Jenny (00:28)
Mother's Day is a key event for profitability on my flower farm and for many small-scale flower farms everywhere. As you know, a lot of the flower industry is driven by holidays. So think Mother's Day, Valentine's Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas, then, know, anniversaries, birthdays, gift giving. Flowers are just such a huge component of holidays and celebrations. And so it is really in our best interest to try to produce
flowers so we can take advantage of those holidays. And in this episode, I'm going to be talking about how you can have a huge Mother's Day this year. But here is the key thing. You have to start preparing now and actually probably may have started preparing last year, but no biggie. We'll get to that in a minute. So in this episode, I'm going to be going over how you can have a big success with Mother's Day and maybe even some other flower holidays. So Mother's Day is just like,
A banger for us, we like kick off our season with it. We a pile of revenue in the month of May because of Mother's Day. And just because it's early spring, like the demand for flowers seems to be huge, at least then for us. So every year we do multiple five figures in revenue over Mother's Day weekend, which is insane. Like it nearly pays for maybe not all of our labor for the entire year, but like a very large percentage.
of our hired labor for the year. Maybe like 65 % of it or something like that.
And so as you can see, we got really amped up about Mother's Day. And in the beginning, we just went to our farmers market for Mother's Day, but over time we have branched out into other ways of selling our flowers over that weekend, mostly to mitigate our risk. So my friend Lindsay from Wild Root Flower Farm told me one year that she had a terrible Mother's Day because she
It just rained the whole weekend. was nothing but rain, rained out her farmer's market, like rained out everything. And so she had all like hundreds of bunches of flowers, probably. And just wasn't a great weekend. And that was like kind of scary to me. And I was like, yeah, I guess I should probably diversify a little bit. So now we sell our flowers that weekend through a farmer's market and we have an on-farm market. Like we have a farm stand here in the springtime, but we have like a special like pop-up market here at the farm.
We've also done pop-up markets with other businesses. Kind of depends on the year if we do that or not. And then we also partner with other businesses where we kind of sell them flower bunches wholesale that they resell over the weekend. And they have their own events and stuff. So we've done this with a chocolate company, a local chocolate company, a local wine bar, a local brewery, so that kind of thing.
something else we've done in the past and we haven't done it for awhile, but we might start offering it again is doing mother's day, workshop. So, you know, maybe not on mother's day weekend, cause it's crazy for us, but selling tickets on mother's day weekend for coming to a workshop later on during the season. And so some of our success with our farmers market is that we do have a great farmers market. it's on a Sunday, so it's almost always.
On mother's day. So people bring their moms out to the farmer's markets, a little outing for them. They go and get poutine and listen to music and buy flowers for me. And I will tell you, it is like being the only beer stand in a football stadium. It's insane. And I love it.
We often have really long lines. Like we bring a ton of volume and we have a lot of people that come with us to the farmer's market to handle sales, to make the whole process like smooth as possible. And it's so much fun and it's so great because we have had a lot of the same customers that come back year after year after year. And actually this is like a big, huge event that's really great for our farm in a lot of other ways, because we'll have families buying flowers for their moms.
And then moms find out about us just by being gifted these flowers and then they become CSA customers or farmers market customers or farm stand customers. And so it's a great way to get our name out there through a big event like this, like Mother's Day. So the farmers market is huge. I recommend if you don't go to a farmers market, see if maybe there is one near you, like a good one, not just a rinky dink one.
A good farmer's market that might let you in just for like a day on mother's day, because it would add a ton of value to a farmer's market to have flowers on mother's day. I am the only farmer at our farmer's market that has flowers on mother's day. So it's really like, like my husband always says, it's like, we're the only beer stand at the football stadium. Like everyone comes to us for flowers because they're not really available through a lot of other outlets. And so that's one way that we've sort of set ourselves apart,
So there's about five other things that we work on to make sure we have a big Mother's Day weekend for sales that you can do as well. And that's what I'm going be talking about for the rest of this podcast episode. So we start dropping hints and starting to talk about Mother's Day offerings about now, maybe a couple weeks ago, kind of depending on the year. So we start selling flowers now. Like we get the idea in people's heads and we start emailing our list. We email them a few weeks before.
