It is inevitable in event floral design, whether in the studio or on site, to have some kind of unexpected surprise, something go awry, or something go completely wrong (as far as your plan was concerned) at some point. The saying "to make mistakes is to be human" could also be "to face mistakes is to be a florist." Making mistakes or moving through unexpected challenges and obstacles, however truly uncomfortable at the time (and sometimes for a while after), is how we learn and get better at what we do.
Still, what is one to do when things go awry? I received a DM recently from a florist asking if she could share a disastrous wedding experience with me and get some advice. I told her that I would be happy to coach her through it by way of this blog post, addressing what happened and giving my advice so that she (and you too!) could benefit from the support.
It happens to the best of us and to all of us. Vessels topple in the transport van. Flowers that you needed for the ceremony installation spoil. Somehow there are more tables than there were on the floor chart. The timeline was wrong. The list goes on. Things do go wrong, and you are not alone in experiencing them, nor are you completely SOL when they happen, so welcome to my tips and best advice for how to recover in those challenging and sometimes disastrous-feeling times.
WHEN THINGS DON’T GO AS PLANNED
My first and biggest tip for you to remember is that, for anything we do or create or deliver, there is always a Plan B. And when that fails, there is also always a Plan C. And a Plan D. And E, and so on until the solution is found. These aren't pre-planned plans either. Each represents more of a willingness to keep considering other options and a commitment to get curious and think outside the box so that the magic gets made and the event is a success.
Creativity isn't just being able to make something beautiful; it's also being able to think on your feet and find other options, especially when what you planned didn't pan out. Just practicing this mindset helped me relax and feel much more comfortable with the inevitable moment of surprise and the ensuing creative scramble to get it sorted. We can always come up with another plan of action.
WHEN YOU HAVEN’T RECEIVED A TIMELINE AND IT’S EVENT WEEK
The timeline is everything on event day. If the coordinator does not provide one, reach out a few days prior to the event and ask for one. They may have so many parts they are juggling that they forgot to cc you on the email, or any number of possible mishaps. Make sure you take it upon yourself to ask for an event day timeline from the coordinators a few days before the event. If you don’t hear back, reach out again. Be professional, respectful, and persistent. The timeline is essential for you to know when personals are to be delivered, when to have ceremony set, when detail shots are being taken, when to have cocktail and reception set, and when to return to strike (tear down).
If you have clients who have opted to not hire a coordinator, I suggest you encourage them to hire one. If they won’t then consider charging an add-on service to help prepare the timeline. You can also get in touch with the photographer, as they will know when the ceremony and receptions are going to begin, plus they will know when they are taking first look, bridal party, and detail shots, which will help you have everything in place for each area before those shots are taken. Never go into an event day blind.
WHEN YOU ARRIVE TO STRIKE (TEAR DOWN) AND WEREN’T PREPARED
Strike is mayhem. Guests are often drunk and having the time of their lives, while vendors dart around like ninjas trying to pack up equipment, rentals, and hard goods within the venue’s allotted time without disturbing the tail end of the party.
My first suggestion is to never do strike alone. Always have help with you, and ideally, as your business grows, hire this task out completely so you can rest and relax after a huge event production week.
My next tip is that the very first thing I always do when we arrive to strike is go straight to the reception and blow out all of the candles. Nobody else is going to do this for you, and you need those hurricanes or glass taper candle chimneys to have time to cool. You also want candle wax to cool before you pack up to minimize the mess candles already make for your cleanup process back in the studio. Consider packing a pair of gloves in your strike kit so you don’t burn your hands or get them covered in melted wax or soot too! Blow out all candles first, and return to pack them up later, after you’ve taken care of other areas of tear down and pack up.
As one more tip here, prior to the event, make sure you find out from the wedding coordinator, or the venue coordinator, what time the event ends and what time vendors can return to strike. You also want to know what time you need to be finished cleaning up, as some venues require you to be out by a certain time. Knowing that will help you know how many teammates to bring along (or send) to be able to tear down and pack up with more ease and within the allotted time.
WHEN FREELANCERS FLAKE OUT OR HAVE TO CANCEL
This is always hard. It is inherently chaotic and a leap of faith every time you hire on your freelance staff for an event, as they are not employees of your business and are operating as independent contractors who can cancel on you without any real obligations. That said, freelancers should know (and if they don’t, they’ll soon learn) that if they do flake, they will not be asked back, which means they will have a harder time getting work. This is why referrals are wonderful to have when you are reaching out to or interviewing potential floral freelancers. Try to get a sense of how reliable they are, along with their experience level, from people they’ve worked for before.
