Click on the photo to enlarge it. Left side floral design is Ikebana arrangement. Center design is European table arrangement. The right one shows wedding bouquet. All these arrangements were made by our students during a flower arranging lesson in the classroom of California Flower Art Academy. The arrangements were done under the direction of our floral design instructor. If you diligently follow flower arrangement teacher's instruction during a lesson and practice at home what you learned during a lesson, you can earn good skill of floral arranging. And finally you can achieve the goal of becoming a floral designer. If your goal is to become a professional floral designer, you need to make more efforts to earn better skills than amateur florists.
We guess that there are lots of people who are interested in becoming a floral designer. For that purpose they would like to take lessons of flower arrangements. We would like to take this opportunity to explain a little bit more about how to become a floral designer as follows:
As mentioned above, there are two types of floral designers. One is amateur designer and the other one is professional designer. Needless to say, professional floral designer should have much higher level of floral arranging skill than amateur designers. In order to earn such high level of floral design skills, you need to find a well experienced and talented instructor. However we can find many floral shop owners who are running florist without taking any official lessons from flower arranging instructor. If you are resourceful and familiar with how to do business, you MAY be able to run a floral shop. Quite frankly speaking, in order to run a floral shop, the knowledge and experience about doing business is more important than having a very good skill of floral arrangements. I mean it is possible to run a ordinary floral shop without any high level of floral arranging skills. However if you want to penetrate the market of wedding and corporate floral decoration market, it is mandatory to earn a decent skill without which you are unable to offer a high quality of flower decorating services. If that is the case, you should join a floral school or find a good flower arranging instructor to learn flower arrangements.
Some of prospective students who approach our school say that it COULD be possible to earn skill of floral designs by way of OJT (on the job training) through actually working for a floral shop. Yes, this is one of the ways you can earn skills of floral designs as well as know-how of how to manage a floral shop. However if you have time and fund available for learning at a floral school, it is ideal to take flower arranging lessons. Also if the school offers shop management program, it is ideal to take lessons of the management as well.
To summarize how to become a floral designer, we can say as follows:
A. To work at a floral shop: to learn, from OJT, floral designs and shop management.
It MAY be difficult to get a job without flower arranging skill and also difficult to
earn high level of floral design skills. But this is the most affordable way.
B. To take lessons of floral arrangement and also shop management. You can find
C. To earn floral design skills at a floral design school (or from a floral design
instructor) and after that get a job at a floral shop to learn, from OJT, shop
management.
D. To work as an assistant at a floral school as a volunteer for learning a flower
arranging skills. After that get a job at a floral shop to learn shop management.
If you would like to work as an independent floral designer without running a floral shop, all you need to do is to earn flower arranging skills. In this case it is not necessary to learn shop management. However even in this case, minimal required knowledge for running your own business is necessary, such as cash flower management and taking care of sales tax return etc.
No matter in what kind of manner you run your own business, it is necessary to get a business license from a city where your business is located and also seller's permit (resale license) for procuring flower materials at a floral shop at a wholesale price.
Here is YouTube video introducing College Flowers offering flower business management. The source of this video is
CEV Multimedia Demonstrator is Kelly
