Jenny (00:29)
So many people ask me how they should sell their flowers. If they should start a farm stand or sell the florists or go to farmers markets or be a farmer florist and do weddings and whatever. And it gets really hard for people to make a decision and get real clarity on which direction they want to move in. And most flower farmers in this regard don't have a marketing problem. They have a niche problem. And so if you feel like you're somebody who is
trying to sell to everyone, you wanna grow everything, and you're still not seeing consistent sales, or maybe you just don't know which direction to pursue, you don't have clarity on which direction to go in, you're not alone. This is one of the most common questions I am asked. And today, I'm gonna help you find your niche. And I'm not gonna do this in like a trendy, pick a vibe kind of way.
but more in a very practical, profitable way that matches your strengths and your lifestyle and what your market actually wants and is asking for. Now, before we dive into it, I want to just define this word niche because when I first started out in business, this word was getting thrown around all the time, like, you have to find your niche. What's your niche? And I was just like, I don't even know what the hell that means. So if you're like me and you're thinking the same thing,
A niche is basically just a very specific focused segment of the market that you focus on and you kind of get known for. So this could be something like specializing in dried flowers or targeting wedding for us with really unique colors or selling directly to restaurants with edible flowers. And you're doing this instead of just trying to be a general supplier of flowers. So,
Instead of a flower farmer, you are a farmer florist who specializes in unique wedding colors or a flower farmer who specializes in dried flowers or you get what I'm saying. So it's kind of like who you serve, what you sell, how you deliver it. And it involves identifying a profitable area that aligns with your skills and customer demand.
And that can allow you to build a recognizable brand that is known for something. And that can also help you, ⁓ just in profitability as well. So your niche can kind of be thought of as your business model. And a lot of people want to find a niche for a few different reasons. The first one is that it reduces competition. kind of avoids just direct clashes with larger farms that sell.
common flowers, it can make you unique and stand out and be known for something. And that builds identity that creates a memorable brand that attracts very specific customers. And if you've ever heard that saying, if you market to everyone, you're marketing to no one, this is where a niche comes in very, very handy. And the thing that I love about finding your niche is that
It really can help you increase profitability, especially if you focus on high value specialized crops and flowers, which is what makes farming in small spaces more profitable. And my favorite is that it simplifies operations. When you focus your efforts on fewer varieties or methods or customers, it really streamlines your workload and it makes work smoother and less draining. And I feel like this is something
I have done really well in my business and I'm like not saying that to brag or toot my own horn, but this is how I've differentiated myself. And a lot of farmers think that niche is like, ⁓ I'm a romantic brand or I grow dahlias, but customers aren't really like buying your niche. guess growing dahlias could be your niche if that's all you do. But anyways, they're looking, your customers are looking to buy an outcome.
They're looking for convenience or beauty or joy or reliability or experience or status or local connection or whatever it is your customers want. But when you have a niche, it should make your business decisions easier. It tells you what to grow, where to sell, what to say in your marketing and what to say no to. And the thing about finding your niche in flower farming is that if you
aren't out of the gate, super, super clear on exactly what you wanna do, it can take you some time to really figure this out and dial it in and like where you fit in the whole landscape of your market and with other flower farms.
I think for most people who aren't crystal clear about what they want their business to look like, which is most people, it just takes a number of years to figure out exactly what your niche is. But what I go over today will hopefully help you speed that up and get you to figure out what you should be focusing on faster and easier. And something that I found that helped me when I was trying to figure out what I wanted to specialize in and get known for when I first started my business.
Was thinking about this sentence. And this is sort of just like a fill in the blank kind of sentence to help you find and define your niche. is I help who get blank results by selling blank offer through blank channel in blank region. Okay. If that just sounded like a bunch of messy jar jargon, let me just give you an example. ⁓ a niche sentence would be I help.
busy corporate women find happiness and joy through weekly table flowers in Rochester, New York. That's basically my niche sentence right now because we sell bunches and bouquets through our farmers market and our subscription program to mostly busy corporate women who just love to find joy and happiness in those table flowers. Now, another example, and this is when we used to do weddings in my business, this was one of our sort of niche sentences was,
We help cost conscious couples have their dream wedding day with affordable, professionally and sustainably designed floral designs in the Finger Lakes region of New York. And that's when we were selling a lot of a la carte or bulk bucket flowers to couples who are getting married. So to find your niche, you know, that sentence can help you define it, but actually find out what you want to do.
