Receiving Your Flowers
Order Early
Most floral wholesale orders are placed at least 30 days prior to an event date, to give our wholesale partners and farms time to allocate the correct stems to your order, but orders can be placed up to one year in advance. No orders can be received for delivery sooner than two weeks from order without direct consultation with our team.
You should schedule your order to arrive a MINIMUM of two days prior to your wedding day, preferably three days prior to your wedding day. In the rare event of a shipping delay, you want to give your stems time to hydrate and open, as well as time to arrange your pieces. Consider that professional florists, who work on these pieces weekly, allocate almost an entire working week to prepping for a wedding order, and leave yourself ample time for the process.
Prepping For Arrival
We will send you a confirmation email when your order has shipped. In the meantime, it’s time to prep your buckets and vessels for their arrival: prepare your vases with floral foam or tape grids, prepare your work surface so that you can line up multiple pieces side by side for the design process, and prepare your buckets to hydrate your stems. Be sure that any buckets used to store flowers are thoroughly cleaned and free from chemicals.
My Flowers Look So Sleepy!
When your flowers arrive, they will be tight and – in floral lingo – “sleepy.” They are dehydrated from their trip and need to be prepped for designing and hydrated. If your flowers look limp, it is completely normal. They will perk up within hours of being put in water.
Flower boxes cannot be left outdoors – especially not during extreme heat or cold. Please be sure that someone will be available at your delivery address to receive your flowers on the day that they arrive.
Day One: Prep
ALL stems need to be given a fresh cut, at least 1/4″ from the bottom, to allow the open stems to pull in water. Some stems, like hydrangea, will need to have their entire bloom heads dunked into water. Please take the time to read your processing guide to understand how you should handle your blooms when they arrive.
ALL greenery and leaves that will sit below the water line must be stripped away from the stems carefully. Plan for the processing time for your order to take 2 – 3 hours.
Design Your Pieces
We offer step by step guidance for clients to design their pieces, as well as available optional phone or Zoom support.
If you have a bride squad on standby to help with the designing process, it can be a fun girl’s night activity, and extra hands make the work go faster. Bridesmaids can help design their bouquets, or chip in to build centerpieces. Pro tip: Always deligate tasks to those you feel confident can handle them. Flowers should be handled with the “measure twice, cut once” mentality.
Depending on the size of your order, design time may vary. Professional florists may spend 30 minutes building a hand-spiraled bouquet, or hours managing the wiring and taping for a complicated cascade. Centerpieces can also vary in design time for industry pros.
The easiest way to ensure consistency, whether you’re designing solo or recruiting assistants, is to divide stems into vases or piles for each piece they’ll be used to create, then design one piece until you’re happy with the results. Once you have that piece, replicating it while it’s visible on your work table makes it easy to see which blooms were placed in what positions relative to each other.
Don’t throw away your flower boxes! Transporting top-heavy floral pieces by car is daunting, especially on a hectic wedding day. Your designated delivery person will appreciate the X-cut technique florists use to pack designed pieces and vases with bouquets into vehicles to transport. And your flowers will thank you!
Send Us Your Photos!
We’d love to see how your pieces turned out, and share your creations with our followers who are planning to manage their own DIY floral journeys! Send us your photos, feedback, tips and tricks, or stories so that we can highlight your experience for other brides. Email us at bridefam@bespokebloomkits.com .