Wedding Flower Budget: Where to Splurge & Where to Save
How to Get the Lavish Wedding Look Without the Lavish Wedding Floral Bill
Let's talk about the part of wedding flowers that isn't nearly as fun as choosing colors and saving inspiration pictures.
The budget.
I have yet to meet a bride who doesn't have one.
Even the bride who wants flowers EVERYWHERE has a number somewhere in the back of her mind where she thinks, Okay Kellie...we need to reel this in a little.
And that's okay.
I've actually had to rework several proposals recently after we started with everything a bride dreamed of and then needed to bring the investment back into her comfort zone.
That's not a failure in the design process.
That IS the design process.
My job isn't simply to add up a list of flowers you tell me you want.
My job is to look at your entire wedding, understand what matters most to you, and figure out how to create the biggest visual impact with the investment you want to make.
And because Lavish Bloom Rentals specializes in premium faux floral rentals, we're already starting that conversation from a very different place.
You don't necessarily have to choose between beautiful and affordable.
Sometimes you just have to know where to splurge, where to save, and—my personal favorite—where to use the same flowers twice.
So let's talk about it.
First, Let's Redefine "Splurge"
When I say splurge, I don't necessarily mean spend more money.
I mean:
Put your money where people are going to SEE it.
There's a difference.
You can spend hundreds of dollars adding little floral details to twenty different places and still walk into the room wondering where all your money went.
Or you can put that same investment into a few spectacular focal points that completely change the way the room feels.
That's what I want for my brides.
I want your guests to walk in and think:
WOW.
I want your wedding photos to look lush and intentional.
I want your flowers to feel abundant.
And I'd much rather give you three incredible floral moments than fifteen tiny ones nobody remembers.
SPLURGE: Your Ceremony Backdrop
If you're going to make one floral statement, make it where you're getting married.
Your arch, pillars, floral wall, or ceremony installation becomes the backdrop for some of the most important moments of your entire wedding day.
Your vows.
Your first kiss.
Your wedding-party photos.
Your family photos.
That floral backdrop is going to appear over and over again in your wedding gallery.
So yes—this is somewhere I want you to splurge.
At Lavish, our custom arches and statement florals are also one of the places where using premium faux flowers can make an enormous difference in what we're able to create.
A large, lush installation requires a LOT of flowers.
Because we're designing with premium faux blooms from our rental inventory rather than purchasing thousands of dollars of fresh flowers that will be used once and discarded, we're able to create scale and abundance very differently.
That's one of the biggest reasons a Lavish wedding can LOOK like an extravagant floral investment without requiring the floral budget you might expect.
SAVE: Don't Decorate Every Inch of the Ceremony
Here's where I'm going to save you some money.
You probably don't need flowers on every chair.
You probably don't need flowers on every pew.
And you probably don't need florals covering every inch from the ceremony entrance to the altar.
If we've already created a beautiful statement backdrop, let's support it—not compete with it.
Six thoughtfully placed aisle meadows may be all your ceremony needs.
Twelve may create the lush garden aisle you've been dreaming about.
It depends entirely on the space.
And here's the important part:
We're not necessarily buying those aisle pieces just for the ceremony.
They're coming with us to the reception.
More on that in a minute.
SPLURGE: The Flowers That Define the Room
When I walk into a reception space, I'm immediately looking for the places your guests' eyes naturally land.
Usually that's something like:
- Your sweetheart or head table
- The bar
- A fireplace or mantel
- A staircase
- Your cake
- A seating-chart display
- The entrance into the reception
- A large empty wall that needs something
- One or two spectacular elevated centerpieces
Those are opportunities.
You don't need a giant floral arrangement on every one of them.
But choosing a few strategically can make the entire room feel much more luxurious.
This is also where working with a designer instead of simply ordering floral pieces makes a difference.
Sometimes I'll walk a venue with a bride and immediately see an opportunity neither of us had considered during the original consultation.
That's when the design starts becoming personal to the space.
SAVE: Every Guest Table Does NOT Need a Huge Centerpiece
I love a big centerpiece.
You know what I love even more?
A room that looks beautifully designed.
Those aren't necessarily the same thing.
One of my favorite reception looks is mixing centerpiece styles.
Maybe we have several gorgeous elevated arrangements creating height throughout the room.
