Jenny (00:29)
Most flower farmers don't struggle with growing beautiful bouquets. They struggle with putting a price on them that is profitable and feeling okay about it. If pricing your bouquets feels awkward, emotional, or like a guessing game, you're not alone. Most growers are pricing based on what feels fair, what others are charging, or what they're aff-
that customers won't push back on. And today I want to give you permission and a simple framework to price your bouquets for profit, not comparison. And yes, this builds directly on ideas I've shared in past pricing episodes, which I will point you to along the way. But honestly, this is such a massive problem in our industry right now. I just see so many people undercharging for what they're selling and
It's really just bringing the whole industry down and it's making it so your business isn't profitable either. And I'm not saying you need to make a million dollars a year and be like rolling in the dough, but you do need to have financial security so you can keep rolling your business along and keep operating. So whether your goal is to build a
six-figure business or a multiple six-figure business or just earn a little bit of cash on the side from your flower farm, pricing is one of the major levers that will help you get there. So fair pricing feels kind, you know, but it's not neutral. It usually works against you and a lot of people base their prices on fairness.
But the problem is that it's usually costing you money to do this. Now, most farmers price their bouquets by asking, what feels reasonable? What would I pay for this? And what won't scare people off? But the problem is that none of those questions account for your costs, your time, or your actual business goals. Fairness, when it comes to,
pricing doesn't pay your labor, it doesn't replace your tools and equipment, it doesn't fund your next season. And so what you need to do is start separating emotion from math. Now I'm not saying that you need to be like heartless when it comes to your business, I certainly am not. I absolutely wanna charge fair prices to my customers, but that has to be rooted in data. So when you're setting your bouquet prices,
There are basically four things that it needs to cover. It has to cover the flowers, the actual cost to grow the flowers, all the cost of production. your labor, supplies, materials, all that stuff. The labor to actually put the bouquets together, which includes whatever amount of time to actually take the different stems and arrange them into a bouquet to wrap it, put a rubber band on it and put it in a bucket and transport it somewhere.
but it also has to account for overhead.
Overhead is all the expenses or all the things you spend money on for your business that aren't directly tied to cut flower production. So these are things that just have to keep the business moving, like office supplies, printer, paper, business insurance, your mortgage or rent or lease, ⁓ auto insurance, your delivery vehicles, like all that kind of stuff that you have to have for the business, but it's not a cost that's directly tied to actually growing the flowers.
So that has to be accounted in the pricing, plus there has to be a margin so you earn a profit, okay? So whatever you do when you have mixed bouquets, when you set the prices, it has to cover those things. The cost of the flowers, the labor, the overhead, and profit. If you've listened to earlier pricing episodes that I've done, this is the same sort of like margin-first thinking. Just apply directly to bouquets.
And I always make a recipe and I price out exactly what the stems are valued at and what the total recipe comes out to be valued at. And then I add on for the labor and for profit. And I highly recommend that you do the same thing. And I just see this all the time when flower farmers are selling a lot of stuff, but they're not actually earning money at the end of the year. It's usually because their pricing is not taking all these things into account.
It's leaving them short at the end of the season. And even though they're charging a price that feels fair to them and their customers, it's not doing anybody justice.
Here's the thing. If you go out of business because you didn't charge enough and you're not making a profit, your customers are going to lose too, because they want your flowers. You're doing them a service. You're bringing them joy and happiness or whatever your business does. And that's not fair to them either. So keep that in mind. Next point I want to hit on is that competitor pricing is simply a data point. It is not a rule just because another farm down the street from you charges, you know, $25.
doesn't mean that you should necessarily. Now it really hurts when there are competitive flower farms out there and they are actually pricing by what it costs them to grow things and then somebody else is just guessing down the road and they're charging half the price. That really hurts the industry. So if you're doing that, please let me help you and stop. But just because someone else charges a price that's near you or they're similar to you doesn't mean that you should charge the same thing.
Now, some people out there say like what your competitors charge is absolutely none of your business and you just charge whatever you want to. And to a degree, I think that's probably true. But I also think that looking at what other people charge is a good data point, you know, like simply just that, a data point. When you look at competitor pricing,
as your sole anchor to set your own pricing, that assumes that you have the same costs, you have the same efficiency, the same sales channels, the same business goals, and that is almost never, ever, ever true. Because, ⁓ you know, farmer Joe down the street from me could charge the same amount for my dahlias, but he could grow them, you know, 10 times less efficiently than I do, which means that he's probably losing money on them. So you have to understand that.
That's why this comparison pricing often leads to that undercharging, especially at like farmers markets and like roadside stands, I would say. I recommend you look at competitor pricing after you already know your numbers and what it costs you to actually grow all the flowers and sell all the things and just use it as a data point. Use it to spot positioning opportunities, not to set your ceiling.
