Poppy's Secret to Perfect Wedding Florals for Your Big Day

We’re pulling back the curtain on our unique process

Poppy’s signature style is lush and romantic, like you wandered into an enchanted garden and hand-gathered the prettiest stems you could find. It’s easygoing and organic with gentle movement.

The thing about this effortless look is that it takes an extraordinary amount of effort.

We’ve given a glimpse into how we execute from customer vision to final product, and now we want to share more about how we cull our catalog, customize our offerings, and guarantee the freshest flowers at your wedding.

In short, this is how we fulfill your Poppy order.

What does the Poppy fulfillment team do?

Poppy’s fulfillment team runs the logistics that match your vision to your order, and your order to the designer who brings it to life.

Poppy is one of the wedding floral industry’s biggest aggregators of data, and we can deliver on and predict trends. We are constantly evolving our catalog to represent the latest palettes, wedding styles and most in-demand flowers.

The team behind the desk is as passionate about flowers as the designer who will be in the field on your wedding day. They’re thoroughly trained in the vocation of floral design and knowledgeable about what’s happening in weddings – both in floral trends and beyond.

Placing Your Poppy Order with a Wedding Specialist

Poppy isn’t simply about being more attainable; we’re about being available to answer questions and to be your smartest-florist-in-the-room friend. We don’t expect our customers to know how expensive peonies are, for example. If you ask for something that far exceeds your budget – armfuls of peonies for your 10-person wedding party – we’ll show you the price and help you make substitutions from there. We love customers who come with big energy and big ideas. The more information we have, the more helpful we can be.

When you’re working with the Poppy wedding specialist to place your order, you’ll be guided to think within the parameters of the possible. These parameters include budget (the Poppy minimum is $1,500 and most of our couples spend within the range of $1,500-$5,000), seasonality and availability. Seasonality and availability are similar concepts. Certain flowers bloom only during specific times of the year, and availability refers to the flowers grown on Poppy’s farms in Ecuador and Colombia.

You’ll get a full proposal that outlines the exact components of your order. Within the proposal, your wedding specialist will make notes about specifications you’ve made to any designs. Once the proposal is finalized, you place your order to save your date.

From Logistics to Recipes

Building off the proposal notes, inspiration imagery and even the Pinterest links your wedding specialist has gathered from you, the fulfillment team can officially begin navigating the logistics of that vision. It might feel unnatural to think of florals this way – as quantifiable products requiring logistics – and that’s OK. You come to Poppy with the vision, budget and date, and the team does the rest of the work for you.

That starts with the designer writing the recipe.

This is the simultaneously creative and technical part where our designers define and then list by quantity each discrete floral and mechanical component in all your pieces.

Once the recipe for each piece of your wedding order is written, the team turns to the farm.

Our Farm-Direct Sourcing Model

Our founder, Cameron, knew from her experience working with another major floral startup that sourcing flowers directly from farms had advantages beyond cost savings – though that’s a big one, and we’ll go into more about it.

When a company builds a relationship with a farm, it allows for the crops to reflect that company’s aesthetic. Like we’ve mentioned already, Poppy’s flowers are romantic, garden-style stems. The flowers grown on our farms allow us to fulfill orders that embody that style: anemones, roses, dahlias, and ranunculus, to name a few. This kind of inventory control means that there’s nothing grown on our farms that doesn’t meet the aesthetic standard of a Poppy design.

Beyond inventory control, Poppy also exercises quantity control. Florist shops order their flowers through a wholesaler. For the customer, this means not only paying an increased price for the flower itself, but also paying for an unnecessary number of them. Every Poppy order is based on its corresponding custom recipe, and the farm fulfills those orders exactly.

The Creative Edge

Another advantage to working within this farm-direct sourcing model is that we can innovate with new varieties of flowers that the farm is testing. We communicate constantly with our farmers to learn how certain crops are faring and what new flowers they’re growing next. This helps us plan ahead for creative new arrangements in future iterations of our Poppy catalog. You know now that Poppy is a major aggregator of wedding trends, so if we see a current wave of interest toward a certain color or style, we can work with our farms to accommodate that with our flowers.

Knowing how the flowers are grown is one part of pulling back the curtain on the Poppy process. We want to tell you more about how flowers get harvested and arranged specifically for you.

‍Exactly how fresh are Poppy flowers? We know – down to the day.

Your wedding flowers are harvested about a week ahead of your event. They are packed carefully in boxes and shipped as refrigerated cargo. When they leave our farms, they spend about three to five days in transit before they reach the designer who will be servicing your wedding.

When the designer receives the flowers, they begin work by unboxing and processing them, which means trimming the ends and placing them in water. Then it takes her about two to three days to execute all the work for your wedding, including personals (anything you or your wedding party carries or wears, like bouquets, corsages and boutonnieres) and centerpieces.

All told, Poppy delivers flowers from farm to customer in just seven to ten days. What’s more, there are as few hands as possible touching your flowers. The farm harvests and packs them, then the next set of hands is your designer. The last set of hands is yours holding your bouquet!

Fulfilled to Perfection

On the Poppy design end, the wedding specialist who helped create your order is working behind the scenes with the design specialist who wrote your unique recipes. That design specialist is working with the designer to ensure the final product matches your vision.

There are checks at every step of our fulfillment process to uphold the Poppy promise that your wedding flowers will be exactly what you envisioned and ordered. Every set of hands that touches your flowers, and every Poppy team member thinking through the logistics of your order is invested in making sure your flowers reach you looking fresh and lush.

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How We Fulfill Your Poppy Order

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How We Fulfill Your Poppy Order

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