the week of Mother's Day and then Friday of Mother's Day to be like, hey, don't forget to get your flowers on Sunday. Bring mom out and take her out to brunch. And there's other things available at the farmer's market or at our farm stand that we kind of encourage them to do to give them an event or an experience, like not just selling them on the flowers. Like when they come to our farm stand, we have this really great restaurant in our town, literally like the only restaurant in our town that's
Kind of upscale. It's very weird because we are not an upscale town, but anyways, that's Clifton Springs for you. So we, anyhow, we tell people when they come get their flowers, go take mom out to lunch at war fields, at the restaurant, you know, do a little brunch thing, have an experience about it. There's a really beautiful park that they can walk through over there. And so we offer them like an idea and an experience. And I think that.
is really helpful to get people interested in also coming to get flowers, especially if you're like me and you live in the middle of nowhere, like you're really, really rural. So another thing that we do is we start taking pre-orders for Mother's Day for pickup at the farm or at the farmer's market. And we kind of just do like a special arrangement for this. You know, we used to do big arrangements to sell at the farmer's market, but they weren't huge sellers for us.
Most people just wanted bouquets to buy for their moms. So now what we do for our pre-orders is we just do arrangements for pre-orders and we don't really sell the arrangements like in person at our farm stand or at the farmer's market. just do bouquets and bunches. And so we start advertising those pre-orders for pickup way ahead of time. And it usually is like a few thousand dollars boost for us.
that I don't think that we would get otherwise just selling, you know, at the farmer's market or a farm stand or, you know, wholesale. I'm not really going to be talking about that that much, but, you know, that's something that I think has been really good for us. We also do Facebook ads for our farm stand. So our farm stand is Friday through Sunday at our farm specifically for Mother's Day weekend. do like a special Mother's Day market event, and we have made an event.
on Facebook before that we share in our community groups on Facebook and ask our neighbors and other people and our customers to share. We've actually had quite a few people discover us that way, which has been super cool. Now, I don't do ads, like paid ads for anything else ever. I guess one time I did one for our DaliaTubers sale, but it wasn't that great. I don't think I really got a return on that. we...
have started doing them for this Mother's Day farm stand. And I think because it's like an event, it has really helped to generate interest and get people out to the farm because people are looking for things to do and like something that's different, something that's fun to do with mom. Something that I would love to do in the future is do like a pick your own only during Mother's Day, but I don't know how the hell I would make that happen. So we haven't done that yet, but it's like an idea that I have churning in the back of my mind. So maybe someday we'll get around to doing that.
You know, Facebook ads, they can work, they cannot work. It depends on who you talk to and how you do them. Like, I'm not an expert at ads, but I have found that for this particular event, just for Mother's Day, throwing a little bit of money at that, like, we've gotten a really good return on it. So, you know, the whole point I'm trying to make right now is that you need to start planning right now. Like, start your marketing, start talking to your customers about it.
You know, think about when you're going to post on social media, when you're going to send your emails ahead of time, you know, write out your social media content, write out your marketing emails. If you're going to do Facebook ads, write out a few different ones with a couple of different hooks and see which one performs better to get those people out and really just start kind of generating interest in mother's day starting right now. It really
There is this marketing rule of seven. So this is a rule in marketing that says that a potential customer typically needs to see your ad or your message or come in contact with your brand at least seven times before making a purchase decision. So this basically is telling us that we need to repeatedly expose ourselves to, okay, maybe that wasn't the best phrase to use. not, we're not.
exposing ourselves to anybody but we're getting people to see us and see our brand multiple times in order to kind of build that like brand recognition and get them to be like yeah that's that flower farm nearby to get them to be encouraged to make a sale or to buy from us. So a customer needs to like encounter you several times through a bunch of different channels before they feel comfortable enough to buy from you.
And so we're doing that by starting the conversation now by talking about it on social media, talking about it through email, getting those pre-orders going, all that kind of stuff. So your like pre Mother's Day launch runway, this is kind what I like to call it, might look different than mine. But the whole point here is you want to start talking about it now. So people, when they think like, shoot, Mother's Day is this weekend. They're like, in the back of my head, like I remembered Trademarks Flower Farm, they have flowers.
Like I'll go find them. So you want that to happen. Now that's all like sort of the pre launch pre mother's day stuff. And here are some things that we do during like the mother's day crunch.
that are really beneficial for our business. The first thing is during Mother's Day weekend, we offer a few different price points. So the lowest price point that we offer is probably about 25 bucks for just a straight bunch of like tulips or ranunculus. But then we also have mixed bouquets that are usually in the range of like 45 to $55. And we kind of make a couple of different ones, typically like a lower price one, one that's a little bit higher.
just depending on what people wanna spend. And then we do arrangements that are like $75 and above. And they're not like huge, know, like bridal or like wedding arrangements, but they're like nice little arrangements, you know? And we are not arrangement people. Like we don't typically make arrangements. We only do vase arrangements for things like Mother's Day. But I like to have different price points because it, well, I've talked about this in a previous episode a long time ago.
