Jenny (00:29)
If you ever wanted to sit down with a flower farming business mastermind, this episode is for you. I'm sitting down today with Nikki Bartley, who is the founder and owner of Cross Street Flower Farm. And when you start listening to this interview, you will see just how smart and savvy of a business owner she is. She actually started flower farming in a very small plot in her front yard in 2015, just selling mason jar arrangements to friends and neighbors.
You know, like so many of us start out that way, but now it's grown to a seven acre cut flower farm and retail operation with over 900 CSA members, a retail barn shop and cut your own bouquet events that she hosts April through October. And her farm is kind of unique because it's located on town owned farmland. So she leases all of that land.
And it's in this gorgeous New England town of Norwell, Massachusetts. And that's where her and her husband Scott live and raise her three boys. So this is cool if you are somebody who doesn't own land or land access is really difficult because Nikki doesn't own the land that she farms on and has an extremely successful business. I loved hearing her story and the ins and outs of her business model. And I think that you will enjoy it too. So without any further ado, let's dive in.
Jenny (01:52)
Nikki, welcome to the podcast.
Nikki Bartley (01:54)
Hi, thanks for having me. Glad to be here.
Jenny (01:56)
I'm so, yeah,
I'm really happy that you were able to take the time to come on. Could you just give everyone a quick little rundown, like two minutes of who you are, what you do about your farm, just a little recap?
Nikki Bartley (02:09)
Yeah, I own Nikki Bartley. I own Cross Street Flower Farm. We're 30 minutes south of Boston in a small town called Norwell, Massachusetts. I actually don't own the farm. I lease seven acres from the town of Norwell. It's a beautiful historic property. It's 300 years old and complete with beautiful stone walls that I have to keep clear as part of my lease fee.
and beautiful historic barns which we lease for all of our equipment, our walk-in cooler, and then we actually have a beautiful barn shop, retail barn shop in one of them. It's right on a main street. We have great, ⁓ you know, curbside access and we live in a pretty affluent area which also helps in terms of being able to sell
all of my flowers retail. do a little bit wholesale but mostly it's retail. ⁓ And yeah, this is our, we just celebrated our 10th year. Yeah, yeah, it was exciting. We had a party ⁓ last month and we had music and wine and all that. It was good. ⁓ Yeah, thank you. ⁓
Jenny (03:18)
Yay!
that's awesome. Congratulations.
Nikki Bartley (03:34)
It's hard sometimes in the middle of the season to celebrate the milestones, but we did it. so I was proud of us. Um, yeah. And then what else? so we have a diversified, uh, group of like sales channels. So we started with our CSA and we still have about a hundred CSA members a year, but every year that shrinks. It was up to almost.
Jenny (03:41)
Yeah, that's awesome.
Nikki Bartley (04:00)
maybe over 2000, but we have our retail barn shop open. Yeah, yeah, it was big. But then we started opening our retail barn shop six days a week. We're only closed Monday and the other days were open nine to five except for Sundays nine to three. And so the, you people know they can just stop in and buy flowers. So we have a really big like grab and go business.
Jenny (04:04)
2,000 members?
Nikki Bartley (04:32)
that has surpassed the CSA. So the CSA is still really nice, our tried and true members, and we actually made it like a 26 week CSA. they follow, some of them follow along the entire season. And,
we can go into the CSA more, but we have like five different CSA shares. And then we do workshops on the farm and we do a lot of cut your own events. We start with tulips ⁓ and we go then to peonies and then cut your own bouquet starting in late June or July and then through to cut your own dahlias in the fall. And then we do do wholesale for wedding, know, florists and we... ⁓
deliver to the floral reserve in Providence, Rhode Island, ⁓ pretty much weekly.
Jenny (05:31)
How far is that from you?
Nikki Bartley (05:33)
That's an hour. Yeah.
Jenny (05:35)
Okay.
Yeah, I know a lot of people travel to deliver there from like, I know a lot of farmers in Connecticut and obviously Rhode Island too, but some people are like driving like five hours to deliver there, which was nuts, but really cool. No, actually, yeah.
Nikki Bartley (05:43)
Yeah.
I know, I know. Yeah, yeah. I'm not sure I would do that, but. If you can make it work, you do
what you gotta do, right?
Jenny (05:57)
Yeah, yeah. She was actually up in my area just a couple of months ago. She reached out to me looking for flowers. She was doing a wedding in a town right next to me. And I was like, it's such a small world, but small world. So it was kind of funny. But that's cool. So you rent or lease the seven acres right in the middle of this beautiful town. How far do you live from the farm that you work on? the five? so you're really close. OK.
Nikki Bartley (06:05)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Five miles. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So I started in my front yard and then ran out of space and moved there. And I actually started farming at that historic property. 15 years ago, I was brought on to help start a, I have a background in a lot of things, but one is nonprofit management. So I helped to start a,
a nonprofit CSA on town land there, a small one, and it was vegetables. And so I learned how to build a farm from the ground up from 2010 to 2015. And during that time, I was like hiring farm managers, raising money for greenhouses, tractors, getting the well installed, electricity in the barns. And then, you know,
The farm managers were great but super young and they didn't really want to live in Norwild. They wanted to live in Vermont or Western Mass. So they would leave and then I had to start over and I realized the only way it was going to be sustainable is if I became the farm manager. So I did that.
