Our UK Floral Design and Wedding/Event Styling Tutor and wedding business owner Dee McMeeking transformed her business when she added floral design. In this post, Dee reveals why she believes flowers are the future for wedding stylists.
1. The Wedding Market Place is Changing
What we are seeing right now in the wedding industry is the growth of a very well informed client base. As a wedding stylist 5-7 years ago there were styling items that we could buy using trade accounts much cheaper than they were found in the shops, if you could even find them in the shops, so we had the stock that the client couldn’t get their hands on. Well not any more! The boom in home styling has grown the interior decorating marketplace and interior accessories – many of which are the fundamentals of any wedding design – and these are already in our client’s homes, or on the shelves in their local stores. They know where to get them as cheaply as we do, so the mark up on smaller hire items has dropped. Not only that but the mindset of the client has changed too. They would rather pay to buy their own now and either keep & use them, or sell them on after the wedding, than pay to hire them from you. So short of only hiring out larger items like backdrops and props that don’t always fit every style of wedding and may be here today and gone tomorrow, adding flowers to your business is one of the few ways left to make yourself marketable. The one thing that brides and their friends and families are afraid of touching is fresh flowers because they think they will kill them or they have a huge fear of them going wrong (which is actually very hard to do when you know what you are doing!). Add to this the convenience of having one supplier who can provide all of your florals and also do your styling, or maybe also do some coordinating for you and deal with other suppliers on their behalf – and suddenly the millennial bride is more interested in your services. Not just a stylist, not just a floral designer. One wedding supplier that has a portfolio of services all under one roof so that they get what they want by dealing with just one supplier. Convenient & less hassle for them, and more money for you!
2. Flowers will allow you to grow and scale your business
As a stylist, I used to think how can I make the average spend of my client larger so that I can grow this business. Because the sensible way to grow a business is to add value and generate a higher turnover per event rather than try to do more events. What would you rather do 10 weddings at £1,000 or 100 weddings at £100? Both give you the same turnover but one may put you into an early grave with the work involved! Adding fresh flowers to your styling business gives you instant access to more of a client’s wedding budget. They have money for flowers as well as for styling, and for those that don’t have a styling budget they still have a flower budget! Think about it – you can now quote for bridal bouquets, bridesmaids bouquets, button holes, corsages, flower wands or flower crowns for the little flowergirls, and thank you flowers for the mother of the bride. This is a whole other chunk of a wedding that suddenly opens up to you – in addition to what you already are selling them. Then you can scale your product ranges and push yourself into a whole new marketplace by adding floral design to your existing venue styling and of course charge more. Plus by having flowers in your services you can diversify into things like Mother’s Day or Valentines Day packages with existing or new clients. So with flowers you can grow your average wedding spend and it opens the door to new areas of the wedding marketplace for you.
3. Flowers give you great profit
Unlike props where you have to buy them outright and then recoup your costs over time as they get hired out again and again, flowers pay for themselves every time you sell them. You buy them in, you work on them and create something stunning, they leave and go to the venue and are gone out of your life as quickly as they came into it! All of your flower costs are paid for in your event, and you always make a profit on them. Now the level of profit will depend on lots of different factors such as the style of wedding, the amount of guests, the amount of flowers v’s greenery, the size of floral arrangements, the size of the bridal party, the type of flowers they want you to use, but one thing is certain – you are going to make money on them every time. The traditional method of pricing a floral arrangement is to take the cost price of the flowers and all of the sundries you use and then use a multiplier to find your sale price. You should at minimum be doubling it, but you could also x2.5, x3, or even x4 in some markets. So how nice would it be to think that for every £1 you spend on flowers you could potentially charge £3 – £4 and in so doing earn £2-£3? Now scale that up into hundreds and thousands and you can see why I am saying that I believe flowers are the future for wedding stylists.
So what are you waiting for? Go and check out our Diploma in Floral & Event Styling by clicking your local campus below, and watch out for our new Certificate in Floral Design launching at the end of 2018.
We’ll also be offering this course via our North American and Arabian campuses by September 2018, so get in touch with our course consultant in those regions now to express your interest!
Image Credits – Photography by Katy Lunsford Photography // Florals by Dee McMeeking and French Flower Style // Styling by Anemone.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dee has trained with the UK Academy of Wedding & Event Planning and she is now a fully trained wedding planner, wedding stylist, & floral designer, and has worked on over 250 weddings since graduating. Alongside her company Dee McMeeking she is now an Academy Tutor on the Diploma in Floral & Event Styling and Certificate in Wedding Styling.
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