You want to consider the opportunities in your local market, your unique talents and strengths, the lifestyle you want to live, which gets overlooked a lot, the customers you want to serve and where the demand is, which is also a huge one that I think gets overlooked. And so we're going to dive into all of these considerations in this episode. So let's just dive right on into it. The first exercise that I want you to do if you're struggling with this is to do something called a SWOT.
analysis. So SWOT stands for, it's S-W-O-T and it stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. And basically you'll just make a list of things under each category as they pertain to your business. It's just a simple writing exercise. And the problem is that opportunity is usually pretty obvious, but we just don't look at it on paper. And so most farmers,
kind of focus on like strengths and weaknesses, but ignore a lot of opportunities or threats in their area. And by doing this SWOT analysis exercise, it forces you to stop guessing and start noticing patterns in your local market. And it also forces you to identify some threats or weaknesses. And threats and weaknesses don't have to be scary. We're just looking for clarity here. So looking at competition.
really short growing seasons, low willingness to pay, saturated wedding markets, like that kind of stuff that comes up for you when you're thinking this through. So the prompts that you wanna do is you wanna take a piece of paper and divide it into four quadrants. So draw a line down the middle of your paper and then horizontally and then draw a line in the middle vertically. And that should give you four quadrants at a piece of paper.
And in the top left, right strengths, then the next one, right weaknesses, then the next one, opportunities, and finally threats. So you should have four sections on a piece of paper, one for each of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. And then we'll start with the strengths. Under the strengths category, just list anything that comes to mind, which is a strength for you. Like what did people already compliment you on? What?
are things that you are already good at. What are strengths or talents that you have that you could really capitalize on? And so if you're already growing flowers, this could be speed or floral design or growing quality. could be hospitality or like customer service. Just write down anything that comes to mind. And this is very much just like a brain dump that we're doing right now. And I promise once we get to this exercise, it'll help make sense of your niche.
as we get through it, so just bear with me. Then for the next one, you'll write down any weaknesses that come to mind under the weakness quadrant. So what consistently stresses you out, what slows you down, what are things that you're not good at, like you naturally don't want to do, you don't like to do, anything like that. Then for the next one, the O, we're gonna look at opportunities, and this is the big, big, big, big, big one that a lot of people don't think about when they're
starting their flower farm businesses or they're trying to scale their businesses. And this is what is missing locally. What are people asking for repeatedly? What are gaps in the market that you could potentially fill? Do this. For example, when I first started my business, I did this exercise and I live in the Finger Lakes region of New York and there are a lot of weddings here, like a lot of destination weddings because
We have a lot of lakes and like very beautiful scenery and wineries where people like to get married at and party and all that stuff. And so there were a ton of event floral designers serving that market. I personally didn't ever want to do like floral design and big weddings, but I started selling flowers to those floral designers because I saw an opportunity to capitalize on. And as I was talking to these floral designers, a lot of them told me about how they struggled to find high quality local flowers.
and that there weren't any real flower farmers out there at the time. And of course this was over 10 years ago. And I really found like a niche in the market by doing that exercise and by going in that direction simply by identifying an opportunity. So maybe in your area, it's that there are also weddings and you could do that as well, but maybe there are a lot of like lower income people and you could serve.
cost conscious couples with a la carte wedding packages, or maybe you live in an affluent area where people have lots of disposable income and they are willing to spend money on those table flowers or flower subscriptions. Maybe you live near a hospital and there are always people getting sick there and there's an opportunity to have floral arrangements delivered. It could be anything. Just try to think through your market and your area and where the opportunities are, where the gaps are.
You also want to think about competition because chances are, if there's a lot of competition in one area, that probably means there's a lot of demand for something. And that doesn't necessarily mean you can't fit into that. It might mean that there's demand there that you can capitalize on, or it might mean that it's already a really crowded space and you might have to fit in somewhere else. Only you will be able to figure that out for your unique market. Now, finally, the last part of this SWOT exercise analysis.
or exercise is you want to look at threats. So on your piece of paper, in the quadrant that has threats, make a list of what would make this hard. Like what makes flower farming hard here? Is it price sensitivity? Is it that you live in a rural area? Is it the weather? Is it competition? Is it regulations? Like just think through anything and everything that could be a potential threat to your business.
Now this will give you clarity on how to maybe avoid some of those threats. just think that this is a fantastic exercise that I do once a year for my business. And I think any business should do this, whether you're just starting out or you're 15 years in, it's a really great way to translate what is going on in your market, what the opportunities are.
and how you can differentiate yourself and put it all down on paper. So that's a huge exercise I highly recommend you doing.