Jenny (07:33)
Awesome. so that was like, you basically had all of that experience leading up to when you kind of started your own thing there, which is, sounds like it was difficult and frustrating, but probably really invaluable. Yeah. Also, I really want to talk to you about hiring farm managers because I have been having a really hard time with that lately. I have not found my person yet. So if you're listening to this podcast and you want to manage a farm, please give me a call.
Nikki Bartley (07:48)
Yes, absolutely. Yeah.
I
Jenny (08:04)
Send me an email.
Nikki Bartley (08:05)
Yeah, yeah, I have one now and I've trained her, Rebecca McDonald. She's my farm manager and she started in 2020 with me and I taught her everything she knows. She was not a farmer before that, although I say she must have been a farmer in her past life because she just is. She was in like telecom sales or something ⁓ out of school, but had a background in science. Anyway, yeah, so.
Jenny (08:22)
Yeah.
Nikki Bartley (08:31)
I'm extremely lucky to have found her because in my area, you know, there are not a lot of farmers and ⁓ the fact that she wants to do this for a living and can, you know, make it work in it's not inexpensive to live around here. So it's, but I hear your pain. Yeah. I mean, before that I would put.
The way that I recruited farm managers and this was like really when slow food was so big and everybody thought they wanted to be a vegetable farmer, you know? And then that has kind of died out. And flowers, I think, replaced that as like the more, you know, new thing. But...
Jenny (09:10)
Mm-hmm.
Nikki Bartley (09:26)
I used to recruit through a lot of the, ⁓ what is it called? I can't think of the name right now, but like NOFA, which is like the Northeast Organic Farming Association and EMASC-Craft, which is Eastern Massachusetts. Craft is like collaborative research of farmers or farmers in training, something like that. And through a lot of those groups, I just like networked with everybody.
Jenny (09:36)
No, yeah.
Nikki Bartley (09:53)
but flowers is different. mean, now actually we're just starting to hire people that have flower farming experience. The past couple of years we've been getting resumes of people, but before that I just had to train everybody. And I did more of like apprenticeships.
Jenny (10:07)
Yeah.
Yeah, everybody who's ever worked for me has been come from really no experience or maybe had experience like gardening or at least like growing cut flowers, like in a garden is probably the most amount of experience I've had, which has been great and been fine. ⁓ it's been so rewarding to train them up. And I have one girl who is my full-time gal who is a lifesaver. She's like the best. ⁓ but ⁓
I really want to find somebody with experience. It's just been really hard finding it, but maybe I need to look more, call NOFA up again and see if I can recruit that way. But anyhow, I'm sure we'll find it at some point, find somebody at some point. So.
Nikki Bartley (10:44)
Yes.
Yes, I always
find that things fall together when you need them to.
Jenny (11:00)
Yeah. Yeah, for sure.
Nikki Bartley (11:01)
It's kind of like the magic of flowers. It somehow, they arrive when you need them to, just like the bees.
Jenny (11:05)
Yeah,
exactly. So earlier you said that you previously had 2000 CSA members and now that's winding down because your retail barn shop is taking over a lot of that volume. So I really want to find out more about both of those things. So let's talk about the CSA first. Can you just, for those who are unfamiliar with you,
Nikki Bartley (11:15)
Mm-hmm.
Yes.
Jenny (11:32)
Tell us how you structure your CSA, what that looks like. I saw on your website that you were voted Boston's best in 2021, so you must have an incredible CSA structure and program. So tell us a little bit about how that's set up.
Nikki Bartley (11:41)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, so I actually learned about the CSA structure, like I said, when I was starting that nonprofit farm for vegetables, and that's almost entirely how we ran that. So I already knew how to do it. And I was pretty, you know, deeply knitted into the community here. I have three boys in the school system, and just through building rural farms, I met, you know, everybody in town. It's not a very big town, but...
So the way I structured it was basically ⁓ the same way that we did the vegetable one, which was ⁓ an early spring, a summer, and a fall share. And then we had a winter share, yeah, by the seasons. ⁓ And then we had a winter share too. ⁓ So the first year I did it, I just sold directly mason jars to people or bouquets, and I sold bouquets to the...
Jenny (12:33)
So buy the season.
Nikki Bartley (12:48)
vegetable farm that was at the farm that I'm working at now. And then in the second year in 2016, I started with a small CSA and it was probably like 30 spring. And I did that based on, I figured if I could do tulips and daffodils, I'd already grown them one season. So for a second season, knew that it's pretty easy to calculate because of, you plant one bulb, you get one tulip. So.
Jenny (13:14)
Yep.
