Jenny (00:28)
We are coming off of a Mother's Day high over here. It's been a really busy couple of weeks, and this is by far the busiest time on the farm. Those first couple weeks in May, right around Mother's Day, Mother's Day weekend, it's kind of nuts, but in a good way. And in this episode today, I'm going over 10 lessons I have learned over the years around our Mother's Day sales.
Also, if you are a fellow mama like me, happy belated mother's day to you. I hope you got to rest and relax a little bit, even though I'm sure that's pretty much not an option for a lot of us. But anyways, back to mother's day sales. mother's day is a hugely important day or I guess weekend for us on our flower farm. over the years we've learned a lot about selling on this big holiday.
We currently do multiple five figure mother's day weekends. And so it's really a huge event for our overall farm revenue. And obviously we lean into that and we try to just make hay while the sun shines, you know, produce flowers specifically just for that weekend. So we can get as much out of it as possible. So it wasn't always like that. And in fact, it took me quite a few years of growing before I could even produce enough flowers early enough in the season.
for Mother's Day weekend. But you just kind of work up to it and eventually you get there. But here are 10 valuable lessons that I've learned from selling flowers on Mother's Day weekend. The first lesson is that demand for flowers surges a lot. So to be ready early.
Mother's Day brings one of the biggest spikes in flower sales. Like it's one of the biggest weekends of the year for buying flowers, probably aside from Valentine's day and waiting until the last minute to prepare for it pretty much leads to chaos. So we pre-order everything we need, like really far ahead of time.
All of the supplies and packaging that we use for mother's day is ordered well in advance to just prevent last minute scrambling. Cause I've been there. I'm like, shoot. Mother's day is in two weeks and we don't have the like fancy tissue paper that we usually use for mother's day weekend. We don't have the special vases that we sell. And then it's like, craziness. So I've learned to plan far ahead of time.
for Mother's Day in terms of like those supplies and materials. And then as far as the flowers, we are planning way ahead, like a year and a half before, which might sound crazy, but that's just how this industry works. In January of this year, it's 2025, in January of 2025, I ordered my ranunculus and anemone and tulip bulbs that we will sell.
Next mother's day in May of 2026. So I'm ordering my bulbs and seeds and all that kind of stuff in 2025, January, 2025 for May, 2026. So really planning way ahead. And that can be sort of stressful when you're just starting out, cause you really don't know how much to order, but you just kind of start small and increase annually from there.
And so we also only use specific supplies for Mother's Day. Like we have this fancy tissue paper that we only really use in the springtime and on Mother's Day. We use extra sleeves. We also provide vases for people, which we normally don't sell our flowers with vases. We just sell the bunches and bouquets. But for Mother's Day, we also upsell people on pretty vases and...
different vessels that they can put their flowers in. We also use those hydro wraps, which if you've never heard of those before, it's basically just like this little cotton wrap thing that you put on the bottom of your flower stems and you wrap it around the stems and soaked in water. So it keeps those stems hydrated and you put it in a plastic bag. So there's no need for any water with it. And sometimes we find that our customers are going to be traveling with the flowers.
And this is a good solution for them to travel with them without needing to have water in their vehicles. And so typically that's not really something that we offer unless people specifically ask for it. But for Mother's Day, we do a lot more of that. So the first lesson in summary is to be ready because demand surges. It really goes up. The second lesson I want to share is
Pre-sales or pre-ordering for your customers really helps to boost revenue. So we offer pre-orders and that allows us to plan inventory, kind of reduce waste and just streamline fulfillment. But more than anything, we get like a tiny revenue boost from that. our customers, certain customers love the convenience of securing their bouquets ahead of time. And usually we market this like, skip the line at the market and order ahead.
So we only do a premium pre-order and it's generally the week before or two weeks before Mother's Day and it's only for arrangements. So we just make big arrangements. So not bunches, not bouquets, they're arranged in a vase and we only offer that for pre-order. So it's a premium offer.
And we find that the majority of our customers wait to the very last minute to buy flowers, but we do have some customers that just want to secure that premium arrangement ahead of time and get that. So they don't have to wait in line or like fight the crowds at the market.
And these arrangements are not available to buy at our farmer's market or at our farm stand Mother's Day weekend. So they're like a specialty premium thing that you have to pre-order at it ahead of time. And in years past, we used to offer these arrangements for pre-order and you could pre-order bouquets and bunches ahead of time as well. And then you could also buy them the weekend off.
