Michaels for Silk and Dried Wedding Flowers After JOANN

Michaels is a craft store, not a florist.

Walk into a location and you'll find aisles of artificial "silk" stems, dried and preserved botanicals, floral foam and ribbon, the raw materials for wedding decor built by hand.

Nobody designs an arrangement for you, and nobody delivers one to your venue.

This page exists because JOANN, the craft chain a lot of brides defaulted to for this kind of shopping, closed for good in 2025, and Michaels is the name people reach for now instead.

What follows covers what Michaels took over from JOANN, what it didn't, and how silk and dried stems trade off against fresh if you're still weighing that question.

Wedding-scale bulk ordering through Michaels: yes, structurally.

Faux and dried stems can be bought in any quantity, on any day, because there's no cold chain and no narrow event-day timing window standing between the shelf and your wedding date.

Where Michaels Fits in the National Flower-Ordering Picture

Buying wedding flowers online breaks down into a handful of business models: wire-service florists, farm-direct sellers, bulk-wholesale suppliers, subscription boxes, marketplaces, and craft-retail chains like this one.

I cover how the national flower-ordering models differ elsewhere on this hub. Michaels is the only craft-retail entity in that lineup, built for assembling your own decor from reusable, non-perishable materials rather than placing a fresh-stem order with a lead time attached.

This site may earn a commission when you click through to some of the brands mentioned here. That did not influence which businesses are covered, how they're described, or the verdict below. Our review methodology explains how we check every seller in this hub, and is worth reading directly rather than taking a summary of it as the last word.

What Michaels Is: A Craft Store, Not a Flower Delivery Service

A national craft-supply retailer with stores across the country and a site at michaels.com, Michaels sells the raw materials for wedding decor rather than a finished product.

That includes artificial flower stems, marketed as "silk" even though the material is almost always polyester or plastic, dried and preserved botanicals, floral foam and mechanics, and ribbon in wedding-appropriate colors.

Add wire, tape and the rest of the small hardware, and a couple has what's needed to build centerpieces, bouquets and ceremony decor themselves.

What Michaels doesn't do matters just as much. There's no design consultation. Nobody builds a custom arrangement to order, and there's no delivery network of any kind.

No department is specifically labeled for weddings, either. On the legitimacy question, there's nothing complicated: Michaels is a large, actively operating national chain, with stores currently open and a working e-commerce site behind them.

What You Can Actually Buy for a Wedding

Start with the stems. Michaels sells artificial flowers labeled "silk" throughout the store and online, and that word is worth stopping on: those stems are almost always polyester or plastic, not silk of any kind. It's an industry-wide naming convention, not something unique to Michaels, but it matters before you build a decor plan around a word that doesn't mean what it sounds like.

Alongside the faux stems sits a dried and preserved botanical selection, useful for texture without the upkeep a live arrangement needs.

The store also carries floral foam and mechanics, wire, tape, and ribbon in wedding-appropriate colors, the hardware a DIY centerpiece or bouquet actually needs to hold together. (I still have a spool of ribbon left over from a project two years back, untouched in a closet - that's the whole pitch of buying something that was never alive to begin with.) None of it needs a lead time.

Buy a case of stems in March for an October wedding and never think about a cold chain again.

That's the real cost-saving angle here: buy ahead at leisure, spread the purchase over a few trips if it helps the budget, and reuse whatever doesn't get used on the day. If you're still weighing how much of the flower work you can realistically take on yourself, settle that before you buy in bulk.

What It Costs (and Why There's No Number to Give You)

There's no published price figure for a Michaels wedding order, and I'm not going to invent one. What I can tell you is the shape of the cost, simpler than anywhere else in this hub: a one-time purchase, no design fee, no delivery charge, and no deposit held against a future date. You pay for the materials once, at checkout, and that's the whole transaction.

Check current in-store or online pricing directly before you build a decor plan around any specific item.

Is Michaels a Real Replacement for JOANN?

JOANN filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in January 2025, its second filing within about a year, and by February 2025 the company had announced it would close every store location across all 49 states where it operated.

As of this research, JOANN is not running as an operating retailer or e-commerce business under its own name. That's corroborated independently by both AP News and CBS News, not one outlet's account.

Here's the myth that's circulated since, and it deserves correcting.

Myth: "Michaels bought JOANN." That's the version most people repeat, and it isn't quite right.

Fact: In June 2025, Michaels acquired JOANN's intellectual property and private-label brands, the Big Twist yarn line among them. Michaels did not acquire JOANN's stores or its corporate entity. It did not acquire JOANN's e-commerce operation either.

JOANN's former website now redirects visitors to Michaels, which is almost certainly where the "Michaels bought JOANN" version got its start; JOANN itself closed separately and completely, following its own bankruptcy process, before that redirect ever went up. (I've seen this exact confusion play out in wedding-planning forums - someone posts "just go to Michaels, it's basically JOANN now," as if the redirect settled it.)