For the most part, floral freelancers are incredible — kind-hearted, talented human beings who share a love for designing with flowers, who understand that the work of a florist is more lugging and schlepping than making pretty things with flowers, that we work in the hot sun and sometimes harsh wind or weird weather, and that the job isn’t really over until it’s finished. I have met some of the most inspiring, badass friends through freelancing, and I try to make sure they feel seen, well paid, and appreciated for the hard work they do. Make sure you pay your freelancers well, and look after them like your own team. Bring waters and snacks for everyone when they work for you. This warmth and thoughtfulness goes a long way.
Sometimes it cannot be helped if a personal emergency comes up, and you may be down a teammate or two on event day. If this happens, lean on your team to help find a replacement. Ask them to text or call friends and fellow freelancers they know to see if anyone is free to help out that day. I’ve been amazed on multiple occasions by my team coming up with replacement freelancers day-of when someone canceled on us.
As a note, remember that some work does not require a trained or experienced florist — you just need someone to help you load in and out at the very least, and that can be a family member, a neighbor, or someone’s friend of a friend. Don’t panic. Just do your best.
WHEN YOU HAVE DOUBLE-HEADER WEEKENDS & DOUBLE-BOOKED YOURSELF
Never underestimate the incredible challenge of having two events in one weekend. Unless you are years, maybe decades, into your event floral design work, or unless you have a big and reliable team that you can split to allow one group to head up one of the events while you head up the other, my advice is simply to not do it.
Double-booked weekends are so stressful. Unless you downright need the cash to pay rent this month, just say “no” if you get another inquiry on a weekend you’ve already booked. You will do a better job with the booking you have, get better photographs from it to share and advertise for future bookings, and get better reviews from your clients, which also helps with future bookings.
You also never know what better opportunities and better bookings are coming your way that will be better for you and for your business than squeezing two in at the same time. Keep in mind that you have two entire flower recipes, orders, and events to create, and there is no guarantee that any flowers from one can overlap with the other.
Additionally, by not double-booking yourself,, you will feel a lot better, and that should never be overlooked. The health of your body, your mental health, and your emotional wellbeing matter. When I teach about sustainable floristry, I teach techniques for reducing our carbon footprint and applying earth-conscious practices, and I also teach making this work sustainable for yourself. The saddest thing is hearing about broken, burnt-out florists who lost the love of what they do in doing it in a way that took too much from them. Let’s change that story.
If you have to book more than one big event on the same weekend, make sure you are charging enough to have the extra teammates to help execute it. Keep in mind what we talked about before too, that sometimes freelancers drop out. It can be helpful to hire on one extra person just in case. The money you spend on them will be well worth your sense of ease and the feelings of calmness and support you will have during what is always a harrowing and demanding adventure to pull off.
While we’re on this subject, make sure you charge a separate line item for “Labor and Installation” on your proposals. I suggest this be 20-25% of your overall subtotal. That way you have a separate and dedicated budget for the hours you can pay and the number of teammates you can have for each wedding or event. Learn more in the Poetry of Flowers Membership or in my Floristry Business collection.
WHEN YOU’RE FEELING LIKE A FAILURE OR GUILTY FOR HOW THINGS WENT
Some things are out of your control. Some things are just hard learning lessons. Sometimes something goes wrong, and it feels like the end of the world, but the clients are so happy anyway. Sometimes it feels like everything was perfect, but a client, or a client’s parent, is not happy. Whatever it is, when it happens, have grace.
Do your best to make amends, do the best you can to fulfill your job as agreed upon in your contract, and have boundaries if you know something is going outside of your agreement. And if you’re feeling down or guilty after a mistake or mishap, be kind to yourself. Give yourself grace. We can’t learn anything if we don’t try, and we can’t grow if we don’t take a chance and try our best to do something new. Journaling, confiding in someone close to you, and therapy are three helpful resources too. You’ll get through this too! And you’ll be all the wiser.
WHEN YOU ACCIDENTALLY LOSE YOUR COOL
The florist who reached out to me for advice after a disastrous wedding experience shared with me that she accidentally lost her cool. She called the coordinator and “left a very angry voicemail at 2am” as she was leaving the venue after strike. This is a tough one because anytime we lose our cool and express our anger directly toward someone else, remorse follows.
