Credit Crunch Wedding Flowers & the Zen of Recession-proofing Your Big Day
With our Wedding Flowers hotline ringing off the hook, Judith up to her chin in raffia, and our drivers up at the crack of dawn for early morning Saturday deliveries, the wedding season is now truly upon us at Flowers HQ. With the bustles of brides visiting our wedding team in Park Royal for advice on an almost daily basis, you’d be tempted to wonder whether the recession is really just a figment of the media’s imagination after all…
Although couples are insisting on committing to their 2009 wedding plans, the economic downturn has nonetheless brought with it a whole gamut of challenges for those intending to marry this year. Partner up the recession with the fact that the average cost of a British wedding topped £20,000 for the first time in 2008, shows that deciding when to scrimp and when to splurge on a such a monumental day isn’t going to be easy.
As the wedding season has approached, we’ve seen a significant increase in wedding flower enquiries in recent months, and with those we’re seeing more emphasis laid on price: “We’re looking for something cheap…” , “Could you advise us on the cheapest flowers…” etc. This nature of enquiry can automatically put any florist into defence mode, as any floral designer worth their salt knows that “cheap” is a relative description and doesn’t normally equate for very good (or even appropriate) flower arrangements.
Wedding Flowers on a Budget
If there is a budget involved (see below for more advice on setting wedding budgets), a wedding florist can then easily come up with flower choices and designs that will fall within that budget. According to last year’s figures, the average cost of wedding flowers in 2008 reached £381, accounting for just 2% of the overall average UK wedding budget of £20,000 (Source: Sky News, November 2008). But in most cases, wedding flowers normally take up 10-15% of the final wedding bill - thus proving every wedding is different with an array requirements and preferences.
The task of choosing wedding flowers is a personal, expressive and emotional experience, which is why we always recommend brides drop into Flowers HQ for an informal chat to discuss their requirements in person with our wedding florists, who will source the right wedding flowers for you - not only suiting your pocket but also of exceptional quality too.
Credit Crunch Wedding Flowers
While 10-15% is a good estimate for your wedding flowers bill, you can modify many floral elements to determine the actual amount you will spend on your wedding arrangements. Factors such as whether or not your preferred flowers are in season, the number, size and complexity of the arrangements all influence your final cost estimate.
In economically hard times, creativity comes to the fore, as brides are find ways to spend their wedding budget more wisely, and discovering “cheap” wedding ideas that help them save money. Here are just a few budget-friendly ideas to help you on the way to beautiful, economical wedding flowers that won’t cost you a king’s ransom. 
Easy Peasey. Flowers in season are often less expensive and easier to source. For a list of common flowers for each season, visit our wedding flowers tips page for our guide to seasonal flowers. Don’t forget that flowers over peak / holiday periods such as Valentine’s, Christmas and Mother’s Day will cost more.
Simple things. Because the time taken to create your flowers will be factored into your wedding flowers bill, go for less elaborate bridal flowers which are less labour intensive. For instance, a hand-tied or free form bouquet takes less time to create than a wired or teardrop one. For extra savings, bridesmaids can carry a single flower in a flower wand instead of a bouquet.
Filler thriller. Use more, cheaper foliage and greenery, baby’s breath, wax flower, soft ruscus etc which will pad out flower arrangements. Use flowery blooms as an accent to the arrangement rather than the main ingredient.
Bargain hunt. Shop around for end of line / discounted glassware in charity shops and budget household stores for vases. This way, for the price of renting / paying deposit on breakages, you can keep, sell on or recycle. The Christmas sale period is the perfect time to purchase candles, fairy lights and other decorations at huge discount.
Let’s go outside. Find a venue such as a park or garden that is already lush and beautiful - a springtime wedding in a garden will require little in the way of floral arrangements, while a traditional church may be breathtaking on its own. Also consider that many venues come ready decorated in the lead up to Christmas, so holding an earl-mid December wedding may provide you seasonal flowers for free.
A problem shared. Find out from your venues whether any other weddings are scheduled for the same day. If the two events can share decorating expenses, you’ll save a lot of money.
Recycle arrangements. If you can’t share your arrangements, transfer the flowers from your ceremony to your reception. Save more money on head table decoration by displaying the bridal bouquets on the head table.
Don’t Do it Yourself!
Floristry looks easier than it really is, so if you really can’t afford a florist, make sure you find someone with at least some skill and experience with flowers. We can provide flowers wholesale at discount prices for brides wishing to create their wedding flowers ‘in house’, but don’t forget you’ll need somewhere cool to store them safely and keep them fresh.
