Wedding Bouquet Preservation
Looking for an easy way to upsell wedding and event orders?
I’d been receiving questions about bouquet preservation here and there for a while from wedding clients. Each time, I sent them on to someone else who was doing that kind of work as their primary business. Most of those folks used flower pressing techniques to preserve and re-create a two-dimensional version of a client’s bouquet.
But those missed sales got me thinking about whether or not we could find a way to take advantage of the interest and keep that business at my farm. So, for the past two years, I tested and then offered a wedding bouquet preservation service.
I had a few stipulations:
I ONLY wanted to work with my own grown flowers (no chemicals). So this service is limited to my own clients. This became another reason for them to book my services! No other florists in my area are offering in-house bouquet preservation.
I only work with fresh flowers. And not wilty, second-day, been-through-the-ringer wedding bouquets. So my clients have to be willing to order a second wedding bouquet for the purpose of preserving the flowers.
It isn’t for every client. I mark up the price substantially in order to ensure a solid profit margin. (more on this below)
Clients have to be flexible with time. It takes a long time to dry flowers. I have my eye on the fall and winter months for the actual completion and delivery of the work, even though the weddings take place the previous summer.
I am determined to make this an efficient process and the bouquets need to be as beautiful and close to fresh as possible without using resin (the crunchy mom in me says— absolutely no plastic!) or time-consuming flower pressing techniques that work for some flowers and not for others.
It’s helpful for me to set our standards and stipulations as much as possible before we take on a project like this. I want to have answers for people who ask questions about the product, and I want my team to know what to say, too. It was inevitable that customers of other florists would ask about the service. When they did, I had my reasons lined up.
My reasoning aside: if you wanted to open up the service to other wedding clients, too, there’s no reason you couldn’t! You may be the only person in your area offering this kind of special keepsake! And you may find a nice demand for it.
Drying Process:
We landed on using silica gel. Silica gel is a reusable sand-like desiccant. It is the material in those tiny packages that say “do not eat” that are included with packaged store-bought items. It dries things out by collecting and absorbing moisture from them. We are able to do several rounds of drying before we need to “dry out” our silica for re-use. We use a variety that changes from orange to blue-green when it is saturated. That is our signal to dry it out before we use it again for the next client. To silica gel may be re-dried in pans in an oven.
Supplies:
I’ve been using Wisedry Silica gel. It costs $29.99 per 5lb bag or $46.99 per 8lb bag. You need about 10 lbs of this stuff for a wedding bouquet project.
Other materials:
a shallow, wide airtight bin like these
a spoon or scoop for moving the silica gel onto / over flowers
a shadow box frame (I use these)
glue gun and glue sticks
shipping materials and postage if you are mailing your work to the client
If you are interested in this kind of work I suggest that you try it BEFORE you sell it. Buy one bag of gel and an airtight bin if you don’t have one on hand that you can use and test it out. This will provide you with a sample for work that is otherwise kind of hard to explain AND it will give you a clear sense of the processes so that you can determine how the work can fit into your space/schedule.
For me, this is the perfect kind of work for the cooler months/winter season. It’s an extra sale I can make when wedding clients place their orders, but it’s work that I don’t have to do when we’re in a rush during the wedding season. Bouquet preservation work can help keep designers working during the time of year when they may have fewer assignments to complete. It’s cozy, inside work, and aside from all the time the flowers take drying themselves in the bins, it is otherwise a pretty quick process.
Steps:
Place the silica gel in a low, wide airtight bin.
Collect a duplicate quantity of flowers when you make the fresh bouquet for your client.
Hang dry any flowers that are easily dried that way (baby’s breath, german statice, statice, grasses, etc.)
Collect the “tricky” flowers: dahlias, roses, tulips, cosmos, zinnias, etc.
Layer the duplicate flowers in the airtight bin when they are fresh and use a spoon or scoop to gently cover the flowers and allow some of the gel to fill in the cracks between petal layers.
Allow to dry for several weeks.
Gently remove (I use a serving fork to sift through and locate blooms), gather any flowers that were hung to dry, arrange, and glue down (we use hot glue) your dried flowers in a shadow box frame with a glass or plastic lid.
Spray your flowers with an archival fixative if you like.
If you are shipping your work, package your design carefully within a larger box with lots of padding and label the outside “FRAGILE: Handle with Care” before handing it off to a carrier.
Our Costs and Profits (2022):
Flowers: Cost to me is about $90. I charge $236 per fresh wedding bouquet.
Silica Gel: ~$60 for 1 bouquet (but it may be re-used)
Airtight bin for drying: ~$20
Shadow Box frame: ~$20
Labor: about 2 hours total per bouquet ~$60
Glue gun, glue gun sticks ~.20
Box and packaging for shipping ~$10
Postage ~$20
You also need space to store the bins for a few weeks- until you use the dried flowers.
1st order total cost: ~$280.20
Product price: $525
Profit: ~$244.80
2nd order (re-use bin and silica gel) total cost: ~$200.20
Product price: $525
Profit: ~$324.80
Final notes:
Costs go down with additional purchases of this product when you re-use your silica gel and bins.
I also found that my labor costs went down over time as I grew faster at assembling these. For me, they are sort of like a collage. They take less headspace for me than making fresh flower arrangements.