BTS at The Flower Cottage: Wedding Week!
After sometime more than a year of planning with our couples which includes our initial consultation, creating their proposal, meetings and touch-points, finalizing their designs, ordering their flowers—the wedding week is finally here! When it’s a “wedding week” at The Flower Cottage we know our schedule is going to be all consumed by the upcoming event.
From Tuesday through Friday we’re in full-on production mode so the wedding day (typically Saturdays) runs seamlessly & turns out as perfectly as possible for our deserving clients!
Tuesday
Processing Day
From boxes to buckets, we get our flowers conditioned & ready for design
Processing flowers means we’re getting them prepped and ready for designing!
Our flowers are sourced from local farms to as far as Japan and other parts of the world and often times they are shipped to us on airplanes, so on the day we get our flowers in it is very important to ensure extra care is taken so the flowers will be healthy and beautiful by Saturday’s wedding.
We order everything to arrive Tuesday so we can monitor particular varieties as they bloom, and that way we have a couple days to order new product if we get moldy stems or coloring is off. Processing takes most of the day on Tuesday as we handle each and every stem that comes in.
We remove all of the leaves off of each stem to prevent them from contaminating the water, we remove any bruised or browning petals, we condition certain flowers with hydration product and we cut a fresh end of every stem to allow them to rehydrate after sitting in a box for days or weeks prior to getting to our cottage. After everything is processed we color code our buckets for each event and they either go in the cooler to stay fresh or sit out to allow the blooms to open!
Cooler flowers
greenery, hydrangeas, and other more delicate flowers go into the cooler for the week!
blooming flowers
Roses, peonies, ranunculus, and any flower we want to open to the desired size stays out of the cooler until its just right!
Wednesday
Prepping & Packing
Counting, sorting and planning every last detail
Wednesdays are less hands-on with the blooms so they can be devoted to prepping every last detail and we can focus on designing for floral pieces the rest of the week.
Char our inventory manager continues to pack and prep all of the hard goods and rentals. She starts by pulling everything our designers will be working on that week—vases, compotes, dishes, etc. She makes sure we have enough floral foam, glue, tape, wire and all the supplies we might need the day of the wedding. Once thats all set aside she goes to town cleaning candles, filling votives with tea lights, organizing and labeling everything so we have a seamless setup. It is a very tedious process!
While Char is doing her thing downstairs, we work with Shannon our cottage manager on reviewing our timeline for the wedding day, scheduling crew members for setup and teardown, confirming van rentals, and color coding floor plans.
prepped & ready!
Thursday
Sorting & designing
sorting flowers, designing vase arrangements and bouquets
Thursdays kick off the designing with our free-lance designers! Thanks to our cooler we can start earlier in the week with smaller pieces and they stay fresh & preserved perfectly until the event on Saturday.
We start by pulling the best of the best blooms for the bridal and bridesmaids bouquets! Emma, our intern, continues pulling flowers into labeled buckets for all the boutonnieres, corsages and on-site design work to prevent us from dipping into flowers we need to work with the day of.
Other items we’ll work on would be small budvases or anything designed in a glass vase with water, low centerpieces, or greenery garlands! We try and knock out all we can because Friday is the last day we have at the cottage to finish up the designing and we never want to save too much for the last day.
Friday
design marathon
centerpieces, statement pieces, and install prep
Friday is a marathon of a design day.
By the time we leave the cottage, the work spaces are cleaned, the floors are swept (you’d never suspect the madness that ensued) and we’re often covered in eucalytpus sap and hobbling to our cars after a long day on our feet! They’re long, beautiful days where we wrap up the remaining- often largest- design pieces for the wedding (and consume many treats to get us through).
We create pieces such as oversized high centerpieces, large scale statement pieces, altar arrangements and we also try to get done any install prep like “greening out” arches and chandeliers as best we can ahead of the next day.
The flowers are tucked into the cooler for the night, buckets of leftover blooms are labeled, the clipboards displaying our pack lists and floor plans hang by our load-out shelving and we’re ready for the wedding day!
Our process for the wedding day is so detailed it deserves its own post! Stay tuned for a look inside our process of delivering and setting up the flowers on the big day. We are so happy you are here with us on this journey!