Real Flower Business

Education and Business Training for Floral Designers.

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2026 Floralpreneur® Workshop

Are you looking for a hands-on workshop for floral designers? Join us for the 2026 Floralpreneur® Workshop for Floral Designers & Flower Farmers!

You’ll learn foam free design mechanics and business strategies to confidently book great clients with ALISON ELLIS of Real Flower Business and LORI BLEY of The Hidden Daisy!

Meet us in Waitsfield, Vermont, April 19-21st!

You’ll walk away with practical, proven techniques to improve your bookings, design skills, and your profits! 

All of your meals are included. Seats are extremely limited.

Get Details & Sign Up

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Pricing Transparency Mini Rant

Have you seen any posts on Instagram lately talking about “pricing transparency” on wedding flowers?

Because I saw one pricing breakdown this morning that was way too low based on their recipes, markups and final price. And frankly, it sets a bad example for both new and experienced florists.

In this particular post, there were at least six large arrangements on pedestals priced at the lowest end for markups and labor fees when in fact, it was a very high-end look the florist was creating!

But there’s another reason that I think it’s really concerning to see these “pricing transparency” posts:

They can be a bad idea for your brand!

Here’s why:

If you are posting about being “transparent” on pricing as a way to educate customers to be realistic about budget ranges, you’re probably NOT creating a post that appeals to higher budget clients! (Because they don’t need to be lectured on why you charge what you do! And whether your markup is 3x, 5x, or 10x, it’s non of their business anyway.)

And this got me thinking, in the spirit of pricing transparency, it’s time for a summer Pricing Chat for Florists! You can join me live on Tuesday, July 22, at 12pm Eastern/9am Pacific for this free Pricing Chat.

If you’re interested in joining me, we’ll talk about the 3 Most Important Numbers That Florists Need To Know in your business AND the 3 biggest pricing mistakes that floral designers often make!

 Sign up HERE to get on the list and I’ll send you an email reminder beforehand. 

 

 

If you can’t join me live, you’ll also be able to watch a replay for a limited time if you’re on the email list. You can submit a question to me beforehand if you’d like.

We’ll talk about maximizing your profits and I’ll answer your questions live!

Hope to see you there.

Very best,

Alison Ellis

 

Founder of realflowerbusiness.com

Creator of Flower Math: The Florist’s Guide to Pricing & Profitability

 

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What I Bring To Every Wedding

What tools should a floral designer have on hand for a wedding day set-up?

For my entire career as a wedding florist, I’ve been working to streamline my day-of delivery and set-up process. I don’t want to lug around anything I don’t need, but I was brought up with the saying, “better to have and not need than to need and not have.” So I’ve definitely been guilty of bringing things that I don’t really need! (And I almost always have an umbrella.)

One thing that hasn’t changed much over the last 24 wedding seasons is my bag, which I lovingly refer to as my “bag of tricks” (because let’s face it, we are making some magic on the wedding day after all!).

While you won’t see me pull a rabbit outta there, I do have a few key tricks to share with you if you’d like to see what’s in my bag. Take a few moments to watch now!

After you watch, I’d love to hear from you, so feel free to share a comment on this video to let me know what you bring to your wedding set up and installations as well.

And if you’d like to come deeper behind the scenes of my business and join me for monthly Q&A calls to ask me anything, you’ll find a ton of my best tips and trainings as a member of my Patreon Community.

In fact, last month on Patreon, I recorded my wedding design workflow for 2 events and broke that down into 4 videos that are a little over an hour in total. Everyone who joins at the Flourishing Floralpreneur® membership level has access to all 4 parts.

Membership on Patreon ranges from totally free to $29 per month and there is no commitment! So if your business needs a boost, you can hop into my vault of trainings specifically for floral designers, take any tips that you need and edit or cancel your membership anytime.

As always, if you have a question, don’t hesitate to ask. We can even book a one-on-one call if you’d like to talk about your specific business goals or struggles. You can learn more about booking a 1:1 call with me HERE.

Keep doing beautiful work!

xo. -Alison Ellis

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Wedding Florist Design Prep Tips

How do florists pull off a big event weekend?

Well, it starts with some serious planning and preparation. Because poor time management, staying up all night to get the job done, or designing just about everything on-site is not really an option when you’re promising to deliver professional work on time.

So to show you how I’ve learned to manage my time to stay on task, I spent the week filming my workflow for a busy weekend with 2 weddings to bring you inside my planning schedule and design process!

You can see here how I get started, but the full week of design work is over on Patreon inside my Flourishing Floralpreneur® Tier.

 

I decided to document my workflow because this was a busy week as a solo designer, but I also knew it could be a great one! And I’m glad to say that it was. I had happy clients, everything was delivered on time, and even the forecasted rain didn’t appear!

If you want to take a closer look, I break everything down for you inside my Patreon Community–including the sales and profits on the two events! Click here to join me on Patreon with no long term commitment at all. Take the tips and training you need, leave anytime.

And as always, if you have any questions for me, don’t be shy! I’m here to help.

xo. -Alison Ellis

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Wedding Bootcamp Part 2

Welcome to Part 2 of the Wedding Bootcamp recap! As I mentioned in my last post, hosting a Floralpreneur® Workshop with a commitment to foam free designs and a balance of business strategies has been a privilege and a proud accomplishment over the last 3 years! In all of the work we’ve done, not one piece of floral foam has been used. The reason for this is simple: if we can work more sustainably as floral designers, I believe we should! 

I love learning and sharing new foam free techniques because it can truly be quite simple to reduce our environmental impact by cutting out single use plastics in our work. And when I can use the same simple mechanics in more than one way, I am really winning! Here you can see how we used the floral table runners above (from Part 1 of our Wedding Bootcamp recap) to create a foam free arbor design. We just placed the designs in boxes and marched them over to the arbor with a step stool and a few floral tools.

It was a beautiful spring day here in Vermont and we enjoyed the time outside to set everything up and enjoy the views of our work! We used Holly Chapple eggs, water tubes and bind wire to attach each arrangement to the arbor–so all of these mechanics could be reused if you want. Lori and I placed the first two pieces and then everyone jumped in to add a personal touch!


One of our reusable mechanics included these water tubes on bamboo skewers that I made in a workshop with Hitomi Gilliam several years ago. Sometimes the finer details on our mechanics can transform them into something that adds value to the design! As you can see below, another foam free flower design tip I share often is to mist your flowers with water. That’s why I gifted everyone with a 3-second mister to help encourage good flower hydration.

We’re a good looking group, aren’t we?! You can hardly tell that we’d been working hard for the last few days! (Although thanks to our wonderful hosts at The Round Barn we were eating quite well, too!)

In addition to the centerpiece designs and arbor decor that we made on Day 2 of our Wedding Bootcamp, our students created hand-tied bouquets, cascade bouquets, wearable flowers and floral crowns on Day 1, which Isora Lithgow Creations captured in the images below, too! Each student used their time to explore something they’d never made before or wanted to just experiment with. Every designer’s work is unique, though we did work with recipes and price out our designs.

A tremendous thanks again to all of our students and to my co-teacher, Lori Bley of The Hidden Daisy and her fantastic assistant designer, Kollin. We’re a great team and this was a truly special experience for everyone who attended!

A successful workshop requires so many tiny details coming together and it was an absolute pleasure to get to do this with you! I’m kicking around an agenda for 2026, so let’s plan to meet up again for another memorable floral gathering at The Round Barn. I’ll see you here!

xo. -Alison Ellis

See Part 1 of Wedding Bootcamp recap here.

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