Power your profitability with flower recipes: How to design exceptional bouquets!
Photo credit Lisa Lupo Couple at Canyonwood Ridge in the Texas Hill Country
Execptional bouquets both make your client's dream come true and turn a profit for your business.
Recently, I was chatting with another floral designer about how to build effective and profitable flower recipes.
She's getting familiar with my new floral design software called EveryStem. So, we decided to check in via zoom. "Is there a base formula for the standard items a floral designer creates for a wedding like bouquet for example?" she asked. I thought about it and said "I think the answer is yes." I looked back at my flower recipes from many weddings over the last decade and a distinct pattern emerged. Not just on bouquets, but on most standard wedding items like arches, ceremony arrangements and centerpieces. So, I'm excited to share my bouquet recipe findings with you today. In fact, I'm going to create a series of blog posts for you that cover each catergory individually. I hope that these blog posts can help to power your profitability even further!
My flower recipe formulas are based on 15 years of flower recipe creation!
I'm sharing all my knowlegde with you today because I want you to benefit from my flower recipe mistakes. Trial and error over the course of hundreds of weddings has brought me to this point in my life. I've felt for several years now that my flower recipe and ordering system is something other floral designers can use. I know it can save you the headache of handwritten flower orders. So, I have created a new platform that simplifies and speeds up the entire flower recipe and ordering process for floral designers. I named it EveryStem and it's launching this spring. I'm excited to share it with you because it's going to power your profitability in several ways! Let me share a quick overview of EveryStem with you.
Power your profitability.
EveryStem is the new flower recipe platform built for florists.
Floral designers just like you use it to take control of wholesale flower orders. By using EveryStem to create your flower recipes you’ll achieve minimal waste and maximum profits on your events, daily orders, and weddings. The struggle of ordering flowers using the old-school pencil and paper method is over! You’ll save time, reduce over-ordering and actually enjoy the experience of creating flower recipes with EveryStem.
Along with your membership to the platform, I'll be sharing free recipes, like this gorgeous bouquet recipe for example. All you need to do is adjust the colors to your client's palette of choice. Then, you can use EveryStem to enter the recipe with your retail markup and labor fees. It calculates the retail price for you automatically! I love how easy it is to use.
You'll never have to question your flower recipes or retail prices again!
Now that you know how EveryStem can power your profitability, it's time to dive into the formula for exceptional bouquets!
The design of exceptional bouquets starts with intentional ingredient selection. Flower recipes for bouquets range based on size and style. However, when I looked back at a random selection of all my wedding orders over the last 15 years I found a distinct pattern.
Most of the bouquets ranged from having 24 to 36 blooms and they all had a range of 0 to 2 bunches of greenery.
It works! 24 to 36 blooms is the magic range for most wedding bouquets. Greenery heavy and smaller sized bouquets can lean towards the lower end of the bloom spectrum. I'd recommend 21 to 26 blooms for small bouquets. Garden style bouquets with more greenery as filler can also have around 24 blooms. For example, the lush garden style bouquet recipe I've shared above has about 25 blooms. Then, there is about 1.5 bunches of greenery to aid the shape and build out that lush garden vibe!
Your larger bouquets with less greenery need to have closer to 36 blooms. A rounded bouquet in a large size requires more flowers, of course! These include bouquets of all roses. When I looked back at my mono-floral bouquets many of them had between 32 and 36 blooms. This seems to be the sweet-spot for dome shaped rose bouquets! I've noticed they've been coming back in style. Have you seen any lately?
Now, I know there are always exceptions to the rule. Believe me. So, I don't want you to take this too seriously. I've designed bouquets with 50 peonies. Oh, yes! I featured an image of one in this blog post a while back. I've also designed bouquets of all greenery and not a single bloom...
So, let your client be your guide and create something that expresses their personality.
That's another reason why EveryStem is getting such rave reviews from our early users. Repeating recipes often happens in the course of a floral designer's career. This is typically because couples fall in love with an image from your website or your Instagram page. So, you recreate that design with a few tweaks to give it a new life. Rather than having to re-create that flower recipe from scratch, EveryStem powers your profitability with a recipe copy feature. It's awesome! You can copy the previous order, make a few changes to it, and send it off to your vendors of choice in a flash.
No more re-doing work that you've already done!
Power your Profitability with EveryStem for Bouquets
Photo credit
Let's take the above bouquet for example. A more compact style than our lush garden bouquet above. It has a similar number of blooms, but fewer stems of foliage. Of course, lissianthus often has more than 1 bloom per stem. That is definitely a factor in the fullness of this compact beauty. If we factor in that there are typically 2 useable blooms per stem of lissianthus, then we are looking at more like 31 blooms in this stunner!
Here's the recipe.
Power your profitability with EveryStem Flower recipes
Consider a few guidelines when building out your floral recipes.
Think about perspective. What angles will the design will be viewed from and how will it be photographed? In particular bouquets are photographed from above and from the front and sides. It's important that if you use mechanics like chicken wire that it does not show at all by covering it with greenery or ribbon. The finished product should never have any mechanics showing including tape!
Also, think about proportion. In the case of bouquets, consider the size of the person carrying the bouquet and the surroundings they will be in while holding it. There are always exceptions, but in general the bouquet should compliment the person not overtake them.
Lastly, consider the size of the blooms themselves. A hydrangea is so much larger than a rose, you might not want to use as many blooms in a bouquet with a base of hydrangeas as opposed to one with a base of roses.
I hope this formula and guidelines help you to create bouquet recipes with ease! I'd love to know if you have a standard go to formula for bouquets in the comments below!
If you are interested in signing up for my EveryStem launch giveaways and promotions, please join my email list!
Until next time,
LuAnn