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First published in the Feb. 11 print issue of the South Pasadena Review.
Roses may still be red, but customers can sometimes feel blue when they consider the cost and kind of flowers they want for their upcoming wedding in 2022.
The prices of wedding flowers and supplies have gone up 25-50% in some cases over the past year, according to Arielle Daxon, the owner of Moss & Meadows Design at 1000 Fremont Ave., Unit 110. Daxon said the COVID-19 pandemic has made planning a wedding date a confusing proposition too. One of her clients has had to postpone her wedding three times. And with each wedding planned this year, there are more obstacles to hurdle.
There’s the price of flowers. After that there is a shortage of candles, candle holders and don’t forget the increased cost of scotch tape to hold everything together.
“What we are facing now is an abrupt half in the entire floral world,” Rishi Patel, the chief executive officer at HMR Designs in Chicago recently told the New York Times.
This is happening at the same time as the number of weddings is blossoming again. The Wedding Report, a trade group based in Tucson, Arizona, estimated there will be 2.5 million weddings in the United States in 2022 — the most since 1984.
This comes as, in the past two years, wholesalers cut staff and delivery, to say nothing of the dearth of weddings in the pre-vaccine phase. A lack of wedding business made growers look toward wholesale flowers to make their money. For weddings, florists often use event flowers which might be supplemented by special event flowers which might be bought the next day. This is different than the flowers that might be purchased at a supermarket, which are meant to have a longer life.
“Everything is a lot more unreliable now,” Daxon said.
It is also hard, if not impossible, to pre-order flowers and promise that those exact flowers will be available. She doesn’t even want to pre-order and make such promises at this time.
“You are setting yourself up for disappointment if you think you have to have a certain type of flower,” she said.
What Daxon stresses is a different style of wedding planning.
“I believe weddings are at their heart personal and intimate,” she said in describing her business. “To truly honor that, I believe in a boutique way of taking on a wedding.”
Daxon was overwhelmed with weekend wedding business last year. This year, she said that sales of bouquets and arrangements have picked up since the first of the year.
“Maybe people are trying to cheer each other up through this latest part of the pandemic,” she said.
Daxon said that she is excited about “creative arrangements” and a look around her studio might reveal her to be making dried arrangements or wreathes adorned with sunflowers.