If this happens to you, my advice is to definitely reach out within a day or two, sincerely apologize, and try to make amends. Maybe let them know you were under a lot of stress, but that you also know that leaving them a message in that state was not the right thing to do. If you take responsibility for your part in any situation, and acknowledge to someone else that you were in the wrong and that you apologize for that, then that is the best you can do.
Then, be understanding and forgiving with yourself. Maybe this was a gift in the long run, showing you that you’re really angry or stressed inside and need some space or support to work it out. Definitely find safe and healthy ways to process and release that frustrated energy, which you can do any number of ways, including through creativity, journaling, exercise, therapy, breathwork, and mindfulness. It is human to feel anger, so don’t be hard on yourself. Just make yourself a promise to take ten deep breaths and sleep on it before you make any calls or send any texts. We are much better communicators when we are out of fight-or-flight mode and back in a parasympathetic state.
WHEN A CLIENT VIOLATES YOUR EXCLUSIVITY CLAUSE
I have in my contract a clause that requires the client to agree that my company will be the only vendor providing flowers and floral design for their event. This is at its root a liability issue as well as a measure to protect and uphold the integrity of my brand and the work we deliver. If someone else brings floral arrangements (a) it looks incoherent, (b) it misrepresents my brand because the arrangements are not work from my business, and (c) if something went wrong with those arrangements, it could be misconstrued that my company had something to do with them when we did not.
In short, it’s best to make sure that you are the only florist on the event, but even with this clause and agreement, there can be times when some family member of the client takes it upon themselves to bring some special arrangements or flowers for some special addition. Their hearts are in the right place, and to be fair, family members do not know, necessarily, about the exclusivity clause, as the client is responsible for that. I
f this happens, do your best to politely let the person know that this is in violation of your contract with the client and might compromise the overall cohesiveness of the event style. If they insist, make sure it’s a contained and minimal display, and let the photographer know to not include this in the professional photography of the event.
I have only had this happen only once, and early on in my floral career. It was a culturally involved issue having to do with a Persian sofreh, which is a special display for the couple at the ceremony that my clients had not mentioned to me. If you have a Persian wedding, be sure to go over this display with your clients to make sure that they and your guests know that you will be providing flowers for all aspects of the wedding, including the display.
WHEN YOU RUN OUT OF PRODUCT OR DON’T HAVE ENOUGH
I had a wedding once early on where there were more reception long tables in the venue than there were on the floor charts. We didn’t have enough mixed greenery for the garland runners we were creating, so I had to send my team out to the park area near the venue to forage. This is not ideal, to say the least, but it can be done! Never forage from private property, and never forage anything rare or valuable. Go for abundant things growing in weedy, native-plant areas and no-man’s-land areas.
Luckily I had enough blooms to pepper into our mixed foraged garlands, and the clients never knew and were thrilled with everything, but this experience taught me two things: (1) always buy a bit more product than you need just in case, always, and (2) florists are our own greatest critics, while clients are expecting to be delighted and are often floored by what we create.
My other piece of advice here is to plan ahead and have a flower market or two of any kind (wholesale market, grocery store, corner store, etc.) in mind that you know will be open on your event day so that if you absolutely need more bunches of stock or roses or whatever, you have somewhere in mind where you can send one of your freelancers for emergency extras.
WHEN EVERYTHING IS MELTING ON A HOT DAY
Assign someone on your team to “sun patrol” and make sure they move buckets of flowers out of the sun when the light inevitably shifts from when you arrived to deep into your installation process.
Bring a pop-up canopy with you in your event-day supplies so you can create shade for flowers if you’re doing an installation in an open sunny space.
Ask the venue coordinator if there is any indoor space that is not being used where you could keep flowers inside and out of the sun and heat. Often there will be a building for catering and other event services with a room or a corner of a room that will provide delicate flowers a more climate-controlled waiting room than being outside.
Otherwise, always order a bit more than you need with your flowers. Work this into your budget as a normal markup for margin of loss. We work with a perishable product, and some of it will inevitably break or spoil before it can be used. Plan accordingly!
