Freelance Floral Designer

Tips for sharing your vision and expectations with freelancers—enabling them to perform at peak efficiency.

By Molly Lucille

Freelancing has long been a backbone of the flower industry, and it has grown exponentially as a career-style choice for many designers and as a labor source for many business owners—including wedding and event florists as well as cut flower growers and product manufacturers—in the post COVID years. As this segment of the labor market grows, and as wedding floral trends delve deeper into the lush, large installations that require many hands, ensuring your systems of hiring and managing freelancers is more important than ever.

Tips for sharing your vision and expectations with freelancers—enabling them to perform at peak efficiency.

By Molly Lucille

Freelancing has long been a backbone of the flower industry, and it has grown exponentially as a career-style choice for many designers and as a labor source for many business owners—including wedding and event florists as well as cut flower growers and product manufacturers—in the post COVID years. As this segment of the labor market grows, and as wedding floral trends delve deeper into the lush, large installations that require many hands, ensuring your systems of hiring and managing freelancers is more important than ever.

Sejour Events

I’ve been a full-time traveling freelance floral designer for the last two years, working for florists in Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Colorado, Texas, and all over the Midwest, designing luxury weddings, climbing endless ladders and scaffolding, wrangling Smilax, schlepping buckets and helping design some truly incredible flower installations with some of the greatest designers I’ve ever met. One thing I’ve learned is the importance of adaptability.

Walking into a shop, studio or design facility can be a daunting experience, especially when you are working with a large team to undertake a task list a mile long. Often, I find myself making a “wish list” of communications that would make my job easier and allow me to perform at my best for each client. This wish list will empower not only the freelancers but also everyone hiring freelancers.

We’re all on the same team.

Aspen Branch

My Communications Wish List

1. “Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.”

This quote about the importance of communication in building relationships and of speaking and leading with clarity and truth, from author and leadership guru Brené Brown, is applicable to so many things in our personal and professional lives, and it pertains to freelancing, as well. On most of my travel gigs, I have no context of what I’ll be walking into until I show up.

I make it work (it’s my job to be adaptable), but then I have to spend time at the beginning of each job wrapping my mind around what will be expected of me.

A little work in advance on the part of the employer can go a long way to ensure that freelancers don’t waste time on the job. Preparing a checklist in advance or even a general mood board will allow the freelancers to walk into a job with the right mindset. One of my clients had a video of a lush English rose garden that he sent us the day before we arrived, to ensure we all would be on the same page about how the installations should feel.

Watching that video on the plane was such a great way to get my head in the game and understand what vibe we’d be creating that week. Another client begins each job with a general design meeting. There is a master binder there for everyone to reference, full of inspiration photos and a list of all the pieces that need to be made, along with assignments—who he wants to create each piece.

Matthew “Coach” Blind, a fellow traveling freelance floral designer, finds this to be the best approach: “I think freelancers can do their best work when the clients really trust and empower them to know the full vision and scale of the event. Don’t give them just recipes; give them the full proposal each bride sees, including prices, so that they can adequately fulfill the full vision of the event.”

Whatever way you want to go about it, if you’re informing your…