Design Week! March 2018
About two years ago, I was laying in bed thinking about our business practices and the process involved with how our clients select their wedding flowers. I was getting frustrated at the fact that although flowers are such a visceral experience, meaning they are best enjoyed in person when you can touch, see and smell their beauty, we had mostly just been designing for our clients with pictures on a screen, fabric swatches and sketches. Mood boards, pinterest links and instagram are all great tools when finding some inspiration for your wedding florals, but when that’s all we have to work with, we realized clients were requesting designs that have already been created before and more often than not we would get sent the same pinterest images in succession.
As a designer, this frustrated me and I knew there was some way I could change it. Almost immediately, I lurched upright with a brief moment of epiphany and decided that we wanted to create mock up displays of real, fresh flowers for all our clients. I wanted to invite each booked client in, order in tons of fresh flowers for them to choose from and let them be involved in the floral selection process. So, I sat down, did some math and figured out how much we would have to charge our clients for this service. Needless to say, it was in no way cost effective and I immediately crumpled up that piece of paper with a sigh of defeat.
The moment of realization.
A few days later, I woke up in the middle of the night in a true EUREKA! moment and said outloud to my sleeping boyfriend “We should have them all in the same week!”. He grumbled something and went back to sleep and I stayed up all night hashing out the details of how this could work.
I first thought, there’s no way I can get all of our clients through our doors in one week. When we handle 50-60 wedding a year, that just isn’t a logistic feasibility. Plus I want to make sure the seasonal products that will be in bloom around their wedding are available to select from. I called a meeting with our Design Manager Katy the next day and we talked for hours about how we could make this work for EVERY client we have and NOT charge a single one of them. Hence, Design Week was born.
How does it work?
Two weeks out of each year, we invite all our booked clients to come into the studio for a 1 hr. wedding design workshop. We host these in March for all our Spring/Summer clients and July for all our Fall/Winter clients. We stock our cooler with hundreds and hundreds of blooms and make sure we have on hand any specific requests our clients had for their wedding day. You come in with some your bridesmaids, friends, family, whoever you would like and get to tour the studio, meet the design team who will be working on your wedding and select from REAL flowers.
We walk you through our process of how we select greenery based on seasonality, how design with chicken wire over the bad-for-the-environment floral foam and how we package your flowers to ensure they arrive safely on your wedding day. You will get to hold bouquets of different sizes and shapes to see which style you like best, and believe me we’ve had many brides completely change up their preferred style once they hold it versus seeing it in a photo. We also work together to create a full scale mock up of your centerpiece designs as well.
You’ll leave with a new appreciation for flowers and the certainty that you’ll be getting exactly what you want on your wedding day. It’s a bonus for us too as after Design week, we have ALL our weddings for the upcoming two seasons designed and ready to go, which saves us loads of time by not emailing with our clients back and forth during our busy season, which then in turn allows us to focus on the weddings at hand entirely.
We hope to see you at the next round of Design Workshops!