WHEN THE VENUE IS HUGE AND SPRAWLING WITH TERRIBLE ACCESS
Do your best to plan ahead. Get a dolly or cart to help move hard goods and flower buckets around the venue. Make sure you get a sense of the venue before event day so you can have an extra helper on hand. Make sure you know from the coordinator ahead of time what time you and your team can load in. Try to get there as early as you are allowed so you don’t have to rush if the loading dock is hectic or precarious, which it often is!
WHEN YOUR FELLOW VENDOR ASKS FOR “EXTRA LOOSE BLOOMS”
Instead of feeling your blood boil when you are asked by a wedding planner or a photographer for “loose blooms,” — which, I know, is kind of understandable when you have so much going on and a plan for all of the flowers you bought and hauled here — try to embrace it. Expect it. Come prepared for it. Instead of thinking well-meaning but unaware vendors are asking you for free materials, plan it into your stem counts so that you can respond from a place of abundance, knowing that the blooms you provide were part of the order anyway.
Besides, providing loose blooms will help make the flatlay photos of personal details and the invitation suite beautiful, and they will be part of your event getting published (not to mention contributing to your clients getting the best experience possible when they receive their wedding photos) when come prepared and ready to hand over a few of those fabled “loose blooms.” As soon as I decided to treat this as part of my job, I didn’t mind it one bit. While the client doesn’t ask for loose blooms, and they aren’t charged for it directly, your fellow vendors who refer you and share photos and publications with you (which build your community and generate future business) do, and that is a great reason to provide them.
WHEN EVERYTHING TOPPLES OVER DURING TRANSPORT
This too has happened to me, and in the moment, it is devastating. However, traffic is unavoidable, and flowers in transit are precarious, even when you have honed and perfected your transport systems. My advice is to do what I did: Pull over, and go to your nearest gas station, where hopefully you can park in the shade of the building. Buy a large water bottle or two, and gently unload your vessels, right them, re-water them, and get back in the car so you can make it to your venue. If flowers can drink, they’ll stay fresh. Then you and your team can work on edits and fixes once you arrive and unload at the venue. Take it in these two steps, like triage. Stop the bleed, fix things up so they stay alive, get to the venue, and make everything look good again once you’re there.
Two more small tips here: (1) Pad your timeline, as in leave earlier than you need to, so you can drive slowly and also accommodate this kind of unforeseen hitch; and (2) Always buy and bring along more flowers than you need. You don’t have to massively over-buy, but you do want to have that markup for margin of loss. And make sure you charge enough for your floral designs to cover this as part of the deliverables. Having extras for fixes and replacements is absolutely part of the work required to deliver fresh, beautiful floral designs.
WHEN YOU CAN’T SLEEP AFTER AN EVENT
Many of my florist friends have described that feeling of being exhausted but wired after events, and I’ve felt it many times too. All you want to do is take a hot shower and fall in a heap in your cozy bed, but your mind won’t stop racing, and you are glued to your phone looking at photos and texting your team to send you photos they got, or you’re aimlessly scrolling instagram looking for nothing but not wanting to let the day go.
It’s ok. This isn’t fun, but it is normal. There is such a huge output of adrenaline all week and especially all day with events that it’s hard to come out of it. If you can, try to turn off and put away your phone. Take a shower, and turn the lights down low so the lighting is peaceful. Put on soft, soothing music. Have a cup of herbal tea. Put your feet up the wall. Maybe watch a movie, but not a thriller — something low-key and ideally boring so it makes you sleepy.
Have some magnesium. Do some deep, slow breathing. Lay in bed with the lights off and just do a body scan, slowly relaxing each part of your body from the tips of your toes to the crown of your head. Eventually, you will fall asleep, and until then, at least you are relaxing. Just allowing yourself to relax and trusting that sleep will come is often all you need to do.
So, have you faced any of these hiccups, hurdles, or horrors? Any others you’ve faced that I didn’t include here? Send me any you want me to speak to or give advice about, and I’ll add them to this or a next post. And if you want to learn more, get support directly, check out Poetry of Flowers and also my Mentorships. There is a lot of support and guidance for you here. Happy flowering adventures! It’s all part of it, and you don’t have to go any of it alone.
Remember, it is more likely than not that some things went wrong while others actually went great, even though it can feel like everything was a total disaster. Take a few deep breaths. Look around. Delegate and ask for help from your team, and keep an even keel. When you are calm, you can think, and when you can think, you can come up with creative solutions to unexpected problems and challenges.
Here for you and cheering you on!
XX
Cover image by Vanessa Rose Photography.
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