It’s no big secret that a lot of brides today are choosing to do their own wedding flowers in order to cut costs. If you’re searching online, you’ll find the internet is littered with sites claiming to sell flowers at wholesale prices or below. Many have good prices. My issue with these sites is not with the price of the flowers, it’s with the shipping and handling methods they use.

All of these sites ship flowers next day via a courier service, like FedEx or DHL. This is a costly way to ship and the flowers are not in a temperature-controlled environment during the shipping process. Here’s a recent, real-life example of what can happen:
Wilted flowers teach bride a lesson about buying online.

Reputable local wholesale florists use specialized floral-only freight services when shipping flowers. These freight services feature door-to-door temperature controlled handling and shipment of floral products, to insure arrival of top quality flowers.

Unfortunately, no reputable wholesale florist will sell flowers to you unless you have a business license or sellers permit, and are either a retail florist or related retail service business (ie, restaurant, caterer, etc). They wouldn’t risk selling directly to the public. If they did, they would lose our business, as well as a lot of others once the word got around. If you call a local wholesale florist looking to buy flowers, they will refer you to a retail flower shop.

To be fair, I’m sure the example I cited above isn’t an everyday occurrence when shipping wedding flowers overnight, but are you willing to take that chance when there could be a better way?

Today, I believe the best value on bulk flowers can be found by buying them from your local florist. Here’s why.

Many progressive retail florists offer “a la carte” wedding services for the bride who wants to do her own flowers.

At our shop for example, we work with many brides who just want to buy the flowers for their wedding, and do the work themselves. We save these brides time and money in several ways:

• Lower markups on bulk purchases.
• Based on their input and our experience, we can suggest the proper quantity of flowers that they will be need to do the job right. This minimizes waste, saving them money.
• Our product sourcing is better than what they would be able to find on their own, so they’re assured they’ll get the best quality product available.
• As our customer, we can also serve as a reliable backup, in case things don’t go quite as planned, or last minute changes are needed.

And that’s just one example of the “a la carte” wedding services we provide. If you are planning a wedding in the Milwaukee area, and would like more information on our services, you can get in touch with us here.

If not, it’s worth checking out a few florists in your area. I’m willing to bet there are more than a few who offer similar services.