Weddingbee Blog

I’ll be honest with you, hive: I was extremely nervous about ordering wholesale flowers online and going the DIY route. You may remember my post on deciding to do my own flowers and how that decision came about. I was confident in my ability to arrange the bouquets, but scared about what sort of quality the flowers would arrive in. There are so many mixed reviews floating around the blogosphere and plenty of horror stories that would probably scare away a lot of DIY brides. It was motivating, however, that with the bad stories there were even more success stories of happy brides who saved lots of money and had beautiful flowers.

Here is a little about my experience with ordering wholesale flowers and going the DIY route using Fifty Flowers.

1. I chose to go with Fifty Flowers mainly because of their 100% wedding day guarantee. I also really liked the fact that their customer service was always very friendly and helpful in answering the million questions that I had about the whole process and about various flowers. They were knowledgeable about their products and always willing to give pointers on caring for the flowers. I really liked using the chat feature on their website because each time I finished a chat, I always saved the conversation to my email so that I could go back and refer to the advice and answers that they had given.

2. When choosing the type of flowers that I wanted, I did so with these things in mind:

a) DIY brides who ended up being happiest with their flowers were more lenient on the expectation of the exact color of the flowers that they ordered.

In other words, if you really have your heart set on an exact color, ordering wholesale online might not be for you. There are so many factors that can affect the shade of the flower including time of year, weather, location, shipping, etc. that they just really cannot promise the exact shade. If you are wanting a hot pink flower, you have to be willing to accept the fact that the flower may show up being a light hot pink instead of a bright hot pink. I knew that I wanted my flowers to be pink and white. As long as they showed up in some shade of pink or white, I would be a happy camper.

b) I knew that I wanted to choose flowers with a fuller bloom so they would stand out by themselves in a bouquet without the need for fillers so as to save more money by reducing the number of types of flowers.

I was over-the-moon happy when I discovered that peonies were available for order in August! Peonies are just not an August flower though and I was super skeptical at first. I’m sure that the customer service people were quite sick of me because I asked a bazillion questions about how it was possible. It turned out that there was a region in Alaska that were able to produce them and I was reassured that they would be beautiful and vivacious. I was sold. They were my first order placed. Up next was deciding on flowers for the bridesmaids bouquets.

I picked pink peonies for my bouquet to stand out against my white dress so I decided I wanted a shade of white flowers for my bridesmaids so they’d stand out against their pink dresses. I ended up choosing garden roses because I’ve always liked the romantic look of them and they seemed to be full enough to stand on their own.

via Fifty Flowers

3. I came prepared. Since I knew that I’d be caring for the flowers and arranging them in a hotel room, I took the necessary steps to be prepared to set myself up to do the best job possible. First, instead of a regular room, I booked a suite so that there would be plenty of room to lay out all of the supplies. Next, I called the hotel to let them know when my flowers would be arriving and gave them instructions to put them inside a cooler until I arrived. Luckily, our hotel was very accommodating in helping me out and we had no problems with delivery.

I also researched other successful DIY brides and brought all of the necessary supplies as suggested such as good floral shears, nutritious flower food, buckets, etc. Since we drove instead of flying, it made transportation of the supplies a lot easier.

When we got checked in, I immediately took the flowers to my room to get them into water and go through the feeding process.

I was so anxious to get the boxes open to make sure they were everything that I had been dreaming of. I was a little concerned when I opened the first box and the peony blooms were tiny!

I didn’t let myself get worked up though since the website did say that they would take a few days to open up and fully bloom. That’s why each type of flower has its own recommended delivery date.

Similar story with the garden roses. I was a little worried since they showed up looking more like normal, standard roses rather than romantic, fluffy garden roses. Again, I was hoping that it would just take a little time for them to open up.

I followed every recommended step in preparing and caring for the flowers, starting with cutting the stems diagonally under running water.

A Fifty Flowers representative called right away to ensure that I had received all of the flowers and was helpful in giving further advice and tips. In order to have the blooms open faster, I was instructed to adjust the water temperature to be a bit warmer. In addition, I also turned on the bathroom’s heat lamp for a bit.

The next morning I was pleasantly surprised to see the peonies had opened beautifully! Pink, fluffy, gorgeousness!

The garden roses, however, were still being stubborn.

Very few of them fully opened up. I tried everything I could to get them to finish opening faster, but time ran out and we had to start arranging them into bouquets. I only ended up having time to arrange my own before I had to start with hair and makeup. My wonderful maid of honor stepped in to finish up with the bridesmaids’ bouquets. They didn’t turn out to be as full as I had imagined…turns out that she accidentally made one extra bouquet—whoops! I loved my own bouquet, but if I had more time the end result of my maids’ bouquets probably would have turned out a little differently, but I was happy nonetheless to have such a caring and helpful MOH to finish them for me. Without further ado, here are some shots of the bouquets in action!

The rest of the images in this post are by Audrey hannah photography

So there you have it—my experience with DIY wholesale flowers! Overall I was very happy with the way they turned out. If I could do it all over again, I would definitely still go the DIY route (I saved a ton of money!), but I probably would have chosen to just go with a mix of white and pink peonies rather than the white garden roses. I was shocked how well the peonies held up despite the fact that they weren’t even in season and were shipped from Alaska! They remained beautiful for days after the wedding, while the garden roses wilted pretty quickly after.

Anyone else save money by doing their own flowers? Where will you/did you order them?