Then we balance those with lower compote arrangements, bud vases, candles, greenery, or floral accents on the remaining tables.
Now your eye moves around the room.
It feels layered.
It feels custom.
And you haven't paid for twenty enormous centerpieces just because you have twenty tables.
With our Lavish Experience, I have even more flexibility to look at the room as a whole rather than treating every flower, candle, bud vase, and little accent like an individual transaction.
That's where the magic happens.
THE BIGGEST SAVE: Let Me Use Your Flowers Twice
THIS is where Lavish brides can really maximize their floral investment.
Please don't make beautiful ceremony flowers work for thirty minutes and then spend the rest of the evening sitting outside alone.
We're taking those babies with us. 😂
Aisle meadows can become florals around your sweetheart table.
They can be staggered around the bar.
They can frame your cake.
They can soften the base of a seating chart.
They can create floral moments around the dance floor.
Ceremony urns can move to the reception entrance.
And depending on the design and logistics of the venue, even larger ceremony pieces may become part of your reception design.
This is something we talk about from the beginning because I don't just want to know what your ceremony looks like.
I want to know where those flowers are going after the ceremony.
The Lavish Room Flip: This Is Where the Investment Really Works
This is one of the things that makes the Lavish experience different.
A room flip isn't simply someone grabbing an arrangement and setting it on another table.
When we've planned a room flip, we're intentionally designing your ceremony florals knowing they're going to have a second purpose.
After your ceremony, while you and your guests are enjoying cocktail hour, we're working.
We're moving pieces.
Restyling them.
Creating new focal points.
Making sure something that looked like an aisle meadow twenty minutes ago now looks completely intentional beside your sweetheart table.
When possible, I want your reception reveal to feel like you're seeing an entirely new floral design.
Same flowers. Second moment.
That is one of my absolute favorite ways to save.
SAVE: Don't Buy Flowers Just Because They're on a Wedding Checklist
This may sound strange coming from the woman who sells you flowers, but hear me out.
You don't need something simply because Pinterest says you're supposed to have it.
If your venue already has a beautiful entrance, maybe we don't need another huge floral installation there.
If your cake is sitting against a stunning stone wall, maybe it only needs a small floral accent.
If nobody is going to see a particular corner of the room, I'm probably not going to recommend spending your money decorating it.
I'd rather take that money and put it somewhere that matters.
This is why I always want to understand the venue and the entire wedding before we finalize a design.
SPLURGE: Your Bridal Bouquet
I'm going to make an exception here.
Your bouquet doesn't transform a room.
But it matters.
It will be in your hands walking down the aisle.
It will be in your portraits.
It will be in photos with your parents, your wedding party, and your new husband.
Years from now, when you're looking through your wedding album, you'll see that bouquet again and again.
Make it one you love.
At Lavish, our custom keepsake bouquets are designed specifically for our wedding clients—and unlike fresh flowers, yours doesn't have to be thrown away a week later.
You get to keep it.
That makes this one splurge I feel pretty good about.
What Happens When Your Dream Proposal Is Over Budget?
This has happened recently, and I think it's important to talk about because wedding budgets are REAL.
We design the wedding.
We add the beautiful things.
We get excited.
Then we look at the total and realize:
Okay. We need to bring this down.
I don't want my bride to feel embarrassed.
And I don't want the next step to be randomly deleting things until we hit a number.
Instead, I go back through the design and ask:
What is giving us the most impact?
What can we make smaller?
What can we repurpose?
Can bridesmaid bouquets become part of the reception décor?
Can we reduce the number of aisle pieces without losing the overall look?
Could a few statement centerpieces carry the room while the remaining tables get a simpler design?
Could an aisle meadow become the floral statement at the bar instead of purchasing another arrangement?
THAT is how I want to reduce a proposal.
Not by making your wedding look cheaper.
By making your floral investment smarter.
What If I Don't Need a Fully Custom Wedding?
Here's another place I can save you money:
Not every bride needs custom florals.
We have four different wedding package options at Lavish because I've learned that brides come to me needing very different things.
Some brides fall in love with one of our Premier Floral Collections exactly as it is. Those designs are already created, they're beautiful, and because we're not custom-designing an entirely new floral collection for your wedding, they're an incredible way to get the Lavish look at a lower investment.
