Wedding Planning: What Makes Our Proposals Special?

We create more than flowers at Carolina Flowers — we also create really excellent and detailed plans. We plan every item in detail, and for every wedding order, we create recipes and workflows to create your flowers on time in excellent form. Most of our customers never see the planning behind the scenes, so I thought I'd give you a little peek into the process. In a word, it is paperwork, but it's also a window into the level of seriousness we bring to everything we do!

Each full-service wedding begins with a proposal that captures the schedule and flow of the day. We also create a custom color palette and notes about the general feeling our client's hope to impart to their guests. Each item within the proposal includes a written description, a price and photos. We use as many photos of our past work as we possibly can, and we add the client's inspiration photos. Our proposals are so much more than a mood board – we write a book about your event! One of our client proposals from last weekend was 36 pages long.

OK, I know what some of you are thinking. Thirty-six pages sounds like way too many pages! And for some clients, it is. Many proposals are half that size. The 36-page client had a very specific vision with lots of notes and images, including images of what she didn't want, and we worked hard to capture all that complexity to make something perfect for her!

Our proposals help clients decide between multiple options. We can lay out different styles and sizes to help distinguish what a particular style or volume of flowers looks like. Most clients find this super helpful in narrowing down their choices. For example, there's a gazebo at The Farm in Candler, where we work often. Most clients need to see what we've done there in the past before deciding what works well for them, so a proposal can really help them visualize. AI also helps us fill in the gaps a little bit. We're always super careful to use AI judiciously. Usually, we will use photos of our own work and expand or shrink our designs. We don't want AI to do floral design — it's really bad at it and often invents flowers that don't exist.

Here's an example of how we use AI for good. The first photo, left, shows a 100% real project we created at the gazebo. In the second photo, right, we used AI photo editing to expand the size of the decoration for a larger vision. However, all the photographs are photographs of real flowers that we made, and if you look closely, you can see seams and resolution issues that are hallmarks of this type of editing, but it gives a vision that is close enough! Without any Dr. Seuss-like flower inventions from the mysterious circuit boards of AI.

After a client has booked with us (via a contract and initial payment), they can still make changes to their plan. Most plans finalize 6-8 weeks prior to the wedding as all the guest counts and last-minute details come together.

Once a floral plan is final, usually 4 weeks before a wedding, we begin the next phase! Each item gets a recipe so we know exactly how many flowers we need to create the client's vision! No late-night runs to the flower field to harvest more. We like to have everything we need in the studio when we need it! Planning is important. Flower recipes are just like kitchen recipes. We keep track of exactly how much we need of each ingredient, and we compile all the ingredients into a giant harvest list so we can make sure our farm is producing the right amount. And if we need extra, these recipes tell us how much to order from other farms.

During wedding prep week, our team references the proposal as they make each item. Customizations are really easy to see, so if you need a memorial arrangement that's a different color from the rest of the wedding, we can do that!

On wedding day, the proposal helps us place all the flowers exactly where our clients want them. Plus, the proposal often records back up plans for rain and other unforeseeable conditions so we don't have to bother the client on the day of their event. It's very handy!

So that's a little look behind the curtain. We really think through everything we make, whether it's a full-service wedding, an a la carte order or a daily delivery. I hope our care and intentionality shows in every order!