Floral Design | When Plan A Fails

Imagine this... you request 300 coral peonies for a wedding and when they all arrive, they quickly lose their petals and die. Yep, that happened to us last year. Totally true story, and it's not the only story of its kind. Working with fresh flowers always carries a risk. Flowers are living, perishable product. From time to time, even the best laid plans go horribly wrong due to circumstances completely beyond our control. The only healthy or productive way to approach floral design is with flexibility. Flexibility is the name of the game. 

I always encourage our clients to be flexible and to trust us. It's not uncommon for a particular flower to be unusable - perhaps because it is out of season, perhaps because there is a shipping/delivery delay, or perhaps because the climate, weather or soil have created unstable growing conditions. We can request peonies in September until we're blue in the face, but that's an extremely unlikely get! Sometimes our wholesale reps and growers are only able to give us 24-48 hours notice that something I've ordered weeks before won't be available because the quality is bad. Sometimes large shipments get caught up in FedEx delays due to inclement weather and we have to replace the product. The potential scenarios are plenty, but the solution is always the same: be flexible, be flexible, be flexible. Plan A is always lovely, but it isn't always the plan that comes to fruition! This subject matter makes many couples nervous, but just like everything else - this is all about trust. And trust is worth its weight in gold... because there's no way on this great, green earth that I'm going to let anyone's floral design be less than absolutely beautiful. 

Becca

Emily March Photography