Nikki Bartley (13:15)
And
daffodils too. And daffodils, felt like a good investment because they're perennial, they'll come back. So I just did that. And then I planted a ton of flowers like I had done the previous year. ⁓ then I've added on since then, once we got, we have three greenhouses at the farm. And once I was able to grow, you know, in the ground. ⁓
It's changed a little bit over the years, but we still have that spring share and it starts in usually late March with the forced tulips that we do in crates. And then it rolls into the field tulips. There's always a little bit of a strange gap that we are always worried about from when the forced tulips stop and the field tulips go and the daffodils are u sually right in the middle. And then rununculus and anemones.
Jenny (14:05)
Mm-hmm.
Nikki Bartley (14:10)
come in after that. And we used to have that as part of the spring share, and it was just a longer spring share. But then we actually made ⁓ the ranunculus share its own thing. And then this year, I'm always kind of tweaking with it, because that's just how I am. I'm never satisfied. I'm always like, I think we could do better if we do this. So then I put ranuncula this past year, ranunculus and peonies together. And so I kind of have like an April share, a May through early June share, and then the summer share.
which has pretty much been unchanged. It's either six or eight weeks usually. And that goes ⁓ from like the early summer flowers like scabiosa, snapdragons all the way through until all the field stuff. then Dahlia share starts right after Labor Day for six weeks. So it's in all 26 weeks that we're offering shares. And every
Couple of years we might get a hiccup where we have to pause a week in between the shares, but we've gotten pretty good at figuring out how to make it go all the way through.
Jenny (15:16)
That's awesome. And now as your retail barn shop open for 26 weeks or you open longer than that, shorter than that for the retail barn shop.
Nikki Bartley (15:26)
longer. usually open up around Easter. ⁓ Well, it depends on when Easter is. Easter switches. But this year, I can't even remember now. it was late, I think, this year. last year, yeah. So we usually end open the last week of March. our barn shop is not heated. There's no water. Yeah. ⁓ No climate control. Yeah. Yeah. It's the real deal. Authentic. ⁓ So yeah, we're shivering.
Jenny (15:37)
It was late this year.
Of course not. It was an antique barn, right?
Nikki Bartley (15:56)
in March and most of April. But the flowers love it, except for when it freezes. Obviously, I've got to be careful of so then it's open straight through. We don't take any pauses on the barn shop, so we always are selling something.
We just wait and start the CSA when we know we have enough to get that big. But I kind of always want the CSA moving and there because that drives traffic to the barn shop too. As soon as people park, other people stop. So it's a really good, yeah, yeah.
Jenny (16:27)
Mm, yeah, crowds draw crowds. Yeah.
So how late do you sell at your barn shop in the year? Do you go through like Thanksgiving, Christmas?
Nikki Bartley (16:35)
We're still selling now, yeah.
So we usually stop, you know, like October 18, 19, and then we reopen right around Thanksgiving for three weekends for Christmas, and we do wreaths and wreath workshops and in the barn shop. We do sell. Once we started being open all the time and I was having the Cut Your Own events, I realized that people wanted to buy things other than, you know, they wanted like a gift shop.
So I have other merchandise in the barn shop too, which we can talk about. then, yeah, and it's wildly popular. People love it. ⁓ And it's extra work. It added on another layer for me. But I think it's really important to diversify. That's what I would say about all of this is that people are going to be like, wow, she does a lot. How does she manage it all? But honestly, you kind of have to with farming because you never know what the season's going to be like.
Jenny (17:08)
Yeah.
Nikki Bartley (17:33)
Anyway, we can maybe do want me to talk about that now or?
Jenny (17:36)
Yeah, well, it sounds to me you have like three main sales outlets, right? Like your CSA, your workshops, or your events on the farm, we'll call them, because we'll include Cut Your Own, and then the retail barn shop. So that's like three main things. I would say that's like really common and like a good way to diversify. But yeah, I want to hear more about that. Tell me more.
Nikki Bartley (17:43)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, about the barn shop. So yeah, we open in March and I spend the winter I usually shop for the merchandise in January, February, March, and I try to get new cross street flower farm merch to to keep it fresh. And this year I did like a line of custom candles, which people loved went crazy for. And yeah, and then I did like a special 10 year poster.
Jenny (17:59)
Yeah.
Really?
Nikki Bartley (18:23)
I have a truck on the farm that everybody loves. do like installs of flowers, you know, like every flower farmer does. And a bike too that every week we fill with fresh flowers. And so they're always, if you go on my Instagram page, you can see every week it's either the bike or the truck that we're doing installs with.
Jenny (18:40)
All right. Is it just
cross street flower farm, your Instagram? All right, everyone go look it up.
Nikki Bartley (18:43)
Mm-hmm. Yes.
so yeah, in the winter I'm working on that. My farm manager is doing all the crop planning. and then we, we actually like bring, get all the merchandise shipped to my house and we're like pricing all the merchandise in my basement. And then once, because the barn is, doesn't have heat, so we can't bring everything over and now I have in there, ⁓ I would say like the top selling items are.
candles, books, vases, and the cross street merch. But we have baby gifts in there. Yeah, we have baby gifts in there. have apothecary. ⁓ We have some accessories like jewelry and scarves. And, you know, I love color, obviously. So a pre flower farmer does but I'm
Jenny (19:22)
Really? So more than the flowers?
