What to Do Before Meeting with Your Florist | Wedding Planning Tips

So you’re engaged – now what do you do? Start planning a wedding, of course!

But where do you start? The whirlwind of excitement that comes with getting engaged may slowly start to wear off when you realize that now you have a wedding to plan and lots of choices to make. If you are planning to do a traditional, larger wedding, you may feel like you have no idea where to start. While it may be tempting to jump into the fun stuff like flowers, stationery or the photo booth you’ve always wanted to have it’s important to get the basics set first. Many vendors (including us) need to know things like your date and venue to let you know if we are even available!

Pick a Date and Venue

As florist, we MUST have a venue and date before we can do anything for your wedding. Without a date or venue we don’t know if we are truly available for your wedding date. So if you’re looking for the best place to start, begin by looking for a venue and signing a contract for a date with them!

Find a Planner

After you know where and when your wedding is going to be, we recommend choosing a planner. You may be thinking you can do it all on your own, but a wedding planner will help look at all your wants and needs and create a realistic budget based on that, recommend vendors to bring your dreams to life within that budget and help make sure you stay on track for everything needed to be done before the big day.

Put Together a Budget

When it comes to budgeting, there are a few things to remember when it comes to wedding florals:

• The price of wedding florals has increased about 5-8%. Weddings we could do for $3500 2 years ago, are now costing $4000-$4200. A seasoned, and good planner will be able to look at what you are wanting and give a solid estimate of what things will cost.
• Going in open minded and flexible with your budget is helpful. If you go in with a harsh number, florists might stray away from certain designs or elements that could make a big difference to the day because it won’t fit into the cookie cut number. I always say – ask away for everything you’d want, and then you can always take away.

Now the fun part, prepping for your meeting with us!

While we have a list of things we go through in each of our initial consultations, there are a few things you can put together before we meet. We want to use our time together wisely and if you can have a few ideas together for when we meet, this helps tremendously when it comes to understanding what you want for your big day!

Choose a Color Palette

When it’s time to start choosing decor and the theme for your wedding, everything starts with your color palette. What color are the bridesmaids wearing? What about linens? Have you ordered invitations or anything paper wise that has a particular theme or vibe to it? As a designer, we LOVE and think it’s very important to keep design styles and colors consistent throughout all aspects of a wedding.

We’ll start with your color palette and THEN pick florals based on that. Having an idea of what you want this to be when you walk into the meeting will allow for us to more quickly narrow down the options for your wedding.

A Pinterest Board

Lastly – a Pinterest board. Pinterest is a great way to translate the vibe you are going for in your wedding to florist and any others that you have hired to aid in your decor (you can follow us on Pinterest here!). Now, we aren’t telling you go pin a million things. It can have 100 or 10, just something that shows off the vibe you are going for on your wedding day. Florals are very visual, so being able to point out designs and things you love to us is a huge plus. From what you share, we can tell you what flowers you’ll need, where to get candles and how many you need and could even have another vendor we recommend to help with a certain design element!

Planning Process with a Reiley + Rose Bride

Ashlyn and Chris are good friends of mine who just so happened to get married during the snowpocolypse we experienced in Texas in February of 2021. On top of all the other things going on, we had to find a way to get their flowers from Austin. I have never had a groom quite like Chris who came and picked me up in his 4×4 truck and drove me to Austin amidst the snow to get their flowers. The MVG (most valuable groom) of the century, hands down goes to him!

Planning for their wedding was so fun! Ashlyn gave me 100% of the control when it came to the florals for their wedding day. She showed about 10 inspiration pictures of flowers she loved, a bridesmaid dress swatch and said run with it! The biggest part of the success with this is that she had zero expectations and knew that I’d do what I do best!

A stressful week, that turned out to be the most perfect day at The Allen Farmhaus. Check out more of their magical day and vendors that helped put it together below!