But having these different price points means that you can appeal to a large range of people. Like, not everyone can afford to spend $80 on an arrangement for their mom. And so, like, I want to be able to have something for them to gift their mom because the rest of the year, I'm selling stuff for like $15 to $40. So in that price range, if I can get someone to buy from me at Mother's Day for the first time, maybe they'll come back for more if they buy at that price point.
Whereas I would say the majority of people, there's like this gift consciousness that when they're buying a gift for somebody, they want it to have value. They want it to be something nice that they like spent money on because that means that they like really love this person. Of course, like that's not really true. Like you love somebody as much as you love them, no matter what you spend, but this is like a bias that people actually have. And so doing that higher price point of like a $50 mixed bouquet.
that appeals to that crowd. And then of course, there's always going to be people who are like, my mom loves flowers. She loves you. Like we're getting her the like prettiest, biggest arrangement ever. So I like to appeal to all these different price points. But another reason is that I have found that I have customers who come and they buy like anywhere from four to 10 different arrangements or bouquets or bunches or whatever for their mother, their grandmother, their mother-in-law, their sister, their friend that just had a baby. like, so we
actually have customers that buy a large volume of bunches and bouquets on Mother's Day. And so we want them to be able to do that so more people get our flowers. So having that lower price point of like $25 makes it a lot easier for them to do that. And like I said before, we've gotten a ton of customers from Mother's Day, from people being gifted our flowers and then signing up for the CSA or coming to the farmers market. Or back when we used to do a lot of workshops, they'd come to one of those.
been super, super cool. So I recommend having that in place and having a plan for that for Mother's Day weekend. Another thing I recommend is having your email list out and ready to collect emails on Mother's Day weekend. So obviously Mother's Day weekend is crazy hectic for us. It's insane. It's so much fun, though.
this can be a really good time to be a great promoter for your business. People will be looking for flowers who normally aren't. So get your email list ready, get them out, get people on your email list. Like this is so simple to do. Like at our farmer's market, we literally just have a pad of paper where people sign up for our email as they put their name and their email address. And we do verify before they walk away because sometimes people's handwriting is really hard to read.
but we love doing that and it's been really effective for us. And if you're not at a farmer's market, if you're selling online, like you can offer a little freebie or just have a little check mark at the checkout. Like, you know, be added to our email list or, know, just as they're buying stuff off your website or whatever. And it's, you can just ask, like, just be like, Hey, you want to be on our email list as people are buying flowers for you or like, Hey, I have a free cut flower care guide for you.
or to give the gift recipient, whoever you're buying this for, just sign up for an email list and you'll get it right to your inbox. Or you can offer them like a 5 % off their next flower purchase so they come back to you later or do like a bouquet giveaway. So do something to entice them to be on your email list or, you know, just ask them if they want to be. This is a great way for you to grow your email list and start making really quality connections.
and make people who might just be a one-time buyer into an everyday customer or an every week customer. So I think it's great to take advantage of Mother's Day and events like this and get people on your email list and convert them into regular buying customers if you can. And then the next thing that you can do is over the weekend collaborate with other businesses. I mentioned this a little bit before, but.
You can collaborate with like a chocolate shop or a wine shop for Mother's Day gift boxes. Like in the past, we've sold little mini bouquets, you know, just like $7 bouquets. And it's just like three stems of flowers in a little tissue paper, with a box of chocolates and a bottle of wine and just collaborating with those other businesses. It's a really fun way to not only get to know some other businesses in your area, but to get your flower farm in front of other people's audiences. So chances are.
If people are anything like me who love chocolate, really like a good red wine, and also love flowers, like chances are their people are probably also your people. And so it's great to just collaborate with other businesses as a chance for you to get, you know, that great promotion and maybe convert some potential customers into real buyers in the future. So I love doing that and recommend that you do it. Now going back to
planning for Mother's Day because remember I said you can have a great Mother's Day this year if you start doing all these things now. Of course, I want you to think about collaborating with other businesses. Have a plan for getting people on your email list. Have a plan for those price points so you can sell a lot and get exposure to other people. Start thinking about your content for your emails and your
Facebook and your Instagram, your social media, and if you're going to do ads. So you got to start thinking about all that stuff. Now that's all part of this planning process and execution of a great mother's day. But one thing that's really important is also planning way, way, way ahead of time. So you can start planning now for next year's mother day. We really take a lot of notes at our mother's day weekend about
What customers liked, what they were asking for more, what we ran out of that we wish we still had. What didn't sell that great? Which right now I'm looking at that, this one type of vernacular we've been growing Malva. It's like this really deep purple violet color. Like nobody buys that on Mother's Day weekend for some reason. It's weird. So like we're not growing as much of it, but we take really good notes. So as you go through the springtime, have a little document on your computer and your phone. That's just Mother's Day.