Nikki Bartley (19:45)
I'm always like trying to ⁓ find things that, new things. So when people come into the shop, they're excited to be there and looking at things. So it's rare. You know, I'm actually not in the barn shop that much, but my women that run the barn shop are like, it's rare that somebody comes in just buys flowers. So it's a nice, yeah, yeah. And we're always reordering merch, you know.
Jenny (20:07)
That's awesome. You're able to.
Nikki Bartley (20:14)
⁓ So the barn shop is open from, let's say, end of March until, like I said, ⁓ close to the end of October when the dahlias finally are gone. And then we open up at three weeks. But this year, we're for the first time doing mums. And I'm going to think about actually just keeping the barn shop maybe just open on the weekends through November.
and see how that goes, because it does get really cold again in the morning shop in December. I mean, we have electric heaters, but, I always know I've pushed it too far from the faces of my employees and they're like, all right, we're freezing now. Yeah.
Jenny (20:53)
Oh, that's so hard.
Yeah, that's really got to be, there has to be a lot of challenges with running that full gift shop in a space like that where you don't have that electricity and heat and that's really challenging. But.
Nikki Bartley (21:10)
Yeah, yeah, like every
night we have to put the books in ⁓ plastic containers so they don't get warped from the humidity, that kind of thing. We do a lot of display flowers and they go back into the cooler every night. Yeah, it is a lot, but it's kind of like a, somebody once said being a flower farmer, your fields are kind of like performance art. And I feel like a boutique is kind of the same way. It's just.
Jenny (21:19)
my God, that's a lot.
Hahaha
Nikki Bartley (21:40)
People go there because it's beautiful and they want to be there.
Jenny (21:44)
Yeah, well, I love that you have created this space where you can have your flowers, sell your flowers, but then you can also cross sell and upsell with all these other different things and merchandise. do you have like certain vendors that you buy like your candles and books and bases and stuff from? are you just like looking anywhere for cool new things that you think that your customers would like?
Nikki Bartley (22:10)
⁓ When I started, I tried to do like only local products, but it was very difficult to stock like local handmade pottery, for example, because although the local pottery artists are extremely talented, they don't aren't able to scale and keep things stocked. And I found that to be the same with most of the other things. So
I shop just as any other gift shop owner would wholesale. And I pick brands that I don't see other places that are farm related and American made. I try to best I can, but I always just say that, I don't know, this is going to sound like a little bit.
but I'm my best customer. Like, I know my target market. They're women like me, and I know how to pick out things that they're gonna like. So that's what I do.
Jenny (23:20)
That
makes you a great business owner. I love that. ⁓ that's so cool. So with the flowers that you sell in your barn shop, are you just selling bunches and bouquets or are you also selling like arrangements? Do you do like custom flower arrangements or bouquets or anything like that? Tell me more about the flower side of the barn shop.
Nikki Bartley (23:22)
Yeah, yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. Okay, so we do Farm Fresh Bouquet is our main thing and that's a $50 bouquet. We have a Posey that's $30 and then we have a Lush bouquet that's $90 and you can buy them on our website, pre-order them and pick them up in the barn shop or you can just come in, grab and go and usually we just have the Posey and the Farm Fresh Bouquet stocked, the 30 and the $50 item.
We, try to always have mason jars. We call it sweetheart mason jar, the smaller size. And that is $35. And then I do a sweetheart arrangement that's like a little bit bigger and that's 65. And then I have, you know, like a 90 and $125 option. And those are all like special occasion flowers on my website that you can again order to pick up and.
then you have to email me and give me a heads up when you want to pick it up during barn shop hours. We don't do any delivery, although we've thought about it. We're just not there yet. ⁓
Jenny (24:45)
Yeah, so you're not like a
full scale flower shop. It's more of a boutique bar. That's like, that would be my ideal. We've talked so many times about like opening. I live in the middle of nowhere, so it would not work in my location necessarily. But like just the other day, me and Rebecca, one of my full-time gal, were kind of brainstorming about our CSA.
Nikki Bartley (24:49)
No, grab and go. Yeah.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm. Oh, you have a Rebecca
too. I love it.
Jenny (25:09)
Yeah, I do. do.
And ⁓ we actually almost hired another girl named Rebecca and was like, my god, we're going to have too many too many Rebecca's. But anyways, yeah, Rebecca's are good farm people. She's probably listening to me outside of the door right now talk about her. ⁓ But we were kind of brainstorming about our CSA and how we were trying to make it more convenient for some of our customers who really wanted to shop.
Nikki Bartley (25:16)
Oh, that would be weird. Yeah.
Jenny (25:33)
or pick up their flowers during the daytime. And there's another flower shop in our area that does a drop in subscription where you just get to drop in any time you want and grab a bouquet of flowers you get. I think they do like a one a month or a one a week or something like that. And I was like, that's like the ultimate because it's so convenient. They can get flowers whenever they want, which is basically what you're doing with your farm shop versus what.
Nikki Bartley (25:43)
Mm-hmm.
