Why Are Premium Flowers So Expensive?
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I have wondered why premium flower arrangements cost so much – Over the past 10 years or so the styles have shrunk in size but the prices have soared. For a while there, I was passing the higher costs off to wage pressure, frictional business costs like local employee taxes & all the various insurances small businesses have to carry now but that still did not give me a satisfactory explanation.
I work with many of our San Francisco florists for my personal needs. They are all so talented, smart and have great integrity and style – but the price for a vase of peonies with accent flowers that still fit on a coffee table was $250 – albeit breathtakingly gorgeous – I would have thought the costs more like $150. On another occasion I asked for a silver urn I have to be filled with just white French Tulips – those are the ones that are large headed and long stems (as opposed to Dutch tulips which are smaller all around and thus less expensive). The urn takes about 50-60 tulips and it cost $400! What’s going on!
I decided to do an experiment – I would do it all myself.
I went early to the flower market and bought 6 bunches which have 10 stems each of whatever the market had that looked fresh and pretty – I walked around and decided to buy at Brannon Street wholesalers. They had a huge selection of French Tulips from Parrot Tulips and bi-colored ones with frilly edges, peony tulips, – the whole range of long stem tulips that are so available in mid-April.
Two hours later I was back home. I filled a bucket with water and proceeded to ‘clean’ the tulips – remove all the excess leaves, wash any residual dirt away, re-cut the stems and plop them in water to for a couple hours or so for a good drink. Well that took almost an hour – I was shocked not only at how much time it took but the waste which amounted to about 3 garbage bags of excess leaves to haul to the recycle can.
Point being from start to finish, this arrangement took 31/2 hours of dedicated work for ONE arrangement. It was not too big – the right size to sit on a medium size console table. When I added up all the costs for me as opposed to the florist there was not any outrageous price gouging going on. In fact $400 is a very fair price! If you included over- head in the analysis (rents and amortized equipment costs like van, billing , etc – it all adds up.
With further thought it occurred to me that the prevailing style at the high end that has evolved from open loose gardeny arrangements so prevalent in the 80’s with lots of natural greenery and maybe 15 choice blooms or even an open style with little greenery to a style now that masses one or 2 types of flowers with minimal to no greenery, in a tight clustered style. So the style is inherently expensive because so many more flowers are being used. And there we go back to extra stem count which involves hauling more product around from the market ie more trips from the cash counter to the car, more cleaning – and thus we have a very lush look.
Whenever I take an order from someone who is new to us, I explain to them – for an arrangement of $100 or less you can take $25-$30 right off the top for the vase (Plain clear glass that we like to call utility vases in floral-speak, the card, the ribbon, getting the arrangement ready for transport. Speaking of which, in many climates, you can’t just take it out into freezing cold or the sweltering summer heat so that requires additional wrapping and ribbons as well as phone calls to set up delivery. So taking the $100 price point (exclusive of tax and delivery charges) and you have $70 to buy the flowers and execute the design! In off season peonies can retail at $16 a stem and French Tulips $8-10 so there isn’t a lot of budget room. And just like any design business whether it be clothes or food even in flowers, the more renown the designer, (ie the fancier the label – think Armani vs. Ann Taylor) or in flowers think Preston Bailey vs New York’s
What conclusions can we draw? Flowers are a luxury item now – You can buy the left over’s at the grocery store but they aren’t as beautiful nor are they as long lasting – usually the grocery store buys what florists have not bought and thus it is older. When dealing with a perishable product, fresh is a crucial standard that sets the best florists apart form the other retailers of flowers. Yes you can get lucky at the grocery store from time to time, but usually it is just convenient and not really less expensive because the quality just isn’t there. I would rather just call a local florist and ask them to do $100 or whatever the budget is – $50 even of wrapped flowers straight from the flower market and I will do all the work: the cleaning, the cutting, the arranging – my arrangements are not as artful as theirs, but it is affordable and I have a better product than the grocery stores. The real exception to this is when a Whole Foods or Trader Joes is selling peonies or whatever below their costs – this does happen – they use it as a loss leader from time to time and I am not really sure why because it confuses the customer. One of these days I will call up their buyer and ask them why they do that – so until next time.