All right. So once you've done that, take into account your strengths and your talents, because those really matter. And you have to do this repeatedly, whatever you pick, whatever direction or niche you go on, you have to do it over and over and over and over and over again. And so a profitable niche that you hate will still burn you out. The best niche isn't just profitable. It's sustainable for you.
So if you're forcing yourself into a model that drains you, you're well, probably eventually resent it and it will probably eventually collapse. And a lot of times people choose niches based on what looks glamorous online, not what matches their actual wiring. And so for me, this was weddings because I went into doing those farmer for sales or selling to event florist, I should say. And then we also started doing weddings ourselves and I actually just like.
really didn't like doing weddings. And so I eventually cut off that piece of the business and we don't do our own weddings anymore. But I want you to ask yourself questions like, do I like people facing work or do I like quiet production work? Like, do I like design and arrangements or do I like systems like just harvesting and bunching and fulfilling? Do I like hosting people on the farm, having people come to my farm and my house?
Or do I like staying behind the scenes and moving product off the farm? Do I want simplicity or do I like variety? Right? Like all of these different questions will help lead you down the right path. And then once you kind of dive a little bit deeper into that, you can choose a niche that fits the lifestyle that you want. There is an exercise I used to have all my business program students do where I would have them map out their ideal.
day of work. Like what does your most ideal work day look like? And then try to design your business around that because your niche is a scheduled decision as much as is a marketing decision. Because weddings often mean weekends, evenings, a lot of emotional labor, higher stakes. And for some people they thrive on that and other people it's really hard. And retail markets can mean a lot of like
repetitive selling early mornings, more weekend commitments, ⁓ and a lot of like people facing and like doing a lot of
talking and being extroverted. A CSA can mean a lot of consistency, logistics, customer communication, and having a really predictable weekly workflow. Like, you picks and events can be high margin and they can be fun, but they require a lot of staffing, traffic, parking, signage, designing guest experiences. ⁓ So, you know, all these different things need to be thought about in a niche.
should really protect your boundaries, not destroy them. So I recommend doing that ideal day in the life exercise, but you can also just create a sort of like lifestyle non-negotiables list where you think about, okay, I don't want to work weekends, or maybe you don't mind weekends, but you're not going to travel, or maybe you're okay with weekends for now, but not later. And then you can hire that out in the future if you want to.
No last minute deadlines, you want winters off, you want one to two days off every week during the season or whatever your boundaries are. Cross off any niches that violate those non-negotiables for you and just don't even think about doing them. Now I wanna kind of shift gears here a little bit and instead of thinking about you and everything that you want and having your business revolve around you, we actually really wanna shift the focus to your customers.
So when you do pick a niche, you want to keep in mind the type of customers and the type of people you will be serving because your niche is also your people and whatever you pick, you're going to be spending a lot of time with these people. And you want to make sure that you can have happy customers. So you have a happy business and different customer groups come with different expectations and communication styles. So if you're serving customers, you don't enjoy like everything becomes harder.
marketing, sales, delivery, problem solving, and your ideal customers. ⁓ you just want them to align with your values. want them to be respectful and reliable and appreciative and able and willing to pay, which is a big one. We'll kind of come back to that in a second, but if you've been kind of trying a bunch of different things out, try to identify some of your favorite customer moments from previous seasons. Like who did you love working with?
Who drained you? Who paid easily and referred their friends? Like niche toward the customers you enjoy because usually they're the most profitable too because that's where you can really lean into and have fun with it. And honestly, the person who is having fun is going to be really hard to beat in business. Now back to what I said before about willingness and ability to pay. Whether we like it or not,
flowers are luxury products most of the time, which means that you can't just ask like what's popular. You have to ask what is being purchased. You really need to look at demand and willingness to pay because high demand means nothing if people won't pay enough to make it worth it. So an example of this is that I would love to grow all of those cloney, ranunculus that are like $4 a corm.
And there are these, you know, big, beautiful, rununculus, but in my market with my customers and the niche that I serve, they are unwilling to pay $10 a STEM per rununculus, which is realistically what I would want to charge if I grew that specific product or that specific flower type. And so that's why we grow a lot of the elegance rununculus, which are still, you know, they're not cheap, but they make it much more affordable and we still get great results.
and our customers love them and they have a great willingness to pay, you know, $3.50 per stem for one of those. And so it comes down to not just interest, it's repeated buying behavior because I know if I had those redonkulas at my market, people would love them, but they wouldn't be willing to pay what I would need for it to be profitable. You know, some markets love flowers, but only at grocery store prices.
