HOW TO CHOOSE THE RIGHT WEDDING DECORATOR IN TORONTO FOR YOUR WEDDING DAY
Choosing Legitimate Vendors
When it comes to choosing vendors, especially your floral and décor company, this is something you want to plan carefully because there are a lot of elements involved in making this decision. One of the things most people don’t realise is that this is a very time-consuming process that requires a team of talented designers to accomplish. Flowers don’t just appear on the wedding day, it actually takes 1 week worth of prep-work to craft each and every centerpiece, floral arrangement, bridal bouquets and all the other details that go into making your wedding look beautiful.
Google is going to be your best friend when it comes to searching for wedding decorators in Toronto. One of the best ways to filter out wedding decorators is to check reviews on Google first. Next is to check the consistency of those reviews. When you look at bad reviews, keep in mind that sometimes local competitors can write fake reviews with fake names, so don’t judge a business harshly if they have 95, positive reviews and some reviews that seem fake or negative. One of the best ways to figure this out is by clicking on the name of the person that left the review, if it shows on Google that they have never left any other places a review, chances are it is a fake profile.
Also, if the owner responds back to the review and offers to make it up to the customer and you don’t see a response back from the customer, chances are it is a fake review, a legit company will always reply back to a negative review to help resolve the issue. Most legit wedding décor companies monitor reviews and immediately respond to reviews in order to help the customer. As long as the company you are considering on hiring has atleast 95% positive reviews, chances are they are a safe bet, to be realistic, there will always be a customer that will go out of their way to find fault with everything and try to bad mouth small business owners in an attempt to get money from them.
As you check reviews for multiple wedding vendors and you see a few vendors that have majority bad reviews and no responses back to the customer telling their side of the story, chances are this may be a bad vendor to deal with. Use your judgement and go with the company that you get a good vibe from.
Always Check the Portfolio
After you check the reviews and you like the company, be sure to have a look at their portfolio of some of the projects they have worked on. If you see that their wedding portfolio has tons of pictures of real venues within the Greater Toronto Area, chances are their portfolio is legit and not just random photos downloaded from stock photography websites. If they are a new vendor with a very limited portfolio of wedding décor and flowers, they may end up using stock photography as a way of showcasing the type of work they can do, nothing wrong with that, atleast try to see 1 or 2 examples of work that the vendor has done, just so you know that they are able to deliver on your wedding vision or atleast a table mockup of the centerpiece that you want for your wedding day.
How to Save Money on Your Venue
If you want to save money on your wedding venue, try to book your wedding during off season, winter months tend to be the best months to book your wedding venue because there are less brides trying to reserve those dates. Everyone wants to get married during the summer, so naturally, venues will charge a bit more during peak season. If you want to take it a step further, planning your wedding on a weekday could save you a lot more money because wedding venues almost never book weddings during the week day. Chinese couples who are planning their wedding in Toronto, tend to book their wedding date on a Monday or a weekday, and this helps them get some of the most luxurious wedding venues at a discounted rate than what the average bride pays.
The next best thing you can do to save money on your wedding day is to lower your guest count if possible. The reason why you see a lot of luxury weddings in magazines is because those couples usually have between approx. 100 guest weddings in smaller but luxury venues. This gives them more money to spend on their wedding flowers and decorations for that day, and to save money on their wedding venue. It all depends on your budget and what your priorities are for your wedding day. Chinese weddings tend to have around 50-100 guest wedding size, European weddings tend to have 300-500 guest weddings and for Indian weddings, they tend to have between 600-1000-person wedding.
How to Save Money On Your Flowers & Decorations
One of the best ways you can save money on your wedding flowers is to rent most of them, that’s right, you can actually rent flowers. The best part of rental flowers is that they look extremely realistic, your guests will not be able to tell the difference, unless they are a florist. By renting flowers you get the advantage of having larger floral arrangements for a much lower cost. At the end of the night, we simply collect them and you save a fortune on your wedding flowers, and your wedding photos will look extremely luxurious.