Making of the arrangements should be left to the very last minute, so best not leave them to a stressed-out, sleep deprived bride-to-be! If you don’t know what you are doing and don’t enjoy working under pressure, don’t try this - even if the temptation of saving some money is far too much to resist!
A good budget compromise would be to ask your florist to create the key arrangements such as the bridal and bridesmaid bouquets which are important to get absolutely right, then purchase additional matching stems for your own vase displays and other ad hoc uses such as buttonholes, hair flowers etc.
Jilted at the Alter?
With sterling still relatively weak against the euro (therefore inflating wholesale prices) as well as diminishing footfall, local independent florists are increasingly falling victim to the economic downturn, leaving distressed brides empty handed for their big day with little time to make alternative arrangements.
If your wedding florist goes bust, first off - don’t panic. Most florists will be able to stock your wedding flower requirements within 4-5 days, depending on how often they visit their wholesalers. If you are based in the London area (and your wedding doesn’t fall on a holiday / event day such as Mother’s or Valentine’s Day) we’ll be more than happy to pick up your order (we get fresh flowers in direct from the Dutch auctions nearly every day).
In many cases we’ve been known to slash existing quotes, and can sometimes provide wedding bouquets with just a day or two’s notice. So, even with times as they currently are, there are good deals to be found by the frugal bride. If you’re just starting to plan your wedding, our short list of 5 steps to a debt-free wedding might just be of some use…
Easy Steps Towards Recession-Proofing Your Wedding
1. Establish Your Wedding Budget
Choose a reliable method to keep track of all expenditures - there are now lots of websites that offer free budgeting services. If possible, keep your wedding fund separate from your personal accounts, so you can easily determine what’s being spent on the wedding. Don’t forget to call in all those favours: contact old mates, colleagues, family members and even the bloke down the road who you lent that jump lead to last winter, who may be able to offer their services.
2. Wedding Wedding Gifts.
Continuing from the above, barter your way to the wedding you want by asking wedding guests to offer their skills and services as a wedding present. If there’s a hairdresser or keen photographer on your guest list, time to bend their ear and put them to work! Chances are they’ll probably bring you a pressie anyway on the day, too… ;)
3. Beware Hidden Costs
Set aside 5% of your budget for those extras that are bound to sneak in one way or another. If you absolutely cannot exceed £20,000, aim to spend £19,000. When last minute costs such as VAT, fees etc come up (and they will), your reserve funds will save you from debt. Similarly, look out for deals and discount rates often offered during low season, midweek or during the day which can trim significant costs from your wedding bill.
4. Super Skinny Me
Serve three courses instead of five (saving on catering and waistlines). Have two bridesmaids instead of four (saving on dresses). Invite 100 guests instead of 200 (saving on just about everything). If you’re struggling with whom to cut from the guest list, cut out children and anyone you don’t know personally, and you’ll see that guest list rapidly streamline itself!
5. More Wine, Madame?
Don’t crack under pressure of the up-sell! That diamond-encrusted designer dress, the fancy five star hotel suite, the vintage champagne - they might seem like good ideas at the time, and it’s easy to get carried away, but they all add up. It’s important to understand which details are truly most important to you. Be strong, prioritise what you want beforehand and you’re less likely to face a nasty surprise later.
Similar Posts: If you liked this post you may find our credit crunching post Lessons From Flowers - Tulips & the Economic Crisis interesting as well as our oodles of wedding related posts!!
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I was recently invited by friend of Arena, Trevor Ginn, to write a guest post for his blog 
Regular readers of Flowers …uncut will already be well aware of our occasional support of charities and good causes as well as the launch of the Arena-powered 
A quick ‘Pop Quiz’ for you: What do Jon Bon Jovi, Kate Winslet, Cameron Diaz, Steffi Graf, Jodie Foster and Tiger Woods (pictured, right) all have in common? Apart from probably having a few bob to their names, they are all reported to be famous hay fever sufferers and/or allergic to flowers.
Flower No-No’s(e)
We’ve been a little quiet on the blog front this past few weeks - call it a little blog break while we recovered from the excitement of serving sumptuous fresh flowers to the nation’s romantics on Valentine’s Day, then just a few weeks later, creating the perfect Mother’s Day bouquet arrangements for mums, grandmas and godmothers across the UK.
“My first order with Arena Flowers was back in December for some Grand Prix roses for my partner’s birthday,” Kalsoom told us on learning of her win.
