Wedding Flowers ~ Real Vs. Fake and How to Save Some Money
With the prices of weddings continuing to go up, most couples have started to look for ways to reduce their overall expenditures. While there are many very expensive parts to a wedding day, most of which can be cut down, removed, or swapped for a cheaper option, florals are one of the most common areas in which couples try to save money. When you stop to consider the price of these beautiful flower arrangements, bouquets, and decorations it’s really not a surprise why they would be a top item to “modify” to save cash!
The average cost to supply a wedding with flowers is around $2,200. The average outliers can be as low as $500 and up to $3,500 with national outliers ranging from $100 to $10,000! Of course, with flowers you’re quite literally getting what you pay for. Florists carefully curate, grow and arrange flowers into beautiful displays and items for different parts of the wedding day. So, when you pay for flowers, you’re not only paying for the goods but also the services and professional skills of the florist.
What Floral Items are Included in a Typical Wedding?
In a typical wedding you could expect to see:
A Bridal Bouquet
$100-$350
Bridesmaids Bouquets
$50-$110 Per Bouquet
Grooms and Groomsmen Boutonnieres
$10-$30 Per Boutonniere
Centerpiece Arrangements
$50-$600 Per Centerpiece
Flower Packages
$120-$1,800
Ceremonial/Day of Decorative Flower Arrangements
$130-$1800
It’s easy to see why couples choose to seek alternatives or ways to reduce the overall price of their wedding day flowers! On that note, if you’re looking for ways to reduce the cost of flowers on your wedding day, then simply removing a few options from this list may be in your best interest! Truth be told, you could get away with minimal amounts of flowers on your wedding day and save yourself a small fortune! You really only need one of these options and that’s the bridal bouquet. Now, obviously the other floral options do make the wedding day that much more special and beautiful, and if you’d like them all then try and find some other way of reducing the costs. For example, if you know a friend or family member who has floral experience, they may be willing to lend you a helping hand! Another option is to find a florist who’s newer yet produces great work. More than likely their prices will be cheaper than the competition!
Fake Vs. Real Flowers
This is an interesting topic. One of the biggest reasons a couple would lean towards using fake flowers for their weddings is the price. Obviously, they could also lean towards fake flowers for something that’s unique and not naturally grown, or for a flower that’s out of season. But the question of whether or not fake flowers are cheaper than real flowers is convoluted, because the answer is both a yes and a no.
Fake flowers vary in price greatly! Like seriously, some floral arrangements that I saw were far more expensive than what it would cost to use real flowers and yet some sets of fake flowers are far cheaper than what you’d pay for their real-life counterpart. Fake flowers also don’t die as quickly as real flowers, but in some cases, the quality difference is huge and even having dead real flowers could be more appealing than having trashy looking fake ones! I think the best way to answer the question of whether or not to use real or fake flowers depends on a couple of things:
Your end goal for the flowers
Your budget
Are the flowers you want in season
The End Goal
If your end goal for your wedding day flowers is to throw them out after the big day then perhaps you should just stick with some nice, but cheap real options. However, if you plan on keeping your wedding day flowers, the only realistic option is to go fake, or invent some way of perfectly storing, caring and preserving your real flowers (which is more work than it’d be worth). A huge benefit to using fake flowers is that they can be stored and used again for other things. If you want to create a beautiful bouquet to have as a centerpiece for your dining room table, then whip out the fake flowers and get to it!
What’s Your Budget?
Perhaps a better question to ask yourself is how much you are willing to spend on flowers. You see for some it’s a huge deal while to others, the flowers are a bit of an afterthought. If flowers are a huge deal to you then consider spending the money and getting real ones! While they won’t last like a fake copy, they will bring a level of quality that can’t be replicated. While fake flowers have grown to impressive levels of quality through lifelike look and feel, at the end of the day you’ll know they’re fake. Maybe not from a distance, but up-close there’s no contest. Plus, real flowers just look better in photos and your photographer won’t have to find a way around hiding the seams, lines in the plastic stems, or the holes in the silk, thus allowing so much more freedom when photographing your flowers.
If flowers aren’t a big deal to you then you have two options. Either spring for some cheap fakes that will suffice to fill the need or contact your local florists and ask if they have any recommendations on good, cheap wedding flowers and arrangements. While the quality of cheap fakes will probably never come close to the cheap options you have for real flowers, they can save you a sizable chunk of change.
Are Your Selected Flowers Available?
Another huge argument for going with fake flowers is that you can find most breeds of flowers in a fake form, whereas if they aren’t in season, the real counterpart may be hugely overpriced or simply not available at all! This could be a potentially huge problem that could either cost you a small fortune on top of the small fortune that you’re already paying for flowers, or you could have to rework your floral choices and designs. This is a huge benefit of using fake flowers. They are always in season, as long as someone has made them!
A great way to save yourself heartache if you really want real flowers but they’re not in season is to mix some real and fake options together to create the selection you want! If your bouquet is mostly in season, but missing one or two varieties, perhaps intermix some high-quality silk knockoffs in to replace the missing flowers!
At the end of the day, there’s not really a right or wrong choice. It’s up to each individual couple to decide how much the flowers are worth to them. I’m certainly not saying that fake flowers are bad, but in comparison to their real counterparts, they simply don’t hold the same beauty! But if you’re on a tight budget fake flowers may be the way for you to go. Perhaps you use fake flowers for the items that are of less importance on the wedding day, like the centerpieces and decor, and then you spend a little more and buy some real, beautiful bouquets and boutonnieres as they will show up in more photos than the rest. The choice is yours and you have a large number of choices to choose from!
Looking for a Photographer who can help you with your wedding every step of the way?
