Floral Pricing
Bella Signature Design Flowers is a full-service floral design studio providing custom, exquisite arrangements for weddings or special events. We have had retail spaces in the past, and found that walk-in customers took our attention away from client meetings. Instead, we now have working studios, and create collaboration and consultation appointments so that we can solely focus on you. We prefer to meet clients at their venue for the initial appointment so that we can walk through the venue with you to discuss your ideas. Our initial consultation is free, which allows you to see samples of our work through our portfolio, and get a sense of our design style and personality.
At Bella Signature Design, we create one-of-a-kind events that are a collaboration between our talents and design sense and your style and vision. Because each event, and even each bouquet, is unique, we do not offer "packages" or list line-item pricing. There are just too many possibilities of what we can create! Instead, we offer an individualized, detailed design proposal after meeting with you for an initial consultation. Detailed design proposals are $75, and include pictures and paragraph descriptions of each element of your event. They cover personal flowers, ceremony flowers and set-up, reception flowers and overall décor elements such as linens, lighting, fabric draping, etc. The cost of the proposal is placed towards your order once you book with us.
Cost for décor and flowers is quite variable, and depends on season, style, the flowers you choose and the size of your bridal party and guest count. A large sculpted arrangement of imported orchids is much more expensive than a simple bowl of dahlias, for example! We understand however, that you may need some guidance on what to expect, and therefore provide several approaches to estimating what you may spend on flowers and décor for your event.
If you have an overall budget for your wedding or event, you can estimate that 15-20% of that budget be reserved for your décor, including flowers and other design elements such as draping or lighting. Although many bridal guides suggest 10% of your budget for flowers, we find that the clients choose Bella Signature Design because the style and décor of their wedding is very high on their priority list. Le Jardin Blanc, a wonderful floral design company in Boston, also suggest another alternative, which is wonderful if you do not have an overall budget yet. To estimate a moderate floral budget (personal, ceremony and reception flowers, including delivery and tax) you can estimate $45 to $55 per person for your total wedding floral package.
At Bella Signature Design we only take on one large event per weekend, so that we are totally available for you and can provide you with the best service and design. Since we handpick only a limited number of events per year, please call early to assure a spot with us. For the 2008 wedding season, our starting floral budget is $3,000.
Why do flowers costs so much?
Clients are often unaware of the process event flowers go through, so after many questions, we thought we'd explain…
Let's take the standard rose as an example. First, roses are grown in a variety of ways, either outdoors in semi-controlled environments such as Ecuadorian roses, or hydroponically, such as Northern America roses, where the environment is much more controlled to ensure a certain look. In either case, a lot of resources, from labor, to electricity, watering and plant food go into growing your flowers. The next step is cutting and hydrating your flowers. Next, they are inspected, sorted and graded in terms of quality and size and packaged for shipping. Roses are almost always bunched into bunches of 25 of same color and grade. Depending on their grade (quality) they get shipped to places such as warehouse stores (lowest quality), some grocery stores (medium grade) and floral wholesale houses ('florist' grade, medium or high quality).
Continuing the path of the rose, we now find the bunch of roses at the wholesale flower market, where they get cut, and stored in a large cooler that maximizes their lifespan. The florist or designer then visits the wholesaler which (opens at 4am) and selects the flowers they want. The bunch of roses is selected, and packed in a van and taken tot eh design studio, where it is again cut and placed in water to hydrate. Once hydrated, the roses have to be "stripped" of their thorns and leaves - do not try this without gloves or a handy tool! Back again in a nice clean bucket, and into a commercial floral cooler, which circulates and cools the air properly to again maximize the life of your roses. Many florists then add chemicals to attempt to lengthen the flower's life, we at Bella do not believe in putting chemicals on fresh flowers, and have found that they last just as long without as long as we follow the proper course of taking care of them!
Lastly, and most importantly, those roses get designed into a stunning arrangement just for you…
Back to quality…yes, there is a huge difference between what you can buy at 'warehouse stores' and a from a floral designer who purchased your flowers directly from a grower or a wholesaler. Completely different. However, floral warehouses sell roses at different price ranges, depending on their quality. Northern American roses tend to be the best, with stunning color and an amazing lack of blemishes. These are the roses that have exquisite depth of color, beautiful full shapes, and velvety petals. They are also by far the most expensive. Ecuadorian and other South American roses can be bigger, but often not as nice as their North American counterparts. For the most part, south American roses get their heads dipped in fungicide once cut, so DO NOT let your florist put these on your wedding cake! It's astonishing how often this happens. At Bella, we heavily encourage the use of organic flowers for your cake, or at least northern American roses that have not been subjected to fungicide dips.
In summary, a flower's price depends on where it came from, how it was grown, and how well it was treated along the way. Like many things in life, you get what you pay for.