But we stopped doing that because we ended up making a lot of arrangements, are very costly to make. we weren't selling all of them during the weekend of mother's day. People were just going for our bunches and bouquets because honestly they're beautiful and, people would just rather have that than pay a lot extra for the arrangements. They didn't quite see the value in it. So that's why we switched to just doing the premium arrangement for pre-order and then
During Mother's Day weekend, we have bunches and bouquets only, no arrangements to buy. But offering those pre-sales really does help boost our revenue a little bit. The third lesson is that simplicity sells. I think as business owners, we often want to offer our customers a bunch of different options. We want to be able to fulfill all their needs and collect money on whatever the hell thing that they want.
but they don't need dozens of options. I find that offering a few well-designed bunch and bouquet choices makes their decisions to buy easier and it helps increase sales. So a clear, limited menu per se prevents overwhelm and makes your life a heck of a lot easier and it makes it easier for them to choose and buy. I think that sometimes when customers are presented with a lot of options, they kind of get
a little bit overwhelmed or they're not sure which one they should buy. And then they just end up not buying. So a clear message to them, like you have these, you know, one, two or three options, make it very clear who it's for, you know, what it's for. You could do that with pricing or with another way, but it helps your customer to buy and it makes your life a lot easier. So we offer three price points. Generally it's
The lowest price point is a $25 to $30 straight bunch. And typically that's either tulips or ranunculus. We often have things like anemone and narcissus, maybe some poppies, depending on my mood that year, whether I decided to grow them or not. But straight bunches are $25 to $30 for mother's day. Then the next price point, the middle price point is a mixed bouquet, which is usually around $55.
So this has a mix of tulips, anemones, ranunculus, and usually some foliage, either eucalyptus that overwintered for us. And if we don't have that, we'll go forage for things like honeysuckle.
And then the third and final price point that we offer are those arrangements I was talking about. So those are usually around 75 to $85 and those are arranged invasives specialty premium product, and that's pre-order only. So we don't do anything really fancy. We don't offer a lot of options anymore for Mother's Day. We found that it was really just confusing our customers and like they didn't really
care for like the super fancy stuff. The majority, the vast majority of what we sell is that $25 to $35 straight bunch. And I think this is because one, our straight bunches are absolutely drop dead gorgeous. Like it's not just like a, a small little pathetic bunch. Like it's a big bunch of premium flowers and they're super beautiful.
And then that $55 mixed bouquet, we fancy it up more than we usually do with our mixed bouquets. add nice tissue paper, you know, they're really elegant and they're stuffed full of premium flowers. And I think when people are buying flowers as gifts, that is a really good option to offer them. Moving on to lesson number four.
We also have a ton of customers that just buy a boatload of bunches for all their family members. Like we have a lot of customers that come and buy hundreds of dollars worth of flowers because they're buying for their mom, their mother-in-law, their grandparents, their grandparents-in-law, their sister, their cousin, their best friend that just had a baby, yada, yada, yada. Like we generally have a lot of people that will buy like.
Eight to 10 bouquets and just give them out to all their friends and family. So when you have that lower price point of like that $25, it makes it a lot easier for them to do that. And they actually end up spending more with us. So simplicity sells, you don't have to make it complicated, just offer one to three options. And then when you're prepping for the weekend, like it makes it so much simpler. It makes it a lot easier to get everything ready. So we'll talk about that more in a second.
But lesson number four is that your pricing must reflect the rush. So premium pricing is justified during these peak holidays because there is added labor, there's added stress, there's added costs. Like I was talking about those mixed bouquets where we have like the fancy tissue paper and like we're fancying a lot of these things up and there's costs that come with that. So undervaluing your bunches and bouquets and arrangements.
That can really leave you overworked with slim margins. Like our $55 mixed bouquets are chock full of premium value flowers. We had really nice packaging and that's why they're $55. Like normally we don't even make mixed bouquets. until like June or July, because our spring flowers are so premium. They are premium priced. so our mixed bouquets.
would kind of price this out of the market because the flowers in them are such high value. But the exception we make here is for Mother's Day. So just make sure you're pricing appropriately. There's this whole like supply and demand here thing. Like you don't want to price gouge. You don't want to just like skyrocket your prices because you know, you can get it. Like for me, that feels inauthentic, but just be aware of that added emotional costs, labor, any other
supplies or materials that add to your cost in there. Lesson number five is having efficient systems. When you have efficient systems in place, it just creates less chaos. I talked to a lot of flower farmers
That around Valentine's day and mother's day, they just are like on the floor, exhausted, like can't even barely move because they've been working so hard and so long. And like that used to be us for sure. Until we figured out that we just offer three simple options. And then we offer just really two basic options during the weekend of mother's day, straight bunches and one kind of mixed bouquet.
