: itemize by group rather than by stem. Personals, ceremony, reception, installations, each as a line with its own count and price. Enough structure to reprice a change without publishing your recipe.

Images, and being careful with them

Reference images in a proposal are a promise whether or not you meant them that way. The tighter the image, the more specific the promise, and an image of somebody else's work is a promise about a piece you did not build in conditions you do not know.

There is also an ownership question. Photographs are somebody's copyrighted work, and a wedding photograph in your proposal is usually the photographer's rather than the couple's or the florist's. Using your own documented work avoids the question entirely and shows what you actually make.

From proposal to agreement

At some point the proposal stops being a pitch and becomes the thing both parties are bound by. Exactly how that happens, what the payment terms mean, and what a cancellation clause can and cannot do are legal questions that vary by jurisdiction, and they are covered separately.