And so we have to think about where does your market already spend money and what do they already value? So you wanna look for signals here, look for things like sold out markets, wait lists, local wedding spend, affluent communities, corporate gifting, subscription culture, all that kind of stuff. And I know that this can kind of get hard for people when they start asking these questions.
if you're in a rural market or if you're in an area that is low income and there's so many of us out there. I personally am in one, which is why I drive 45 minutes to the city of Rochester. That's where my market is. It's not where my farm is. And for you, that might not be an option, but there are always options out there available.
Like that example before of if you're in a rural low income community, maybe there's an opportunity there for you to do all a car, like lower cost wedding packages to cost conscious couples. Like there, if there's a will, there's a way. Like I've definitely believed that, but I also believe that your life will be a lot easier if you take these things we're talking about today into consideration and really do the exercises. So do a demand reality check. Like what's already selling locally?
What price points are normal in your area? Like that's not something to really a hundred percent go off of, but just take a look at it, especially at like florists in your area, maybe not necessarily other flower farmers. Think of what's underserved. Like if there are just a few farms offering something really well and what you can deliver consistently. And then finally, this is the last point I'm to make today is that you don't have to be married to whatever you pick. You can test it out.
You don't need a forever niche, you need a next step niche. Like a lot of flower farms freeze because they think that choosing a niche in a direction to go in is permanent. And it doesn't have to be. Your niche can evolve with seasons, with the capacity you have, with market feedback, like...
your business is yours. You can make it whatever you want to be at any moment, but testing it kind of removes the fear and replaces it with evidence. Like you don't have to pick something and jump in with two feet. can, if you want to, but you can also do some quick validation tests. You could do some micro offers like a Friday porch, bouquet drop, like come and pick up your flowers from my porch this week.
You could do a pilot event. You could do a pre-sale campaign. You could just try one small CSA share and see how it goes and track things like time spent, the profitability, the demand, the enjoyment. And once you do that for a little while, it will start to get much more clear which direction you want to go in.
And just to reiterate on all of this that we've talked about, it can just take some trial and error sometimes to find your niche. know that was the case for me and I know it's the case for most people that I talked to. So don't get discouraged if it's not like this aha moment that you figure out right away. But let me recap here. Finding your niche in flower farming really comes down to alignment between a lot of different things. Defining
the niche as your model. looking at like who, what, and how doing that SWOT analysis to reveal real opportunities in your area and then match your niche to your strengths and what you enjoy and making sure that you're filtering that through your lifestyle boundaries. So it all aligns with your values and how you want to live your life and run your business. And then the flip side, also choosing niches that have customers that you're really going to love serving.
And validating all of this by seeing if there's even demand for it and willingness to pay and just, you know, kind of testing that before you jump in with two feet and committing long-term, if that's your personality style. And if that gives you a little bit more peace of mind before you really like start tearing off in one direction. But I will say that when you have a clearly defined niche, when you really know what you want to be known for, what you're really good at.
and what you can do better than anyone else. Like what can you be the best at in your area? When you know that everything gets so much easier. Your marketing gets easier. Your season gets simpler. Your whole operations are streamlined and your profit gets way more predictable. That clarity helps create demand and demand helps create a profit. It really, really does.
And I have seen this work so many well with so many different people. I've also had a lot of flower farmer friends who have switched their niches and changed things and it's evolved over time. And that will probably be the case with your business as well. So don't get too stuck on it. But I highly recommend that you sit down and just sort of go through these exercises today to try to figure all this out.
And I made a worksheet just for you to walk you through all these exercises I've talked about. Just head on over to trademarkfarmer.com forward slash niche. That's trademarkfarmer.com forward slash N I C H E. It's a hard word to spell. I probably shouldn't made that my URL, but
Here you go. Spelling lesson of the day, spelling bee. It's N I C H E. That's how you spell niche. So I, like I said, I made a worksheet to walk you through all these different examples. So you can help pick your niche a little bit easier and get you moving in the right direction.
Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the Six Figure Flower Farming Podcast. Don't forget we publish new episodes every Monday, so I will see you next week, same time, same place, and don't forget to go download that worksheet at trademarkfarmer.com forward slash niche. I'll also drop that link in the show notes. Take care for now.