So we have a very clear workflow for order intake, bouquet assembly, and pickup, which reduces stress. And so a well organized system can really make the difference between a smooth operation and a complete logistical nightmare. It really used to take us forever to process all the flowers for mother's day because we're doing so many different sizes and options and different mixed bouquets. And it would take us like really, really long days.
Now staying up to midnight type of thing, but now it's not really that much. We really just do a ton of sleeving because we sell a ton of those single variety bunches and it goes by pretty quickly. Like we can pretty much do all the processing on Thursday and Friday before mother's day weekend. So we harvest everything all week, generally have been holding some stuff in the cooler from the week before stuff that will last like ranunculus and tulips that we kind of hold specifically for mother's day. So we plant an extra.
Well, we plant extra flowers with our first six sessions. So we make sure we're planting those flowers specifically for Mother's Day. And then we just sleeve it all. And then with those pre-orders I was talking about, we just have like one option. You just have, you just buy the arrangement, right? And we have a whiteboard that we write down the recipe and we just use the same recipe for each arrangement. We make them all the same.
And we know the number of arrangements we have to make. And so we just like bang them out. We don't do like custom anything. And I find that like our customers never really ask for custom anything or if they do, it's very rare. And so we have a lot of really great systems in place that allow us to just like bang out the work and like, yeah, it's a lot of extra work than a normal week on the farm, but it's not to the point where we're like broken afterwards.
We usually take an extra day off to like recover, but we don't feel that complete exhaustion that a lot of people do. Moving on to lesson number six, delivery is a beast. So mother's day deliveries are kind of, I don't know, they aren't hectic, but it's just a lot of extra labor. There's tight routes, know, traffic, unexpected issues pop up.
So if you're going to offer delivery, make sure you plan efficient routes. There's like apps and websites out there where you can just put in all of your stops and it will make the most efficient delivery route for you.
I think a few examples of these are, I think one is route manager. Another one is road warrior. think who the one that we used was circuit. I think I can't exactly remember, but there's a whole bunch out there. If you just Google delivery route mapper, it will save you so much time. trust me, when I used to do deliveries, would like,
put every single address into Google Maps. And then I would have to rearrange the stops to make it make sense, like we were driving in a big circle or we weren't going out to one place and then coming back. just plan accordingly for that. So because of this, we stopped doing deliveries years ago and we'll probably never go back. During COVID, we delivered our CSA and it just takes so much time.
There's so much cost with it. I've never really felt like I could charge enough to cover the cost of delivery. we never really made money on it. So we just stopped doing it and it's been fine. People just come and pick up their flowers instead, especially because we have consistent options for them to come and do that. So lesson number seven is last minute customers will always exist. Like
the vast majority of shoppers will be last minute for Mother's Day. No matter how much we've pushed pre-sales, there's always gonna be procrastinators. So we just kind of have a strategy for handling those last minute shoppers, which is our grab and go bunches and bouquets, and that really captures those sales without disrupting our operations. A lot of people think that people are going to
do all those pre-orders ahead of time. But the truth is the vast, vast majority of shoppers, like in the back of their mind, they're like, yeah, Mother's Day is coming up when they see like your ad or your promotion or whatever. But then they wake up on Sunday and go, crap, it's Mother's Day and rush off to find flowers somewhere. Which is also kind of cool because like at our farmers market and our farm stand, everyone, like my husband always says, it's like, you're the only beer tent at a rock festival.
because we get these huge crowds and it's actually kind of fun. Well, anytime you're making money in business, it's like a little fun, right? So it's cool. We get to capture a lot of those last minute sales. Whereas I feel like traditional florists really kind of lean on those pre-order arrangements and we get to capture like the rest of the world. That's like, crap. I got to buy my mom something. So we like that, but.
Those last minute customers are always going to exist. Lesson number eight is that marketing matters more than you think. So even though we get all these last minute shoppers, like almost everybody is a last minute shopper, right? Talking about it ahead of time is key. Like if by some chance, like most people they're like, oh yeah, it's May, Mother's Day is coming up, but they don't really think about it. And then they wake up in a panic.
They might remember seeing a post from you where you talked about mother's day or an email that you sent talking about mother's day. And even though wasn't at the forefront of their mind at the time, they'll probably think of you and be like, yeah, I remember trademarks. Flower Farms said they would have mother's day flowers at their farm and the farmer's market today. So they can go get flowers from you. Like not the grocery store. Unless you sell flowers to the grocery store in that case, tell them to go there, but
Posting once on social media isn't enough. think that consistent marketing reminders and some urgency-driven promotions can help maximize your sales if you're doing those pre-orders. If not, people know at our farmers market, if I want the good stuff, I got to get there early. Because by the end of the day, it's good stuff that's left over, but it's generally colors that are not as popular. And people kind of have to pick through stuff.