2025 or Mother's Day for 2026 and make notes about what people are asking you for, like comments they've made, things that you wish you did differently. And then when you do your crop planning for next year, you will take all of that feedback and put it into your crop plan. So you know that you're producing flowers for Mother's Day. So in our crop plan, we add like.
Basically a whole bed of ranunculus just for Mother's Day. And we grow like thousands of tulips just for Mother's Day. So when it's time to move them, we move them. Like we make hay when the sun shines. If people are lining up to buy flowers, we are growing flowers specifically just for that weekend. And so it's a huge piece of it is really planning for it a year or months in advance. So we're planting.
All of our flowers for mother's day, the fall, the year before. So for this mother's day, you know, we planted our tulips and our ranunculus last October, November, and we've been caring for them all year, but we had to place the orders for those flowers. About this time last year. So we placed, well, even before that, honestly, we place our tulip and our ranunculus orders in like January for the ones that are going to bloom the next.
You know, not that following May, but the May after that, which is insane. The flower business is insane. And so we're thinking about these things literally years in advance. So I know that for this Mother's Day, it's a little late, but you have to start planning now for next year. And when you do that, and if you're really cognizant about like trying to target that weekend with your crop planning and with your marketing,
Like you can easily have a five figure mother say you could do 10,000, 20,000, $30,000 in a weekend because that's how powerful these flower holidays are. And can you imagine like how amazing that would be for your business? Like a huge boost in revenue for your business. So all this to say mother's day is wildly important for our flower farm. And it is scary to me, like how much revenue.
we're dependent on on this one weekend. It's kind of wild, but we lean into it and we try to do things to kind of level out the load and make sure we're not depending on just like one sales outlet, like I said, to make sure that we can still have a really good Mother's Day. But I really recommend doing some planning for it. So here are some action items for you based off of everything we just talked about during this episode. The first one.
is to make a content plan for your social media and email marketing and Facebook ads if you're into that. So start making a content plan now so when you get into that busy season, you'll have it all ready to go and you can just hit post or can just hit send. Better yet, just schedule it so you don't even have to think about it. So making that content plan. Then number two, making a product plan for what you'll offer and at what price points. Number three, updating your website.
and get people to make pre-orders with a pickup or delivery option or collaborate with another business. And obviously like this is optional, but I found it to be really fun and really great for our business. And another piece of that, just a little side note is if you have a limited amount of flowers, like you don't have a ton to sell, you can use that to your advantage. Like, so they don't, just show up to buy and they're all gone. Wherever you sell them, just have people pre-order. Like it'll be great.
Then the next thing is generate ideas on how to get customers on your email list during that surge of sales so you can get them coming back for more later in the season. And then lastly, even though it's a little late for this year, but for next Mother's Day, start planning for it right now in your crop plan. Start getting ideas of what you need to order, the volume you need to order, the marketing you have to do. Like I said, we grow extra just for Mother's Day.
and get an idea of what that is going to look like for springtime and Mother's Day in the future. So you can have an amazing Mother's Day this year. You just got to get started now, start working on it, get your name in front of people, and start generating ideas for next time. So I hope this was helpful, and I am wishing you the most amazing Mother's Day, not just in terms of your business, but if you are also a mom, make sure after the holiday craziness, you take a little time for yourself to relax.
Take a couple days off, take a breather. You so seriously deserve it. Thanks for being here for another episode of the Six Figure Flower Farming Podcast. One last request for you, if you found this episode helpful, or if you've gained any value from this podcast at all,
It would mean the world to me if you could leave a positive review on Apple or Spotify. It just takes 30 seconds. Just go to our page on either Apple podcasts or Spotify. Just leave a quick review. It is amazing for me to see that it is being helpful for you guys and really helpful for other flower farmers to find this as well. So leave a review or share this episode with somebody that you know would get something valuable out of it. would mean the world.
So thanks for leaving a review and I will see you next time, same time, same place.