What Michaels has actually done since is a fabric and sewing story, not a floral one. Fabric is already carried in more than 840 Michaels stores, and a company representative has cited a target of 1,000-plus stores carrying it, plus roughly 250 additional locations, by early 2026. That's a reported target, not a delivered fact, and it says nothing about silk or dried flowers specifically.

Whether Michaels' wedding-flower selection now matches what JOANN used to carry is genuinely unconfirmed, and so is whether what you see in a specific store matches what's shown online. I made a version of this same mistake with my own dress: I assumed the alteration slot would still be there when I needed it and missed the window by two weeks.

Assuming a familiar name still has what you remember it having, without checking first, is the same complacency wearing a different outfit.

How Michaels Compares to Fresh-Flower Options

Put Michaels next to the two fresh-flower sellers covered elsewhere on this hub, and the trade-off is immediate.

Entity	Business model	Wedding-day bulk support	Lead time / cold chain	Price signal
Michaels	Craft retail, faux and dried stems	Yes, structurally, any quantity, any time	None, reusable, no cold chain	None published
FiftyFlowers	Bulk-wholesale fresh stems	Yes	Narrow, multi-day conditioning, cold-chain dependent	$60.00-$2,175.00 collection range
The Bouqs Co.	Farm-direct, direct-to-consumer	A real Bulk Flowers category exists, no published self-serve price	Moderate, farm-to-delivery	No bulk price disclosed

FiftyFlowers ships raw stems that need days of conditioning before they're usable; what a raw-stem bulk order asks of you instead is real labor, not just a different price point.

The Bouqs Co. sits between the two: the finished, farm-direct alternative if you want real flowers delivered ready to use, skipping the conditioning window but still tied to a delivery schedule built around the wedding date.

Nothing sold at Michaels needs a delivery schedule at all. Buy it whenever the store trip fits your calendar, and it's still usable on the day, six months later or six days later, since none of it was ever alive to begin with.

Honest Verdict: A Practical Stand-In, With Real Limits

The honest verdict: Michaels is the practical national stand-in for silk, faux and dried wedding decor now that JOANN has fully closed, and it earns that call honestly. It's a large, currently operating retailer with the raw materials a DIY-minded couple needs, sold in any quantity, on any timeline.

But confirm current in-store silk-flower stock and pricing directly before you build an entire decor plan around it.

The store's documented 2025-2026 growth has been about fabric and sewing, not a confirmed floral-department expansion, and that gap between what's proven and what's assumed is exactly where a decor plan can go wrong.

Michaels and JOANN: FAQ

Does Michaels actually sell wedding flowers? Yes: artificial ("silk," typically polyester or plastic) and dried or preserved stems, plus DIY wedding-decor supplies, sold in-store and online. There's no design service and no delivery, and nothing here is organized into a wedding-specific department.

Did Michaels buy JOANN? Only JOANN's intellectual property and private-label brands, acquired in June 2025, not its stores or its e-commerce business. JOANN separately closed every location by early 2025, following its own bankruptcy filing.

Is the silk-flower selection at Michaels as big as JOANN's used to be? Unconfirmed. Michaels' documented 2025-2026 growth has been in fabric and sewing, not a confirmed floral-assortment expansion, so check current stock before assuming the range matches what JOANN once carried.

What if Michaels doesn't have enough stems in stock for my wedding? Look at FiftyFlowers for a fresh, bulk-wholesale order, or The Bouqs Co. for a finished, farm-direct alternative. Neither shares Michaels' no-lead-time, no-cold-chain setup, so budget extra time either way.

What if a flower or decor company I'm relying on for my wedding closes before my date? Pay by credit card where you can, and confirm close to your date that the vendor you're counting on is still trading. JOANN's abrupt 2025 closure is the documented example behind this caution.

Before You Buy: Checklist and a Note on Our Data

Most of the pre-payment checklist used elsewhere on this hub assumes a deposit-based vendor contract, and Michaels isn't that. It's a straightforward retail purchase, so only a handful of these items apply. Run through what's relevant before you commit to a large order:

1. Confirm current stock and pricing directly, in-store or on michaels.com, before planning around a specific item.
2. Treat any online-listed price or assortment claim as a snapshot, not a guarantee, and re-check it close to the wedding date.
3. Verify the actual material before buying stems in bulk for a coordinated look; "silk" almost always means polyester or plastic.
4. Don't assume in-store selection matches what's shown online, or what JOANN previously carried.
5. Check the store's return or exchange policy before committing to a large bulk quantity.
6. Weigh a review system tied to verified purchases above an open, anonymous star count, where one is available.

The store-count and fabric-expansion figures above are a company-reported target, not an audited total; re-check them yourself if the number matters to your decision. This site may earn a commission on some outbound links, which played no role in what's covered here.

Related Options and Further Reading

A few related pages worth reading before you commit to a decor plan:

• How the other five ways to buy wedding flowers online compare

Confirm current in-store or online stock and pricing directly before you build a decor plan around Michaels, and look at FiftyFlowers or The Bouqs Co. if real flowers end up the better fit for your wedding after all.