Design Labor & Fees

Why Design Labor Matters in Floral Pricing

 

Understanding design labor fees and labor costs is essential to pricing floral arrangements and installations profitably. Flowers and hard goods are only part of the actual cost of a design—the time and professional skill required to create a beautiful bespoke contemporary arrangement, or installation, has significant monetary value as well.

 

Tracking design labor helps you understand how much labor time an arrangement or installation actually requires and whether the price you charge (design fee) adequately covers that time. This is especially important for larger arrangements and installations, where processing, designing, assembling, and finishing can represent a significant portion of the total cost.

 

When design labor is built intentionally into your pricing, you can price more accurately, protect your profit margins, evaluate the efficiency of designing your arrangements and installations, and make better decisions about which products and projects are financially sustainable.

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Why Calculate Your Actual Hourly Bill Rate?

 

Wedding and event floral designers price design labor using a design fee within the overall pricing formula rather than billing clients by the hour. This makes sense because clients are purchasing a floral product.

 

However, breaking your design fee down into an actual hourly bill rate gives you valuable insight into whether the design fee covers both the time and skill required to create the floral product and to provide the labor profit to compensate you and your business.

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For example, the same $150 design fee produces quite different results if the design labor time for an arrangement takes one hour versus three hours. By determining your actual design labor time, you can effectively determine your hourly bill rate that you are charging the client for that arrangement. 

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Knowing this number helps you evaluate profitability, identify designs that are taking too long to produce, improve estimating, and determine whether your design fee needs to be adjusted.

 

You can continue pricing with a design fee while using the hourly bill rate as an internal management method to confirm that your pricing reflects both the value of your creative work and the time required to produce it.

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The calculators mentioned below help you determine a profitable design labor fee for any arrangement.

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• Design Labor Timer & Fee Calculator

• Design Fee Calculator

• ​Hourly Bill Rate Calculator

• ​Design Labor Time Calculator​

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The chart with Hourly Pay Rates and Hourly Bill Rates is approximations. 

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