The Right Décor Company with The Right Connections
After you spend several hours on Pinterest, figuring out ideas for your wedding flowers and décor, now it’s the time to find the right vendor that can bring those ideas to life. By checking out various different websites of different floral and décor companies, you can get an idea of what caliber they are. Compare a few companies side by side and take a look at their portfolio, if they have a lot of variety in their portfolio, chances are they are going to be able to deliver on your vision. Organize a few photos and send them out to a hand-picked list of wedding decorators to see if they are able to pull it off. Now it’s important to be realistic when it comes to your wedding vision. When you see those luxury weddings in magazines, you need to understand that those brides most likely spent a lot of money on those weddings to make it look luxurious. If you are trying to model your wedding after a famous celebrity wedding, know that those weddings have limitless budgets. Its perfectly okay to use celebrity weddings in magazines as an inspiration, but you want to be realistic and find designs that can fit in your budget. Don’t be shy, bring whatever ideas you have to your wedding consultation and our team can help you narrow down something that you can afford.
Unique Wedding Décor Pieces
If you want to make your wedding truly stand out, consider having a floral arch or floral wall or even a custom gazebo as part of your wedding décor. Over the last 10 years we’ve had the opportunity to work with brides and design some truly stunning pieces. You can find them on our floral arch/wall page on our website. Your wedding photos will turn out stunning if you take the time and work with your decorator to craft some beautiful decorations. Our brand-new refreshed website has thousands of ideas for you to choose from. We have pages dedicated to every single category of flowers & décor products with tons of designs for you to choose from. For example, if you can’t think of any wedding centerpiece ideas or you can’t find anything good on Pinterest, we have pages dedicated for each product along with attached price ranges. This will help you narrow down what is in your budget before your consultation.
Wedding Backdrops
The primary purpose of a wedding backdrop is to disguise a wall that does not look great in photos, on top of that, it also helps to set a focal point in the room when your guests walk into your wedding venue. You can really transform the look of a venue by incorporating a unique wedding backdrop, without it, the head table looks empty. Take a look at our wedding backdrop page and you can see what a transformation it can make on your head table. Oftentimes your head table wall will look very boring or if the venue is old, the walls tend to look outdated. Covering these walls with a beautiful backdrop can make your wedding venue look luxurious.
When Should You Book Your Wedding Décor
Wedding florist and decorators usually get booked atleast 1-2 years in advance, however we sometimes can accommodate last minute weddings as well. The reason why you want to book ahead of time is to make sure that your date is secure and not booked with other weddings. Wedding flowers & decorations are fairly large projects, we have to reserve a lot of flowers with growers, along with all the linens and decorations, this can add up to hundreds or thousands of items, so its best to reserve your date as soon as you can. You should always book your wedding venue and ceremony location first, before flowers and décor, because when it comes time to have our consultation, we usually design the theme and style of the wedding flowers to compliment your wedding venue design.
Should You Hire A Wedding Planner
It never hurts to have extra help on the day of your wedding. There are a lot of brides that simply don’t have the time to find the right vendors for their wedding day, it takes a lot of interviewing, going back and forth on ideas with lots of vendors before you finalize on which company to go with. Wedding planning is almost a part time job, it can be done, however you need to understand that it will take a certain level of effort on your part to meet with every single vendor and plan out all the details on the day of. The good news is that if you choose the top rated vendors in the city for each respective category, you will have less to worry about, more than likely if the vendor has lots of great reviews, they will be super reliable and accommodating to make sure your wedding planning process goes smoothly.
If you decide that you don’t want to be bothered with all the back and forth and just want a reliable wedding planner to take care of everything for you, reach out to us and we can recommend the right wedding planner for your special day. If you need someone that can speak your language so that your older guests are more comfortable, or if you have a lot of family from back home visiting for your wedding. That can certainly be arranged. When it comes time to hiring a wedding planner, understand that this is quite a lot of work and a lot of long hours that goes into planning a wedding, phone calls, contracts, follow ups, design mock-ups and more. You want to make sure the person you hire has great attitude, easy to get along with, but also reliable. You want to make sure that you pay your wedding planner fairly for the time investment and the experience that they bring to your wedding.
How to Brainstorm Ideas for Your Wedding Flowers & Décor
The best way to start coming up with ideas for your wedding is to first figure out which venue you are going to get married in, after that you can simply go on Google and type in “venue name + wedding décor” or any variation of that keyword, you should see a lot of pictures of recent weddings from that. Alternatively you can simply go on Google images or Pinterest and type in “wedding centerpiece ideas” and start saving photos that you like for your upcoming consultation. We recently launched a section on our website with every single product category so that you can see all of our recent works, for that specific category, along with price ranges. For example, if you want centerpiece ideas and prices, simply go to our centerpieces page and browse through all the work we have done for that category.
