I was sixteen years old, bagging groceries and then pushing carts in a Vons parking lot in the Central California heat, when the store manager rushed over to tell me I’m needed in the floral department for Valentine’s Day. I said yes mostly because it beat the parking lot and touching people’s reusable bags. I had no idea what I was doing. The department was a hot mess of buckets and wrapping paper and people who needed roses like their lives depended on it, and somehow in the middle of all of that I just got it. The arranging, the color combinations, the way a few stems could completely change how something felt. I was hooked before the shift was over.
I spent the next two and a half years working that floral department. I loved it. But looking back now, what I actually fell in love with wasn’t floristry. It was design. And it took me a long time, multiple career pivots, a pandemic layoff, and a whole business later to understand that those are two very different things.
Here’s what I mean.
A florist and a floral designer are not the same thing
A florist works from recipes and copy-paste framework. I mean that literally. There are standard arrangements, proven formulas, catalog designs that can be executed consistently and efficiently across dozens of orders. You ask for a centerpiece in blush and white, you get a centerpiece in blush and white. The system is reliable. The output is predictable. And for a lot of situations, that is exactly what you need.
Retail florists are genuinely impressive at what they do. The volume, the consistency, the speed, the ability to move through orders without stopping to ask twenty questions about your personality and your grandmother’s energy and what your favorite travel memory is. That skill is real and it serves a real purpose.
But a recipe is a recipe. It doesn’t shift because your venue has a specific architectural feeling. It doesn’t change because you’re the kind of person who wears deep jewel tones and nothing about you is blush and white. It produces something correct. Not necessarily something yours.
What gives it away the moment you walk in
I can tell within about thirty seconds of walking into an event whether the florals were designed or just placed. And it’s not about how expensive they look. It’s about whether there’s intention behind them.
Recipe work has a specific feeling. It’s babies breath and leather leaf and roses popped into a polka dot formation across an arrangement…basic example, but you get the gist. Flowers placed symmetrically, evenly spaced, same height, same density throughout. No depth. No visual movement. Nothing reaching or draping or growing the way something alive actually grows. It’s flat. And it’s not the florist’s fault, that’s genuinely what the recipe calls for.
The Floral varieties give it away too. You’ll see alstroemeria and carnations as filler, very generic greenery, a handful of roses. Standard colors rather than a curated palette. And that’s the thing about color that most people don’t realize until they’ve seen it done both ways. If you tell a recipe florist you want yellow and purple, you’re going to get bright yellow and whatever purple came in that week. If you tell a floral designer you want yellow and purple, they’re going to source buttercream yellows and soft creams that transition into the purples, and then find blooms that carry both colors naturally so the whole arrangement feels like it grew from the same place. That’s a curated color story. Those are two entirely different results even though the brief was the same.
Design work looks like something is happening. Some stems lower, some higher. Things reaching outward, things tucked in close. Negative space used on purpose. Premium blooms you’re not going to find at the grocery store, not because we’re being fancy for the sake of it, but because those blooms have variation in their petals, depth of hue, a quality that reads differently in person and in photos. The whole arrangement has a point of view.
What I actually do (and why it starts way before the flowers)
A floral designer starts from a completely different place. The flowers aren’t the product. They’re the medium.
Think about a painter and a house painter. Both use paint. Both are skilled. But one is executing a job and one is creating something that didn’t exist before. The flowers I work with are my medium, the way clay is a sculptor’s medium or fabric is a fashion designer’s. What I’m actually building is atmosphere. An experience. Something that reflects something true about the people in the room on one of the most significant days of their lives.
When I take on a wedding, I’m not opening a catalog. I’m starting from scratch every single time. I’m thinking about who this couple is, how they move through the world, what their guests are going to feel when they walk in. I’m thinking about the venue’s architecture and the quality of light at that hour and the flow from ceremony to cocktail hour to reception. I’m thinking about composition and negative space and color theory and how a design reads from across a room versus right up close at the table.
That process started for me back in that Vons floral department, even if I didn’t have words for it yet. I wasn’t filling orders. I was noticing what made one arrangement feel alive and another feel flat. I was paying attention to what made people stop and actually look.
The thing is, I didn’t get a lot of breathing room to design at Vons. There were catalog requirements, corporate metrics, a specific number of arrangements that had to match the standard recipe exactly. But I’d sneak in longer stems when my boss wasn’t looking. I’d do asymmetrical spacing instead of the polka dot approach. I learned which regular customers liked something a little different and I’d make them something that wasn’t in the catalog, something I got to actually play with. I even would take the plant section decor, you know when you see the plants decked out in butterflies, birds, trinkets, bows, etc? Yeah I would take those decor items and incorporate them into arrangements, I’d hot glue a butterflies to rose stems, I’d dangle decorative strands of jewels across the designs, I’d add bows and glitter and whatever else I wanted to just spice something up. Small things. But I was always looking for the loophole, the little pocket of space where I was allowed to try something, where the rules had enough give that I could push them just slightly without the whole system coming down on me.
I still do that. Just with a lot more room to breathe now.
How to know which one you’re talking to
Here’s where it gets practical. Pricing is actually one of the first signals, though not in the way most people think. A floral designer might quote $250 for a medium sized, lush table arrangement scaled properly for a 72” round table. A recipe florist might quote $150 for the same size. The instinct is to think the cheaper one is the better deal. But what you’re getting at $150 is a different thing entirely. Cost-efficient flowers, standard greenery, a formula that gets filled. What you’re getting at $250 is sourced product, intentional structure, a design that was thought about before a single stem was cut.
Cheaper is not always a red flag. It’s a flag that tells you what kind of work you’re buying. Know which one you actually want before you decide based on price.
Beyond pricing, here’s what to look for:
Do they offer a mood board, a color palette, or inspiration images before anything gets built? A floral designer is going to show you a visual direction before the wedding. If someone can’t give you even a general sense of what they’re seeing, that’s worth paying attention to.
Can they repeat your vision back to you? If you describe what you’re looking for and they can’t reflect it back with any specificity, including the feeling, the flow, the movement you’re after, that’s a sign they’re listening for an order rather than listening for a concept.
What does their portfolio actually look like? If every arrangement is the same shape and the same structure and it all kind of looks like it came from the same place, that’s consistent, which is genuinely great if that’s the style you want. But if you’re looking for something design-driven and artful and specific to you, you want to see range. Unique vessels. Premium blooms you wouldn’t find at the grocery store. Designs that look like they were made for a specific person in a specific space, not pulled from a catalog and placed.
The couples I work best with come in already knowing they want something that belongs to them. They’re not shopping on price. They’re shopping on trust and vision and the feeling they get when they look at someone’s work and think yes, that. If that’s you, you’re probably not looking for a florist. You’re looking for a designer.
And now you know the difference.
If you’re looking for someone to copy-paste a simple, generic vibe… there are a lot of talented florists in Arizona who will do that beautifully. If you’re looking for someone to help you figure out what your vision actually is and then build something around it that you couldn’t have imagined on your own, let’s talk.
Leave a Reply