A Premier ceremony package with a floral arch and 12 coordinating aisle pieces starts at under $3,000.
And here's where it gets really good.
Add our $500 Lavish Room Flip, and after the ceremony we'll repurpose those same florals throughout your reception.
Now the arch that framed your vows can become a statement backdrop in the reception, while those aisle pieces can be restyled around your sweetheart table, bar, cake, seating chart, or other focal areas we've planned together.
That means you can have beautiful statement florals for your ceremony and reception for under $3,500—without purchasing an entirely separate set of reception statement pieces.
That's a pretty perfect example of what I mean when I say:
Splurge on impact. Save on repetition. Repurpose whenever we can.
Then there are the brides who say, "Kellie, I love these...but my colors are completely different," or who have a very specific vision they've been dreaming about.
That's where our three custom floral packages come in.
Those give us different levels of flexibility depending on the size of your wedding, how much floral coverage you want, and just how custom we need to get.
You don't need to choose the biggest package simply because it's the biggest.
You need the package that makes sense for your wedding.
And figuring that out together is part of the Lavish process.
And Then There's the Lavish Experience
This is exactly why I created our Lavish Experience, beginning at $7,500.
It's for the bride who doesn't want to spend her consultation counting bud vases.
She wants to show me her inspiration.
She wants to tell me how she wants the wedding to feel.
And then she wants me to help figure out how to get her there.
The Lavish Experience gives us the ability to think about your wedding as an overall design rather than a shopping list of individual floral pieces.
Statement florals.
Centerpieces.
Candles.
Bud vases.
Greenery.
Floral accents.
Styling.
Repurposing.
The little things I see during setup that make me think, That spot needs something.
That's the experience.
I want you to walk into your wedding and feel like you splurged.
Even when we were being incredibly smart behind the scenes about where every dollar went.
You're Already Saving by Choosing Lavish
This is something I don't think brides always realize.
Premium faux flowers aren't "cheap flowers."
The quality florals we use are an investment, and a tremendous amount of design time goes into every custom Lavish wedding.
But because our flowers aren't being purchased for one wedding and discarded afterward, we're able to approach large-scale floral design differently.
You're renting much of the floral beauty instead of purchasing every single stem for one day.
That allows us to create arches, aisle meadows, urns, statement arrangements, and lush reception designs with the kind of abundance that could become extraordinarily expensive when created entirely with fresh flowers.
And then we make those flowers work.
Sometimes twice.
Sometimes in several different places throughout the evening.
That's where the value is.
My Rule for Splurge vs. Save?
Splurge on impact.
Save on repetition.
Repurpose whenever we can.
And don't spend money on something just because someone told you a wedding is "supposed" to have it.
Your wedding doesn't need to have the most flowers.
It needs the right flowers in the right places.
That's what makes it feel Lavish.
I Want It to Feel Like You Spent a Fortune
I'll tell you exactly what I'm trying to accomplish when I'm designing your wedding.
I want your guests to walk in and think:
"Oh my gosh. LOOK at these flowers."
I want your photographer to have beautiful floral moments everywhere she points her camera.
I want the room to feel finished.
I want you to look around and see the wedding you imagined.
What I don't need is for anyone to know how we did it.
They don't need to know that those gorgeous flowers around your sweetheart table were lining your ceremony aisle an hour ago.
They don't need to know that we intentionally mixed statement centerpieces with simpler tables.
They don't need to know that the beautiful arrangement at the bar was part of the ceremony.
That's between us. 😉
I want it to feel like a splurge—even when we designed it to save.
That, to me, is the whole point of Lavish Bloom Rentals.
Let's Figure Out Where YOUR Wedding Should Splurge
If you have a Pinterest board full of gorgeous floral inspiration and you're wondering how on earth you're going to make it work with your wedding budget, come talk to me.
Bring me the dream.
Bring me the venue.
And yes—bring me the budget.
We'll figure out together which pieces deserve the wow factor, which ones we can simplify, and which flowers we're going to make work twice.
Because a beautiful wedding isn't about spending money everywhere.
It's about knowing where to make it look like you did.
Blooming with Gratitude,
Kellie Jones
Owner & Lead Designer
Lavish Bloom Rentals
