Wedding and event designers have long held a guiding principle that flowers at certain height or distance are acceptable in a realistic, faux botanicals. When flowers aren’t being touched frequently, the beauty and effect is achieved with permanent material. Plus, you don’t have to hold your breath waiting for the stock to arrive, concerns about freshness, and a potential time crunch in design and set-up. Add the benefits of reusability and less fragility, and you’ve discovered the event florist’s secret weapon.

But to be clear, we love fresh flowers!  We believe silk flowers complement fresh. We know because we’ve seen your beautiful work and focused on developing new lines of silk flowers with four central beliefs:

1. Silk flowers are an artistic representation of the beauty found in nature. At its core,  the combination of color, shape and size of flowers adds art to our homes and events. We revere them as artistic tools, and therefore their quality and color are extremely important.
2. Silk flowers are botanically correct. Our silk flowers contain the same attributes as their fresh counterparts. Petals may be hand painted to resemble the natural color variation. Foliage is the correct shape and shade you’d find on the bush or plant. Even the materials we use – fabrics, plastic, polyurethane and more, are selected to provide the most accurate texture.   
3. Silk flowers are trend forward. We do allow for an exception to rule #2. Sometimes the beauty in faux flowers is controlling the colors and materials to fill a need for home decor and wedding color trends. This spectrum varies. For example, it could be a color found in nature, like a blush pink, applied to a sunflower that wouldn’t grow that way naturally, but could be easily imagined. This allows designers to get their size, texture and shape needs met while staying in a color story. We also know there are some truly Avant Garde fashions that need unique materials, like a turquoise ranunculus.
4. Silk flowers are a complement to fresh flowers, not a competitor. There are benefits to both fresh and silk flowers. Both have their place. And in events, we see mixing silk and fresh can save time, and provide peace of mind. In areas like a flower wall, lifelike silk greenery and florals can be beautifully paired with fresh floral accents. This helps to achieve a price point and a timeline for labor that is manageable, along with great reusability. Because of this, we, again remind ourselves of rule #2. Only by creating botanically correct artificial flowers can our customers mix real and faux flawlessly.

2022 is the time to revisit silk flowers! With riskier supply chains and more individualistic customers than ever, silk flowers in conjunction with your fresh goods can be the answer to creativity, ease and efficiency.

And we will continue to support our floral community by developing high-quality, trustworthy products that allow you to be the artists, and sharing best practices along the way in this blog.

A Collaboration from Sarah Botchick of Pioneer and Blog Writer Laura Vitale.