Choosing the Right Wedding Venue
The best thing you can do when it comes to choosing a wedding venue is to pick a location that is central to all your friends and family members, typically this will be around Vaughan or North York area. However, it’s a wedding, so people know they have to drive for atleast 30 min to 1 hour. In order to make travel as easy as possible and to save some money in logistical fees. The best thing you can do is plan your wedding reception and ceremony at the same location. Ideally you want to choose a wedding venue that has a ceremony location on the spot. This way you don’t have to worry about having all your vendors and all your guests travel from one side of the city, to the other side of the city. One time we had a wedding where the couple planned their reception in Burlington and their ceremony location in Markham.
Don’t really know why but that’s what they planned, we simply provided the flowers and decorations for the day of. Maybe it was sentimental, most of the guest’s unfortunately arrived late and you can easily tell that it was uncomfortable for them to have to travel from one side of the city to the other. On top of that, the costs will add up for you since you have to pay for your floral company, DJ, photographer, limo driver to cover such a long distance back and forth.
If you are planning a wedding, stick to wedding venues that can offer a ceremony location on site or atleast pick a ceremony location that is as close as possible to your reception. If you are planning a wedding and you have a lot of guests traveling overseas, consider choosing a nice hotel with a beautiful event space, specifically designed for weddings. King Edward Hotel is a great location, or Four Seasons and even Shangri La Hotel. If you are on a budget and you want something more affordable, there are lots of other hotel venues that are budget friendly and can provide a reasonably designed event space for you to get married in. Check out our wedding gallery page to see a list of all the wedding venues and halls we have done events in, along with pictures of what we designed in those venues.
How Long We Take to Custom Make Quotes
We want to be as accurate as possible, so once we receive the right quantity and the right pictures of exactly what you are looking for, the process can take 2-3 business days, we normally get back to our clients earlier in the week. Towards the end of the week, our entire team is primarily focused on executing events for our lovely couples.
Fresh Flowers VS Rental Flowers
A lot of luxury weddings you see on magazines tend to have rental or silk flowers incorporated into the wedding décor. Some of them are made from strictly fresh flowers but its extremely hard to tell because the accuracy of the shapes and colors of silk flowers are very realistic. You can make your wedding flowers look that much more luxurious simply by switching most of them to silk flowers instead, this will reduce your cost as a client and help you achieve a better look for your wedding day. You could also use a hybrid centerpiece, which incorporates fresh flowers, typically hydrangeas. Along with luxury flowers like orchids or peonies as silk flowers. This will give you the best of both worlds and your wedding décor look more luxurious. If you would like to see some ideas of rental flowers, check out our “flowers/décor pricelist” drop down pages and click on any sub-menu to see real examples of hybrid or silk wedding flowers from real weddings we have done in the Greater Toronto Area.
How to Prepare for Your Wedding Consultation
Before coming into your wedding consultation, it’s important to collect your ideas and have things somewhat organized so that you can make the best use of your time when you are having a consultation with at wedding decorator. The job of your wedding decorator is to see all of your ideas and your budget and to figure out what solutions are going to be the best fit for your wedding day. Feel free to bring photos with you and save them on your laptop and your wedding decorator can give you their expert feedback on what works and give you alternative suggestions if things are a bit, out of your budget.
Why Are Flowers Expensive
This is a common question we get a lot and the reason is, majority of flowers come from South America or Europe, which means everything is traded either with the Euro or USD. This means that your Canadian currency has less buying power and between the currency exchange and the shipping costs, everything adds up. If you are planning your wedding in America, flowers are slightly cheaper and you can get more for less money. Same things goes for Europe, a lot of premium flowers grow in places like Netherlands so brides that are planning their wedding in European countries, can take advantage of slightly lower priced flowers since they are saving on freight and currency exchanges. Another factor that can influence prices of flowers is natural disasters, if there are major floods in certain parts of the world, this can limit the supply of certain flowers and for that reason, some of your flowers may cost more.
Choose Full-Service Companies
If you are shopping around for wedding florists and wedding decorators, you can save a lot of money by simply hiring one company, like ours, to handle both services for your wedding day. Years ago we realized that providing flowers is not enough, we need to expand our horizons and add wedding decorations as well to our products and services list. As a result, we can save customer a lot of money on transportation, simply because we use the same trucks to transport the flowers and decorations, sometimes multiple vehicles. It’s more time consuming for you as a bride to find a wedding florist, and then find a wedding decorator, after that, managing both companies an making sure your wedding décor matches well with your wedding flowers. The last thing you want to do is manage more people and add more complexity into the design of your wedding, for that reason, we recommend you to hire a company that can provide both services for your wedding day.