If you've ever listened to our navigating cut flower pricing episodes, which is episodes number 34 and 35 of the six figure flower farming podcasts, this is kind of where like the wholesale versus retail logic like comes into play and understanding your prices and understanding your market.
So by the way, if you're interested in learning more about pricing, I highly recommend those episodes. I'll drop links for them in the show notes of this episode.
Now, if we want to move away from actual numbers and real hard pricing strategies and techniques and stuff, it's important to understand that your bouquet price and that product needs a clear role in your business. Not every bouquet needs to do the same job. Not every product needs to do the same job. Some bouquets are volume drivers. Some are first time customer entry points.
Some are high margin anchor products. And problems happen when you expect one bouquet to do all three of these things. And I know a lot of flower farmers out there that sort of have these different tiers of products. For example, in my business, we sell mostly straight bunches of flowers. 90 % of what we sell is just straight bunches. For me, it's just way more efficient.
way more profitable and that is my preferred way to sell flowers. And that is sort of like an entry point for a lot of our customers where we're selling flowers, like the bouquets or bunches are mainly around that like $15 to $25 range. And so if people are trying us out for the first time, that's what they're buying. Then we also sell mixed bouquets and we are pricing those at anywhere from like 35 to 55.
sometimes more depending on the demand and the time of year. And those two products exist for very different reasons. And so that is why they are priced differently. So like those small bouquets or like single bunches, single variety bunches, they are accessible, they are fast to assemble, they are quick out the door. And then if you have something in that like medium tier, that's often like your main profit driver where you have a really good profit margin on that.
And then sometimes you have a large bouquet, which is a margin protection because, you know, not a huge percentage of people buy our $50 mixed bouquets, but we make a pretty big margin on them. And that small percentage of people that buy that carries a lot of the profit for the day at the farmer's market. And so it kind of protects your margin that way. And so this also matters. Like your product mix also matters just as much as your
price sometimes. So I want you to think about how you can change a bouquet size or a product to improve the margin without necessarily just trying to like move more volume. You can play around with the different pricing strategies to create more margin in your business without just like increasing your prices on everything.
So if you wanna dive deeper into pricing strategies around this and kind of how to like pick different tiers of products and go over that value ladder, I did an entire episode about this. It's episode number 11 of the Six Figure Flower Farming Podcast and it's called Three Pricing Strategies to Boost Your Summer Revenue Now. And you might wanna check that out if you wanna learn more about this.
And earlier on in this episode, I said that pricing isn't usually a confidence issue. It is a data issue. Or maybe I didn't say that yet. If I haven't said that yet, I meant to say it earlier, but I really believe that it's really not a confidence issue. It's a data issue. And until you have the data, you won't have the confidence. So you need clearer systems in place to gain the confidence to price what you need to for profit.
And most pricing stress is more about like fully trusting the numbers underneath the price. So when your pricing is documented, it is repeatable and intentional confidence naturally follows that. So I encourage you to record things like the STEM counts per year bouquet, your recipes. Like I'm not a fan of doing just STEM counts for bouquet recipes. have like very specific recipes based on the value of each flower. like
Zinnias, each stem is charging $2 in a bouquet. Then dahlias, we're charging three to $4 per stem in each bouquet. Like that kind of stuff. Not just like we charge $15 for 10 stems of flowers. Like really think about the value of the flowers you're putting into those bouquets and recording it. Looking at the time it takes you to put bouquets together and
After you discover some of that, figure out what your target margin is on those products so you actually can earn a profit on them.
Now, you don't have to go over this stuff all the time. That's not realistic. But once a season, probably in the wintertime, sit down and evaluate these things. Jot down the records, the notes as you go, and then sit down in the winter when you have more time to evaluate it. You don't have to do this every single market day.
So here's your action step on this for today, and it takes about 15 minutes. Just pick one bouquet size you sell most often or one bouquet recipe, and I want you to write down and try to figure out what it costs you to grow those flowers and put that bouquet together, then what role it plays in your business, and whether you are pricing it for profit or just for comfort.
You don't need to overhaul everything today. You just need to start small and try to get really clear and intentional about your pricing on your bouquets and not just being like, ⁓ this feels fair or this feels about right, or this is in line with what other people in my area are charging. Trying to be a lot more intentional about your pricing and your goals with your business. So if this episode helped you feel a little bit more grounded and more confident about this,
I would love it if you shared it with a friend, send it to somebody who could use a little bit of a confidence boost with their pricing and help me on my mission to help all small scale flower farmers build profitable and sustainable businesses. So that's it for today. Thanks for being here for another episode of the Six Figure Flower Farming Podcast. Don't forget we publish new episodes every Monday. So I'll see you next week. Same time, same place. And I'll put those other pricing episodes, the links for them in the show notes for you.
So that's it for today, take care.
