Florist vs. diy

Keep in mind that your time and patience equal money (at minimum wage per hour). Be realistic about what your skills are even with Youtube videos and the time crunch, having to do everything the day before.


If you just want a simple bouquet, grab one at Costco or the grocery store and wrap a ribbon around the stems. Another couple bouquets to separate among small vases with stems cut. You don’t need greenery or filler unless you want it.
Do a test run and see how it goes so you can decide what to do.

It really depends on what centrepieces you want – if you just want flowers in a vase, sure, it shouldn’t be difficult to DIY them, but if you want something more technical, you may be out of your league. For example, my centrepieces will be large gold candelabras with big flowing floral arrangements on top and cascading down and the flowers will need to be very carefully secured. I’m quite savvy with DIY but there is no way I would be able to properly execute the vision I have in mind if I did it myself.

Something else to be mindful of, generally the cost charged by a florist will include preparing the flowers (ie removing odd leaves), assembling arrangements, delivering them at the venue and setting up anything that needs to be done onsite, and then packing down afterward. Thus, depending on what you have in mind, it wouldn’t just be flowers that you’d be forking out for, rather, time and effort too.

We are doing diy floral. I highly recommend you tubing wedding floral DIY videos. We were quoted 3500, to 8000 for floral. One of the places had a minimum of $8000 for floral, and to be honest, I really wasn’t even impressed with it. Trader Joe’s has amazing follow options https://youtu.be/oJdz1bY-IHg this YouTube video is perfect! It looks gorgeous she got all the form from Trader Joe’s and it’s so simple. She scavenged some of the greens from her backyard. It’s really not as hard as it seems. You can also check fiftyflowers.com They sell all their flowers wholesale and even give you floral combinations and how to get that look recipes

I got garlands from Sam’s club and turned those into centerpieces. It was super easy and cheap but I had a very small wedding and only need 4 centerpieces, plus a piece of garland for sweetheart table plus another piece for the arch

We ended up with fake flowers. The company we used (Budget Bride) did the bouquets and bouts for us, and then we arranged the centerpiece flowers ourselves. This saved a lot of money... and also, because they were fake, we were a LOT less concerned about messing up!

I totally feel you on this. I was looking into doing Flower Moxie but I’ve been advised by multiple people that unless you really have the time to dedicate to DIY I’d probably feel super rushed and stressed out. I had strongly been considering dried flower elements for the florals anyway so I decided to go with dried bouts and bouquets from Etsy. My main cost will be for fresh greenery garlands for the tables but going this route I actually keep costs more around $700 than $7000. It’s just an element of the day that for me is really difficult to justify that kind of spending!

I know quite a few people who have hired a florist to do the bouquets, then did the centerpieces themselves. You just need to be honest with yourself about what you can do. I myself am not a crafty person AT ALL, so I knew there was no way I'd ever be able to put together bouquets and/or centerpieces. My best friend, however, is extremely crafty and did all of her own arrangements and they looked really nice.

There’s a website called Ling’s moment with flowers that are pre-made. Truthfully I didn’t wanna spend so much either. We got centerpieces for $600 total by getting 22 lanterns and Ling’s “Lantern Flowers.” In comparison to the $2,300 I was quoted for at a floral shop.

I am paying for the bouquets, corsages, and boutonnieres but am buying everything else in bulk and doing them myself. They will be basic floral centerpieces. I would recommend practicing keeping them alive for a few days and arranging. Depending on the flower you can get them at trader joes or a local grocery chain.

I do recommend Ling's moment the floral look very nice from there but it can be pretty costly too compared to just going to the florist. You can also consider doing candle centerpieces or just centerpieces with filler/baby's breath to save some money on florals.