Hiring Wedding Photographers
As you go about finding vendors for you wedding day, one of the most important vendors apart from wedding decorators, is your photographer. If you are planning on having photography and videography and possibly a photobooth, try and find a company that can offer you both services in-house. By purchasing both services from the same company, you will get better package pricing, rather than hiring 2 companies. Another important tip is to look at their portfolio. It helps a lot if the wedding photographers have done weddings in your chosen venue because they already know the best angles to shoot from. A good chunk of the day is going to be spent with your wedding photographer.
You naturally want to hire a photographer whom you have great chemistry with. Both couples should feel totally comfortable with their wedding photographer because he/she will be taking some very intimate and romantic photos of both of you for the duration of the day. If you don’t have good rapport with your photographer, it may prevent you from being totally relaxed in your photos. Take some time and interview atleast 2-3 wedding photographers before making a decision on who to hire for your wedding day. If they never done weddings in your venue before, it’s not a dealbreaker, but it can certainly help if they know the area better.
Home Based Wedding Vendors VS Retail Based Wedding Vendors
As you start interviewing wedding vendors you will notice that some vendors have really expensive retail locations in downtown Toronto, while some work from a home office or a shared office space. While this may cause some confusion, understand those wedding vendors are self-employed individuals, the majority of wedding vendors are good people who simply want to do what they love and deliver the best service they can for their couples.
Getting a physical location is financially draining on a small business owner. The average retail costs can range from 60k-80k per year, depending on the size and location of the retail space. Photographers, cake makers, invitation designers, makeup artists might choose to operate from their home office or just provide a mobile service when needed. This does not mean they can be trusted, by them having no physical presence allows them to save more money and as a result, they can pass on the savings to you as the customer. For caterers, you want to make sure they are properly certified and they use an inspector approved kitchen, even if it’s a temporary rented kitchen.
While most wedding vendors may choose to work from home or have a retail location, some vendors simply can’t avoid not having a retail location. For example, your venue needs to have a physical presence and of course, most bridal dress stores have actual stores that you can go to. The good thing is that if you hire a wedding vendor that works from home, they technically can never go out of business.
Of course, you want to check reviews from all vendors before hiring them but this is an added layer of security. On the other hand, if you are hiring a wedding vendor and they operate from a retail location, there is always that chance that they may shut down. If the owners are honourable and still deliver their promise to their customers in the unfortunate event that they close down, then that’s great. But there have been some wedding dress stores in the past that closed down and never refunded their clients.
The chances of this happening are very low, but you can rest assured that if you hire a wedding vendor that works from home, they will 100% be there to deliver on their services for your special day. Always do your due diligence by checking the person’s website and Google reviews. One trick you can use is by searching for their company name + reviews when you go on Google. This will show you all of the reviews on every single website they have a business listing. For example, Yellow Pages, Facebook reviews, Google reviews, Yelp reviews, Better Business Bureau and much more.
Do You Need Wedding Insurance
Your wedding is going to cost a lot of money, and if you are one of those couples that want that extra bit of piece of mind, there is such thing as wedding insurance. Simply going on Google and searching for wedding insurance + your city name, will give you a few links of relevant companies that can provide such services for your wedding day. Let’s say that your banquet hall goes out of business and shuts down, or your guests damage expensive equipment owned by the photography company or certain vendors don’t show up, the insurance can come in handy for these scenarios. Although we never used wedding insurance ourselves, the service does exist and its fairly inexpensive. Talk to your local wedding insurance provider to get the full details on what specifically the insurance will cover in case of unfortunate circumstances.
If you don’t want to have wedding insurance, the best way to protect yourself is to hire the best wedding vendors in the city.
Typically, these will be the first vendors that show up on the first page of Google, for the specific service that you searched for. If your wedding vendor has a good presence on Google, this usually means that their business has a good flow of customers coming into their sales pipeline. If they also have anywhere from 50-100 five-star reviews, then it means you are most likely dealing with a very trustworthy company. Usually some of the more famous wedding companies in Toronto still have the original owners as active members in the business, this shows that they care about their business and are actively on top of it to make sure everything goes smoothly. Also, if the wedding vendor you are considering on hiring has a lot of badges from famous wedding blogs and magazines or industry certifications, this is another signal that the vendor really cares
about their brand and their reputation.