Nobody Judges a Coat by How Much Fabric Was Used
We judge most creative work by its quality, not its quantity. Floristry is the rare craft where how much gets mistaken for how good. On size, value, and what you're really paying for.
Imagine judging a garment by how much fabric it contained. The best coat would be the one with the most metres of wool in it. The dress of the season would be the one that needed a second bolt of fabric. A beautifully cut jacket would lose, every time, to a sleeping bag with sleeves.
It sounds absurd because it is. I spent years in fashion and nobody ever held up a jacket and asked how much fabric they were getting for the money. Yet that's exactly how most people judge flowers.
Size has become the only measure
In our category, the first question is almost always about size. How many stems? How big is it? Will it look like enough? Size has become the stand-in for value, and for a lot of people it's the only measure they reach for.
Try applying it to any other craft and the logic falls apart.
A painting priced by the litre of paint on the canvas.
A novel judged by its weight, so the best book of the year is the one that doubles as a doorstop.
A haircut valued by how much hair ends up on the floor.
A restaurant reviewed by the kilo, which would make the all-you-can-eat buffet the finest dining in the country.
A song judged by its length, so every perfect three-minute single loses to a twenty-minute drum solo.
A chair valued by the timber in it, so the best chair is a log.
In every one of those, we understand without being told that what we're paying for is the thinking and the skill. The material is just what it's made of.
What size can't tell you
A bouquet's quality lives in things a stem count can't see. Its proportions. Its colour, and whether the colours were chosen to sit together or just happened to be in the bucket. Its line: whether it stands up and holds a shape or slumps into a mound. Whether it looks finished from every side, not just the one in the photo.
Those are design decisions, and they're where the real difference between two bouquets lives. It's why height reads as care and width just reads as more, and why every stem in a bouquet should be doing a job. A bigger bouquet with no idea behind it is still a bouquet with no idea behind it. There's just more of it.
Why are flowers so expensive? Look at the hands
Most of what you're paying for in a bouquet isn't flowers. It's people. Nothing in our category is mechanised. There is no machine that makes a bouquet, and there never has been.
Every stem is handled by a person, more than once. It's unpacked, stripped, cut and conditioned in water before anyone thinks about design. Then a florist with years of training chooses it, places it, steps back, moves it, and places it again, working with a material that's alive and changing by the hour. Then the bouquet is tied, wrapped, carded and sent on its way. All of it by hand.
That time and skill is the most expensive thing in the bouquet, and it's the part a stem count ignores completely. When you judge flowers by how many there are, you're counting the materials and leaving out the craft.
Nobody judges a coat by how much fabric was used. Flowers deserve the same courtesy.
More stems isn't more care
The idea I most want to push back on is that more stems always means more value. Add stems without a reason and you don't get a better bouquet. You get a busier one. The colours start to muddy, the shape disappears, and the flower you were meant to notice gets lost in the crowd.
Some of the most considered work a florist does is knowing when to stop. That restraint takes more skill than adding another handful, not less. It's the same reason a well-cut jacket uses exactly the fabric it needs and not a centimetre more.
Small, and completely finished.
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The person who receives your flowers won't remember how many stems there were. They'll remember how it looked on the table, how it changed the room, and that someone chose it with care. That's what the money was for.
So when you're choosing a bouquet, ask the question you'd ask of anything else made well. Not how much is there, but how well was it made.
