What to tell your florist about your bridesmaids

Continuing from our last post about the brides dress style and colour affecting the flower choice, today we present “the bridesmaids”.

The main thing your florist will want to know about the bridesmaids is what they are wearing and how many.

What they are wearing:
Bridesmaid’s dresses really are such an important part of the wedding colour scheme and theme. This is often where the main colourway is set for the entire wedding, not just the bouquets but the ceremony and the centerpieces too. We’ve been seeing many brides lately that aren’t choosing a colour for their girls, they are going with black. Black is a very strong “colour” but the wonderful thing is that it is also the perfect background for flowers, better even than white. In fact many florists paint the inside of their coolers black to show up the beautiful tones of the flowers! If you do choose to go with a colour, this can guide the florist toward using a certain palette. The bride that chooses bright fuchsia dresses is probably going to be open to some hot Mediterranean colours such as pink, orange, red for the bridesmaids. Softer toned dresses will probably look better with softer pastel tones of colour to avoid them looking washed out.

How many:
Having just two or three girls standing with you generally means you are going to do the same bouquet for each of them, but if you are having a larger bridal party you do have the option of mixing it up. If perhaps several could be categorized as junior bridesmaids for instance you could have them carry something different.
For instance, this would be the brides bouquet:

This would be the bridesmaids bouquets:

And this would be the "junior" bridesmaids:

You can also have each girl carry a variation of a bouquet for a more relaxed look (doing this when you only have a couple of bridesmaids can make it look like someone got forgotten until the last minute and had to take what you could get). More bridesmaids also means more of the budget is going here, so we often suggest to brides on a tighter budget that they go with something simple but effective- the repetition will add to the drama as well. For example you could do a bouquet of just three gerbera daisies for each girl. Here is a great example of this concept-
The bridal bouquet:

The bridesmaids bouquets: