Your wedding is on Saturday. On our end, we’ve been working on it since Monday. Here’s what that week actually looks like.
Megan | Phoenix, AZ Florist | Fleur de Vie Studio
While you’re doing final dress fittings and sending rehearsal dinner reminders and trying to remember if you confirmed the shuttle situation, something else is happening on our end.
Your wedding week has already started.
Most couples never see this part. But I think it’s worth pulling back the curtain a little because understanding what actually goes into the week changes how you think about what you’re investing in. It’s not a Saturday. It was never just a Saturday.
Monday or Tuesday — the sourcing run and rentals prep
This is where the week starts for us. Candle packages get assembled. Rentals get pulled and organized and prepped. Flowers get picked up. I’m at the wholesaler in person, eyes on everything, hands on the product before anything gets committed.
For most events I’ve already placed orders ahead of time but I still show up myself for anything complex or color sensitive. Because there’s a difference between trusting a pre-order and actually standing in front of the product and making sure it’s right. Certain varieties I won’t commit to until I can see them. Certain color palettes are too specific to leave to chance.
I’m also looking for whatever came in locally that week. Arizona farmers bring novelty blooms into the wholesale market that you can’t pre-order because they only exist when they exist. You have to be there. Some of the most interesting things that have ended up in my designs came from being present at the right moment on a Monday morning.
I pull extra on anything that needs a backup. Flowers are living things and sometimes a stem just doesn’t make it. Having coverage means your design doesn’t have a hole in it on Saturday.
Wednesday through Friday — the studio days
This is the part nobody pictures when they think about floral design. The part that is genuinely a lot of physical, skilled, detail-oriented work that happens entirely before anything looks beautiful.
Processing comes first. Every stem gets cut at an angle, stripped of any foliage that would sit below the waterline or is generally unnecessary, sorted into the right buckets at the right temperature. Certain varieties get their own situation, their own bucket, their own space, because they don’t play well with others or they need specific conditions to open correctly. Some flowers need a warm hydration bath to recover from transit. Yes this is a real thing. Yes it works. No I will not apologize for how much I love watching a sad orchid perk back up after a good soak in their diva bath.
Then there’s the opening management. Some flowers need to be kept cool to slow their bloom so they peak on Saturday instead of Thursday. Some need warmth to coax them open faster. Getting this wrong means your flowers are either still tight and closed on your wedding day or they peaked two days ago and now we’re working with something past its prime. Neither is acceptable. The timing management is its own full time job across the middle of the week.
Design work happens Thursday and Friday. Arrangements get built, vessels get filled, everything gets checked and adjusted and checked again. The studio starts to look like your wedding before your wedding exists anywhere except on paper.
By Friday night your design is mostly alive and living in my cooler waiting for Saturday.
Saturday — the day you see
You see Saturday. We’ve been living in your wedding since Monday.
We load everything carefully early morning, packed and protected for transport, and head to your venue. From there it’s a sprint that looks effortless from the outside because that’s exactly what it’s supposed to look like.
The venue gives us a working window and that window doesn’t flex. Shorter window means more team members, more hands, faster execution. We’re often working alongside rentals and catering and lighting and whoever else is setting up, everyone in their lane, everyone moving toward the same final moment.
Ceremony gets done first because guests arrive there first. Then we move to reception. If we’re repurposing ceremony elements during cocktail hour there’s a team already at the reception space starting while another team breaks down and moves what we built earlier. It’s coordinated in a way that feels like chaos from the inside and looks invisible from the outside.
And then your guests walk in. And it just looks like it was always supposed to be exactly that way.
After you leave
You go to your honeymoon. We go back to the studio.
The next day is cleanup. Wax melted out of two hundred candle vessels. Buckets sanitized. Rentals sorted and wrapped and put back. Inventory reorganized. The studio reset back to baseline so we can start the whole thing again for next weekend.
It’s unglamorous and it takes hours and I usually have an audiobook going just to survive it. But it’s part of the job and it matters because the next client deserves the same level of care and organization that you got.
One wedding is a full week of our lives. The flowers are just the part you see.
If you want a team that shows up fully for your entire week not just your Saturday, let’s talk.
Want to work together? Let’s connect.
Want to see more of the pretty things? Follow me on the gram!
Typically and ideally they get to place an order no later than 3-4 weeks prior to the event, so the flowers can arrive one to two weeks before the event depending on the varieties and their bloom timeline. Some specialty flowers need two weeks to open to the right stage. More delicate varieties may only come in a day or two before because their lifespan is that short.
Processing and designing typically happens Wednesday through Friday for a Saturday wedding. A full design day can run eight to twelve hours depending on the scope of the event. Larger events with installations may require multiple full days.
Cutting stems at an angle, stripping foliage below the waterline, sorting into temperature appropriate buckets, monitoring bloom stage, giving certain varieties hydration baths, and managing which flowers can and cannot be stored together.
In a temperature controlled cooler at the right humidity level. Florists manage the temperature to slow or encourage blooming depending on the variety and how far out the event is.
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