On being told of her win, Pippa tells us “I find the Arena flower service an excellent way of keeping in touch with my mother, who sadly had a stroke over ten years ago, and has not been able to speak since, so no chance of chats on the phone unfortunately. She loves flowers, and this is a wonderful way of brightening up her life.”
If you’ve missed Valentine’s Day and forgot to send flowers from our exclusive 
Be fun - laughter is the best aphrodisiac: Add a 
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The 
The wedding flowers on display at the Think Pink Wedding show last Saturday were: Amnesia roses, Cool water roses, Schwarzwalder calla lilies bridal bouquet (from £65), guest table arrangement (from £50) and buttonhole (from £7.50); Cool water roses, Limbo roses, Sea holly / thistles bridal bouquet (from £65); Sweet Avalanche and Sea holly bridal bouquet (from £65) and buttonhole (£7.50); Orchid cascade bridal bouquet (from £120), vase arrangement (from £26) and buttonhole (£7.50); and large mixed vase display including while lilies, pink mini gerberas, sea holly, sweet avalanche roses, limbo roses, carnations, and completed with soft ruscus and bear grass (from £80 plus vase hire).
Just three good reasons to mosey on down to the David Lloyd Health & Fitness Club in Raynes Park, South West London today (Saturday 24 January) where yours truly will be exhibiting the floral fineries of our rapidly growing wedding flowers arm 
As trailed a little while ago in our 
Recently 
Getting hitched in the chilly months of winter doesn’t mean that you need to compromise on your winter 
Yesterday was a busy day for anti-fraud newsflow plus some good old fashioned 
There’s no doubt that education is key in battling web spam and other forms of online fraud and 
Understandably, reputable online businesses recognise the challenge of building trust and at Arena we work very hard to address potential trust concerns of visitors, such as payment methods and checkout integrity, site security, quality / value / freshness of product, and data protection and privacy policies. After all, if we’re asking customers to hand over their money without ever having met us face to face, then they will need to be convinced that we are who we say we are and that we’ll deliver on our promises. We try as much as we can to be clear and transparent about what we do (posting to our blog regularly is part of that…I hope it’s clear that this post isn’t being written by a scammer in Eastern Europe!). The key is not to slip up as, as they say, “trust is hard to win and very easy to lose”. Once you have it, do your very best to hold on to it.
It’s therefore incredibly frustrating when a lot of hard work is potentially undone by a company that really should know better - 
Now, I don’t know what you think, but if I received an email like that from my firewall supplier, I’d look very hard at any future communications from Arena and quite possibly unsubscribe immediately. After all, MessageLabs are a $700m company so they must be right, yeah? Surely, they wouldn’t send out an email that slams a genuine business’s legitimate, opt-in marketing activity so thunderously by mistake? Big boys like MessageLabs are bound to have complicated checks and balances in place to avoid accidentally torpedoing the legitimate marketing efforts of other organisations. A web security firm in particular would understand the importance of online reputation and the hard work that goes into building trust. And in any case, Arena has been sending regular marketing emails every other week for over two years, so no doubt MessageLabs would be able to use characteristics of our mail sends, such as previous send frequency, an unchanged IP address, subject lines etc etc to double check the validity of the send.
10/10 for being a pushy sales rep but frankly this mail was not terribly well received as you can imagine. You wouldn’t want this guy consoling you if you broke up with your partner. “I’m afraid you’ve been dumped but I’m a pimp - have you considered paying for sex?”. You’d then be even more upset when you found out that it was this guy that had caused the break up with your partner in the first place.
The frustrating thing about this is that MessageLabs has several million installed users in the UK, particularly in big, wealthy organisations, such as the government and banks etc. These are obviously valuable potential customers and exactly the kind of people we’d love to retain. Unfortunately we have no way of knowing how many such customers have now had their hard won trust in Arena dented or destroyed by MessageLabs’ misdiagnosis and there is no real way for us to fix this (bar writing this cathartic blog post!). The chap at MessageLabs said “Sorry” but it’s not going to make any difference. It’s clearly no coincidence that this email performed far worse than any other we’ve ever sent; it can realistically only be down to our MessageLabs mishap.
Dr. Dave Chaffey, is the Director and lead consultant for 
The biggest challenge for all online marketers has to be gaining and keeping attention, what the academics call “customer engagement”. Despite the Google monopoly, the search engines are still great for gaining attention for businesses that make the effort to understand the details of best practice.
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