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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: October 4th, 2023

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  • Your resident lemmy wedding florist checking in!

    Cheers to all of you who are excited about the deaths of small businesses just because you…don’t like the way other people get married, lol? Do you think artists should be paid, or not?

    I, too, got married when I was a broke grad student and couldn’t afford the wedding I wanted. We didn’t go in debt for it! In big cities, there are a lot more wealthy people than y’all realize who are happy to pay people like me to make art. Business is down but still fine for us.

    Anyway, what most people don’t realize is that certain wedding vendors have super low overhead costs, so they are mostly paying for labor. Your DJs, wedding planners, and photographers can afford to charge $3k/wedding and still pay themselves. Meanwhile, florists are spending $1-4k at wholesale for a typical wedding, before we even touch your flowers or get any pay for our time. I think we probably have the highest COGs outside of venues. Catering, cakes, and to some extent rental companies are all in the same boat - we have to pay a lot to provide you with the physical goods we show up with, and we don’t make much.

    I know everyone on Reddit and probably Lemmy thinks every wedding vendor is fleecing couples at all times. Or that the price goes up because “wedding.” It doesn’t. The price is what it is because it takes a LOT of labor and materials to create an entire event from scratch. And because it’s seasonal/weird hour/weekend work, we have to pay our freelance teams really well to keep them coming back. (You think I can afford a salaried team year round?? Lol no.) I can’t think of a single colleague who inflates pricing between weddings vs. other kinds of events.

    I only do $10k+ weddings, and you probably think I’m raking it in. But 75-80% of the cost of every wedding I do goes to someone else - paying my team $35/hr, paying local flower farmers fair wages for their products, buying vases or supplies, my web hosting and professional fees, insurance, etc. I still only take home A QUARTER of what my spouse does in a good year. We live in an expensive city, and I could make a lot more money doing something else, but I love what I do.

    I hope this helps y’all understand at least the wedding floral business a bit better. We aren’t getting rich off weddings, there is no wedding tax, and wholesale flowers are expensive AF before we do anything with them. I can’t speak for all vendors, maybe there are unscrupulous ones out there, but most are just small businesses trying to do something we love for a living. And I don’t really understand the online hate when people are in my inbox every day asking me about their wedding date.





  • Our cat will follow us around the house, screaming, until we either sit with him in our lap (human heating pad) or put him in his heated bed but remain near (human security blanket). He’s a sweet cat and has arthritis, so I get it. But sometimes we gotta make dinner, bro.

    Our dog will constantly and shamelessly be nearby when food is present, whether we are cooking, eating, feeding the cat, doesn’t matter. His previous owner gave him human food all the time. He completely deflates when you tell him to go lie down. When we cook, we just let him be in the way, next to the screaming cat 🤷‍♀️