So email lists really help with this. Local partnerships help to boost visibility. Like we have partnered with wine bars and chocolate shops in the past to do fun little collaborations with them. Facebook posts or ads for Mother's Day markets that you have at your farm or pop-ups or whatever. So just let your customers know ahead of time that you're gonna have Mother's Day flowers.
Lesson number nine is customer service is key to repeat business. Mother's day is sort of high pressure for everyone and your customers like might be stressed out. Like it's kind of a lot on mother's day when you have a family, like most of my customers have families or like somewhat young to middle-aged couples that have young kids. And so when you're like trying to wrestle the kids to like
Go see this grandma, go see that grandma. Mom's not actually really getting that much of a mother's day. Tensions are kind of high. Just understand, not everyone might be having the best day ever. And whatever you can do to make their day a little bit easier, a little bit better, just do it. That customer service piece is key. If you handle those inquiries that you get, if you get special inquiries or you have people asking weird questions,
you know, just handle those questions and inquiries with patience and professionalism. The thing about Mother's Day is that a lot of people are buying flowers that normally don't. Like a lot of people are buying flowers and they like don't regularly buy them. And that can be a huge opportunity to take a one-time buyer and turn them into a repeat customer and even a lifelong customer. So,
A big thing that is, hard to do because mother's day is a big rush and it's kind of crazy, but try to get them on your email list if you can, and then touch base with them. And then maybe they'll turn into a regular customer for you. We actually have gotten a ton of subscription customers from mother's day sales because a lot of people are gifting our flowers. Like they get our flowers and they're like, my God, these are the best flowers I've ever seen. They're amazing. Where'd you get them from?
and they find out it's from us, and then they end up buying a subscription or coming back to be our customers at our market, which is awesome. So turning those opportunities for a one-time buyer into possibly making them into a repeat customer by really great customer service and capturing their information, getting them on your email list if you can.
My last and final lesson for you guys, lesson number 10 is to take care of yourself. There's this saying in farming, gotta make hay while the sun shines, which means like when there's an opportunity to make money, you gotta jump on it. And so that's what Mother's Day is for a lot of us flower farmers.
Like I said before, we've really streamlined our operations and our systems and our offerings.
So Mother's Day is really manageable, but it's still a lot. Like it can be exhausting. It can be a lot of longer hours, high expectations. If you're doing custom orders, it's like a lot of back-to-back orders and customer communication, which is why we don't do that. But making sure that you prioritize yourself, like eating well, eating three meals a day, resting whenever possible, like planning downtime after the weekend is over to help prevent that burnout.
and just kind of like simplifying the whole process to make it not as stressful. And then celebrate when it's over, especially if you're a mama too. And I just think that it's really easy to let the farm take over our lives. It's easy for us to prioritize the business over our own sanity and our own health, but really making sure that you kind of schedule in that time for yourself, making sure that you are.
Eating well, sleeping well, not staying up until two in the morning. If you can help it. mean, maybe when you're first starting out, that's unavoidable, but at some point you got to put some boundaries in place and find better ways to do things. So final lesson here is to just make sure you take care of yourself because the business can't run well if you aren't feeling well too. So there you have it. There are my 10 lessons that I've learned over the years for making big mother's day sales.
without like a lot of burnout. So take these ideas into account for a next year. You might want to put a little reminder in your Google calendar with a link to this episode to come back and listen to it again next March or April, sometime before Mother's Day, just to help with a reminder and to get those creative juices flowing. And if you had a bad Mother's Day or Mother's Day flop, or maybe your sales weren't as good as you wanted them to be this Mother's Day weekend, like
Please don't give up. We have all been there. We've all had sales that didn't do as well as we wanted or wasn't as expected. And it's just part of having a business, especially if you're just starting out. So remember not to give up. Keep putting some of these things into practice. Test your audience. Test some other ideas. Your customers might want something completely different than mine do. Ask them. Test it out.
And eventually you'll work it out and you'll be able to get some bigger Mother's Day sales if you haven't quite gotten those yet. So that's it for today. And I just wanted to say thank you to anyone who has left a review for the Six Figure Flower Farming Podcast. It means the world to me and all the other flower farmers. It really helps when you leave a review for other flower farmers to find this information that they really need to build a profitable and sustainable flower farm.
So if you can help me in my mission in reaching as many flower farmers as possible to help them do that, I would sincerely appreciate it. You can leave a review on Apple or Spotify. It takes less than 30 seconds. So thank you so much for going ahead and doing that. Thanks for being here for another episode of the Six Figure Flower Farming Podcast. I'll see you next week, same time, same place.