Jenny (26:00)
You know, what I do is we have certain pickup locations and they have to pick up on the same day and the same time, probably how your CSA works. imagine. But yeah, but this like convenience factor.
Nikki Bartley (26:07)
So yeah.
Yeah, so I used to do the CSA with drop-off locations. then ⁓ COVID was really great for me because it was just when I was scaling up and at the farm. And I didn't have the barn shop yet. But I had all my pickup locations were closing. So I re-wrote. But nobody was that far.
Like my pickup locations were in my town, the next town over, so it wasn't like a significant distance for anybody. So I just was able to quickly reroute everybody curbside pickup into what is now the barn shop. And I just had a girl sitting in there, a woman, and she would check people off and bring their flowers to the car for the CSA. So that was step one. And when I did that and
Literally, I would sell extra stuffs and send an email out like, I'm going to have extra tomorrow morning come. And we started having a line of people ⁓ down the street to the point where we were getting complaints about parking. So I was like, OK, think people like coming here. And so over the past five years, I've just really focused on that, bringing people to the farm rather than.
sending my flowers everywhere and it's much better for CSA because when I would drop them off I never really knew what happened to the flowers if they didn't get picked there was no control there. Also the other thing that I we learned my team and I learned is that
Not everybody picks up their CSA. And so you always have, and we allow our CSA customers to pick up any time between Tuesday and Saturday. And we make a certain number of bouquets every day. And we know based on past experience, it was a little bit tricky at first. And there were times where we were like really sweating it and we wouldn't sell CSA bouquets, right?
Jenny (27:57)
⁓ okay.
Nikki Bartley (28:12)
Now my Farm Fresh bouquet is the CSA bouquet, but I just charge 10 % more for somebody to walk off the street and take it. Does that make sense?
Jenny (28:21)
Yeah. Yeah. So it's the same bouquet, but if they're just walking in off the street, they're not in your subscription. They're paying 10 % more. So it's a huge incentive for them to join your CSA because they get that discount.
Nikki Bartley (28:24)
Same bouquet.
Yes.
Yes.
Well, yeah,
it's an incentive. It's not huge. I mean, I don't think I market it well enough so people really would be able to repeat back to me that they're getting a 10 % difference. But I just try to make it fair. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I try to make it fair. And I do say that to every, thank you for joining the CSA. You get 10 % off. And then I try to give discounts on CSA throughout the season, you know, and I send them a weekly newsletter with.
Jenny (28:44)
Probably they're not paying that much attention.
Nikki Bartley (29:03)
more information about what's going on in the fields that they wouldn't get if they're just popping in the barn shop. But in terms of inventory control and what you're talking about, being able to sell off the street, grab and go, it really helps with that. Because we know if we make, let's say, 40 or 50 bouquets a day, we're going to have enough for our CSA people plus. And then on the weekends,
that number might go up to like 60 or 70 or whatever when it's more busy.
Jenny (29:36)
feel like you would have to do it that way because if you had like a different CSA bouquet than like what you sold in your shop, like what if they don't pick it up and, or what if you have a big surge of people that come to pick up? Like that would be really difficult to manage. It would probably have like a lot of waste. you're doing it in a really, really smart way, which is really cool. I, I.
Nikki Bartley (29:56)
Yeah, and then we
also have bunches always for sale. So right now, if you go into my shop, it's just pretty much Dahlia bunches. And it's the same way in the spring when it's like tulips and daffodils, you know. ⁓ But, you know, in the summer and any other time, I try to have both mixed bouquets and bunches ⁓ and then the mason jars and the sweethearts. So there's just a lot of options.
Jenny (30:00)
Hmm.
Yeah. So would you say...
Nikki Bartley (30:24)
I don't really sell single
stems though because I'll do single stems for dinner plates, yeah, and I keep them up high so that people can't touch them. But yeah.
Jenny (30:27)
annoying.
Yeah, we actually, we used to sell a lot of dinner plates. We would bring them to our farmer's market. And then for years, I stopped doing it for a number of different reasons. And just this season, we started doing it again. And it's been a big hit, but they are just so annoying to transport. then they don't last a long time. And people are in the bucket. They're like picking them up and shoving them back in and destroying things. It's like, come on.
Nikki Bartley (30:59)
Yes, yes. ⁓ it's painful
to watch.
Jenny (31:02)
I know, but they're having a great time. that's so funny. So how do you determine, we're going into 2026 and you have your CSA and your retail barn shop and you used to have this much bigger CSA program and it's kind of been shrinking because your retail barn shop has been growing.
Nikki Bartley (31:17)
Mm-hmm.
Jenny (31:28)
Is that the direction that you want to keep going in or do you want to up your CSA numbers again? Or is this just something that is like naturally happening in your business and you're like just going with it?
Nikki Bartley (31:40)
Naturally happening just going with it. I mean obviously I'd love to get the money in the winter ⁓ And I do I still do because most of my CSAs are given as gifts I would say not well, yeah, maybe it's half. I don't know maybe a little bit more ⁓ So, you know I get enough money to make it through the winter and then I also do Dahlia tuber sales ⁓
Jenny (31:45)
Hmm.
Same.
Nikki Bartley (32:05)
But it's also nice to just have people come in all the time because then, you know.
I feel like those are the people that are word of mouth. And you know, I always have signs out on the street. That's a big thing too, in terms of marketing. Somebody told me, ⁓ you know, I have sidewalk signs. I have one right in front of the barn shop and one on Main Street, which is like, you know, a state highway. So it's busy. And on weekends when we have big events, I even get balloons. Somebody was like, get balloons, because it will draw people's eye to the sign. I was like, my God, that's so cheesy. I can't do that.
Because I just try to do like an elevated brand, you know, like flower farmers do I think But it it absolutely works
Jenny (32:51)
Yeah, it draws people's attention. like, balloons, something exciting is happening. Can we talk more about the marketing? Because you've told me about the signage that you put out. You told me about the truck, the bike that you do the installations on. That goes a pretty long way, wouldn't you say, towards getting the attention and getting people to just even notice that your barn shop is there and come and give it a try and walk into it. What other things do you think have contributed to your success with that?
Nikki Bartley (32:54)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Well, I think I joined Instagram at a great time, right? Like it was 2015 and that's when everybody was just starting to do it. So I got that bump. I mean, there are some people that started a couple of years before me and have an even bigger bump on Instagram. But I think the difference with my Instagram followers is that they're mostly local. Like I don't have, I don't think I have every flower farmer in the country following me at all by any means. And my Dahlia tubers don't sell, I don't think to.
Jenny (33:42)
Mm.
Nikki Bartley (33:50)
a lot of flower farmers. So that's not really who I'm targeting. I'm targeting my retail customers in my area. ⁓ When I first started doing Cut Your Owns, I was getting people from a lot of different states and workshops too, especially right after COVID. And that has kind of quieted down too. ⁓ And so really now it's just all word of mouth targeting. So my
The life cycle, I think, of my customers, which is important to know, obviously, is when I started the business, it was mostly exactly women my age, like friends of mine or friends of friends. And then ⁓ when I started the CSA, I started attracting ⁓ women who were more like empty nesters because they wanted, they had the time. Women my age don't, we're all busy doing, like, know, being moms, raising kids, running around.
taking care of in-laws, we do not have time to get flowers every week. Like it's just not in the program, right, working. ⁓ So the empty nesters do, they have a little more time. So that's who like my CSA target market really is now. And then the young fam, so then we get the brides, the people who come to us for wedding flowers or their florists used our flowers in their bouquets or they come.
with their boyfriend for a Cut Your Own event. And then they get married and they move to Norwell or to the South Shore and they remember the farm and then they have kids and then they come to our Pick Your Own Tool Ups. And then, I named my daughter Dahlia and we come every year and take our family photos in your Dahlia field. ⁓ And so it has, you know, that life cycle that has changed. And I think it's gonna, it's a good, it feels like a good spot to be because
I'm getting all the young families and that's never gonna stop. Our area is growing, there's always new families moving in. ⁓ And the people that are those young families, they're dying, as you know, with a two-year-old, dying for things to do on the weekend, right? And the mom blogs, I'm sure everyone knows that too, but like, well, they're not so much blogs anymore. guess that was when I had my babies 20 years ago. I'm dating myself, Jesus.
Jenny (36:13)
The
Facebook groups, Rochester Moms Club.
Nikki Bartley (36:17)
Yeah, well now it's exactly. now here it's Instagram, Boston
moms, South Shore moms, and the women who run those. know, like I remember my best friend who is now my barn shop manager, she used to run one of those when it was just like an email list before even I think, you know, when Facebook was just starting. my God, I'm And ⁓
Jenny (36:42)
I feel it too.
Nikki Bartley (36:47)
⁓
But now women like her, you know, they just, they come to the farm and they're like, ⁓ if you give me a free ticket to cut your own, I'll make a video and I'll blast it out to all the moms on Boston moms. And then, you know, I get like two or 300 new followers. And yeah, pick your own tulips is great for that. It's great for bringing new people to the farm.
Jenny (37:12)
Hmm.
Yeah, I have thought about this a lot recently because there for the past like 10 years, there have always been these little Instagram accounts that have highlighted things in our local community. And whenever any of them have ever posted about my flowers, it's like this huge, you know, they have like,
50,000, a hundred thousand followers of all these people in your local town, your local community. And it's like such a powerful marketing tool that I think a lot of people don't necessarily think about or consider, but it's almost like, what do they call it? Like influencer marketing. Like a lot of people think that's for like big brands or whatever, but it's like, there's all this opportunity in your local market to get the word out about your local flower farm. So that's really cool. I love to hear that that's been.
Nikki Bartley (37:54)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Yeah.
Jenny (38:07)
working really well.
Nikki Bartley (38:08)
Also another thing I do, which I think it's also on the down tick, but I'll share it anyway in case it works for somebody else in the beginning, is we started doing artisan markets. Because I was talking about how I really wanted to have to carry only local products when I first started the barn shop and it just wasn't feasible. So what I do is I invite them for free and they come. I'll usually do it like.
two or three times a year. do it always on Mother's Day weekend when I know there's gonna be a big crowd. do it when I have the Dahlia Festival in the fall. And then I usually do it at Christmas, although we don't have an inside space, so again, they're freezing. And so that one's not as popular anymore. ⁓ my gosh, that's a whole other, yeah, it is. And the cost of that, yeah. ⁓
Jenny (38:51)
Can you get a tent, a big heated tent?
It's a whole other thing. There's a place near us that does it so much.
Nikki Bartley (39:04)
⁓ but that was a really great way to get people excited about, know, just make the place, make the farm a place that people want to come. with me, there's a, a musician that, ⁓ he teaches guitar lessons to little kids and his business is performance based. So he's always looking for places to bring the kids, ⁓ to perform. So I have him come.
whenever he wants on weekends. And he always brings like five or 10 families of the kids that are performing, right? And then it's just so lovely because it's these adorable little kids playing guitar. You know, it doesn't have to be expensive. Yeah.
Jenny (39:45)
I love that.
No, for sure. ⁓ Why did you say that you thought that it was on the down tick? Because I feel like having those little like pop-up events, like that doesn't seem like something that's like going away for people to be interested in.
Nikki Bartley (40:03)
⁓ I think, so we used to get a lot of food trucks and they would come for free because that was also like a COVID bump thing where everybody was starting their own food truck. But around here at least, the food trucks have gotten wise that they've learned that they don't make money by just showing up wherever they're invited. And so they'll only come if you pay them like 2,500 bucks or whatever the fee is. Yeah, like right.
Jenny (40:11)
Mmm.
Mm.
wow, that seems like a lot.
Nikki Bartley (40:33)
So food trucks, you really don't see them around here as much anymore, except for there's like food truck Friday night at the South Shore Food Truck Association, and they all go to like the mall and park there. So I think they found out that unless they have like 500 plus people, it's not gonna work out for them. And I think the artisan thing is kind of similar.
Jenny (40:45)
Mm, yeah.
Nikki Bartley (41:02)
people will do it as long as it's good for them and then if they're not repeatedly making money, then they won't come.
Jenny (41:08)
Yeah.
So the one thing that I feel like I've been hearing from you in this whole conversation is that you've really built your business around community and you're very much, it seems like super integrated into your town and your small town into your community. And you have all of this exposure in your local market. You have all this word of mouth and you have longevity.
Nikki Bartley (41:23)
Mm-hmm.
Jenny (41:38)
from your customers that are coming back for your you picks or your whatever events you have going on and for your barn shop and for your CSA. Like you are able to sort of like cross sell people on all these different things. And then these little pop-up markets that you're doing. And I just think that's so cool when you can be such an integrated part of your community with your business. And it just feels like a really supportive, like awesome little space that you're in. ⁓
I really want to come visit someday because you're not that far from where I grew up and I feel like I'm out in that area all the time. need to come visit from Enfield, Connecticut. So we're just south of Springfield, Mass. So yeah, my cousin got married ⁓ kind of near you last this past summer. I was out there, but didn't have time to go visit any flower farmers. I was too busy doing wedding things, but yeah, it's a nice area.
Nikki Bartley (42:07)
Yeah, I love that.
Where are you from?
Mmm.
Yeah.
It is, yeah. And we're on the way. We're in between Boston and Cape Cod. So in the summer, there's, you know, we get busy on Fridays as people are heading down to the Cape, yeah. Lots of weddings.
Jenny (42:37)
Mm-hmm. ⁓ lots of traffic. Yeah, I know. I went to the Cape every summer.
yeah, I'm sure. Yeah. ⁓ It's such a great, like, part of me really wishes that I was still in Connecticut.
Nikki Bartley (42:46)
Mm-hmm.
Jenny (42:55)
I know that there's a lot more competition with flower farms on the East coast there, but I just also feel like there's a lot more opportunity. Like I grew up in Connecticut. My whole family is still there, but I moved to middle of nowhere in New York. Cause for people listening, I live seven hours from New York city. Do not live anywhere near New York city. There's more cows than people in my town. And, ⁓ you know, I, of course I love it here and everything, but.
Nikki Bartley (43:02)
Hmm.
Yeah.
Wow.
Jenny (43:19)
I always have this like pang of like, but if I had my flower farm on the East Coast, things would be so different. But it's probably easy to just think about that.
Nikki Bartley (43:28)
Yeah, well, it's a
trade-off because I don't own my farm. So I have this insecurity that the town can pull my license. it's real. So, mm-hmm. I mean, on the one hand, I don't have a mortgage. So my overhead is lower. But on the other hand, it's like, oh, can I really invest? Or what happens in five years if the board of selectmen or the select board
Jenny (43:31)
Yeah.
That's huge.
Yeah, that's a huge risk. Yeah.
Nikki Bartley (43:57)
turns over and they don't like me anymore. What happens? ⁓ So it's a trade off. But yes, I mean, the community.
Jenny (44:00)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's so scary.
Nikki Bartley (44:09)
That's the reason that I keep going, you know, is that it really is. I've kind of, I've figured it out and I'm locked in and the community loves it. I mean, people say they move here because they came to my farm to pick flowers. We're like the first thing as you drive into our town that you see, it's like this historic week, like historic Jacob's farm. It's the crown jewel of Norwell or whatever. And it's like, as soon as you enter town, there's like a sign and then my flower farm.
And so, and people always come up to me like, I live on Jacobs Lane, which is the other main in Jacobs Lane where my farm is. And I love that I see flowers. I get to enjoy your farm more than you do because I get to drive past it two or three times a day, picking up my kids or whatever. Yeah. ⁓
Jenny (44:57)
I love that. That's so cool. mean, how cool
is it that you have like this cornerstone that you are the cornerstone of the town? Awesome.
Nikki Bartley (45:05)
Yeah, yeah.
It drives some people crazy. There's jealousy, of course, and then they're always saying they're going to raise my rent and things like that. with something great, there's always the other side, the balance. Yes.
Jenny (45:20)
There's always trade-offs, always, always, always.
Like I actually was just having conversation with somebody the other day who was kind of trying to start a flower farm in a rural area. And she was like, well, I can't charge the prices that people do in like Boston and New York City. And I was like, well, you also don't have the costs that they do with like insane land prices and like everything is so much more expensive. That's why. And so, yeah, we were having this whole conversation about it, but.
Nikki Bartley (45:38)
Yeah. my gosh. Yeah.
Jenny (45:50)
Yeah, really interesting to think about. Well, Nikki, I just think that you are such a savvy business person, and I'm so glad that you were able to come on today and give everybody like just a little sneak peek into your like business brain. ⁓ cause you're really smart about so many of the ways that you've gone about things and the way you've set up your barn shop and the way that you market and even just like your business model in general, just like feels like it's set up in a really
Nikki Bartley (45:59)
Hmm?
Jenny (46:19)
smart, solid way. And so I'm just so thankful that you were able to come on today and chat with me for a little while.
Nikki Bartley (46:25)
Well, thanks for having me and I love your show and it was great to meet you at Flower Farmers of the North. What was it called? Yeah, I forget. Flowering in the North in during what? I think a blizzard last year. it was so cold.
Jenny (46:31)
Yeah, flowering in the north. Flowering in the north.
Yeah,
every time I have gone to Flower in the North, there has been a blizzard, which is probably why I'm not going this year, because I'm not doing that drive right now. ⁓ but yeah.
Nikki Bartley (46:42)
Yeah.
Yeah, no,
I love it. And it's always a good group. And anyway, yeah.
Jenny (46:52)
Yeah, for sure.
Well, is there anything else that you would like to leave our listeners? Any piece of advice or anything that's standing out to you right now before we close up?
Nikki Bartley (47:06)
No, I mean, it's never easy, know. Farming is not for the meek. you know, last week we had ⁓ frost warning followed by a nor'easter and I thought for sure the season was over and then I went the next, you know, after it all rolled through town and the dyes looked better than ever. So, ⁓ and just when I'm about to give up hope and I'm completely, you know.
Jenny (47:24)
You never know.
Nikki Bartley (47:33)
I'll get an email from a customer like today I got one. I have to share this. ⁓ This guy was like, ⁓ I was wondering, I live in Wellesley, which is west of Boston, and I summer in Marshfield, which is the town next to us. And my wife is 80 years old, and she is a Dahlia enthusiast. And we always come to your farm in the summer, and she loves it. And she's turning 80 in November. And I'm wondering if you would go out to lunch with her.
so she could meet you and pick your brain about dahlias. And I was like, yeah, I can do that. I can do that. And that's like a really good reminder of why we do this because we're doing good too. Where people come to my farm and they're like, I can't believe this is Norwell. I could be in France, I could be in Vermont. It allows people to step out of their daily lives and take a moment and you know.
Jenny (48:09)
my God.
Nikki Bartley (48:30)
That's priceless. And especially nowadays. We need it.
Jenny (48:35)
We need it. Yeah. I
think that perspective is so important to come back to you because there's so many hard days of farming, so many impossible decisions that you have to make so many ridiculously difficult situations that you're faced with. But like at the end of the day, when you get emails like that, when you interact with customers that are just literally mind blown by what you're doing or you make their day or their entire week with something so simple, like a bouquet of flowers, like, ⁓ that really does make it all worth it. So.
I love that you shared that. Thank you. And you have to tell me about what it's like going out to lunch with her. That's so fun. It's going to be a blast. Awesome. Well, thank you, Nicky. Tell everyone where they can find you and follow you on the interwebs.
Nikki Bartley (49:07)
Yeah. Yeah. Thank you.
I know, I'm sure it'll be adorable.
Yeah, so we're cross street flower farm.com at cross street flower farm, Instagram. And I think that's it.
Jenny (49:33)
Awesome. I'll make sure that I link those in the show notes for anybody who wants to go and give Nikki a follow, which you absolutely should because she is a genius and has the most beautiful farm ever. So please everyone go and do that. And thanks everyone for being here for another episode. We'll see you next time.
