Jenny (00:29)
A lot of flower farmers here, DaliaTuber sales and think easy off season income, or maybe you're like, wow, I'm not sure if I could ever do that. Or I don't know if I'm doing this right, or this is harder than I thought it would be. And you know, from the outside, DaliaTuber sales seem like they're pretty easy, but then reality kind of hits where there's like the spreadsheets everywhere, lots of data, piles of DaliaTubers, shipping overwhelm.
and a whole lot of time and labor. And so the real issue is that tuber sales aren't hard because you're bad at them. Sometimes they're hard because people don't always treat them like a systematized product with real margins and systems that need to be optimized and made more efficient. And so today I'm walking you through how to make tuber sales more profitable, efficient, and actually work for you. ⁓
not the other way around. So today I'll be covering pricing and margins, marketing, execution, and efficiencies, especially around shipping DaliaTubers, and I'm really excited for it.
I've been selling DeliaTubers for nine years now. We've always just done one sale a year, usually in like late winter, early spring. And ⁓ to be honest with you, like our systems have definitely been optimized a lot over the years, but it's not the only thing I do. It's not my main focus. So I'm just gonna be walking you through things that have really helped me and things that we've optimized over the years. There are people out there.
who only have Dahlia farms, so they only sell Dahlia flowers or maybe only Dahlia tubers. And we're gonna talk a little bit about that, but this is really an episode for the average farmer who is looking to either add Dahlia tuber sales to their lineup or make it more efficient and profitable. But first things first, I wanna ask the question, should you even be doing Dahlia tuber sales?
Like not every profitable flower farm needs to do tuber sales. And I think that's kind of like a misnomer out there and that's totally okay. I want to reiterate that tuber sales are not passive income. It sounds great. Like, well, I have all these extra tubers. I'll just sell them. But it does require storage, labor, systems.
policies, customer service, mitigating risk. And if that doesn't all align with your capacity or your margins, it can quietly drain your time and energy. But I do think that Tuber sales make sense if you already grow deli as well, you can store them properly and you have pretty good luck with that, you've got that down, and you're willing to systematize the whole process. They might not make sense if you're already really stretched thin,
over the winter or the spring, if you truly want to take some time off in the winter, like not think about work for a little bit, ⁓ or if margins feel fuzzy, or if this is like an emotional decision for you, like you are totally allowed to opt out of this or to simplify things. I don't think that DaliaTuber sales are for everybody, but I do think that they're right if you want some of that cash injection in the middle of winter when
You may not have sales coming in. You may not have fresh flowers. For me, that was a crucial decision maker because I wanted cash flow year round, even though I didn't have flowers year round. And so it's kind of like a personal decision, whether you're going to do it or not. But I think it can be a really great cash injection in the middle of winter to kind of help you get going early on in the spring.
But let's take a look at the numbers and like pricing and margins because profit with DahliaTubers really lives in the details. Selling a lot of DahliaTubers does not necessarily mean that you make money and that you earn a profit. Margins tend to disappear here when your pricing ignores labor that goes into all the little pieces of digging your tubers.
storing them, dividing them, packing them, shipping them, organizing the sale, all that stuff. And actually shipping is one of the biggest places I think farmers accidentally give profit away.
When I first started selling Delia tubers, I made the mistake of not fully covering my shipping costs. So I charged for shipping for the box and you know, the packing paper and the postage, but I didn't account for the labor to actually like pack all of the orders because that takes a lot of time. And let's just say it takes you a full week to pack all of your orders and get them shipped out. Let's just say 40 hours.
And if you're paying somebody $20 an hour, that's $800 in labor. And so that cost has to be covered somewhere, whether you include that in the price of the tubers or in your actual shipping charge that you charge people, but you have to account for it somewhere. And if you don't, you're just quietly eating away at profit. And so I think this is where people think tubers sales are profitable, but when you actually add up all the math, it can tell a different story.
So just think about tuber pricing. It has to account for the growing time, the digging time, the dividing labor, losses. Like if you have rot and you have losses, like has to account for that as well. Your admin customer service, like I know every year it takes me a while to go through my website, like update our variety, see if we have new varieties, if we have ones we're not selling anymore, update all the inventory, like track all that.
And then making sure your shipping charges cover all the packaging materials. So that's the box. Any like packing paper, peanuts or whatever you put inside of the box. The plastic bag that you put your tuber in, the label that you put on the tuber, the label you put on the box, the actual postage, and then the labor to pack the order. So all of that has to be taken into account. So.
As always with this podcast, I am encouraging you to sit down and look at your numbers and try to figure this out so you can price appropriately to know that you are actually earning a profit on your DaliaTubers. I don't think anybody is necessarily getting rich selling DaliaTubers out there because it is a lot of work, a lot of labor. So really to know your numbers around that. But enough of that. Let's move on to marketing because I get this question a lot.
Our Dalia tubers sales saturated. seems like everybody's holding a Dalia tubers sale and everybody's selling these like unicorn varieties. And there's so many of them out in the world. And like, yeah, I think that's true. But I also think that it's this weird ecosystem where all of us far farmers are just like selling and buying Dalia tubers from each other, where we're all just like trading money back and forth, just like in our little community of flower farmers. And we're all supporting each other. And I think it's great.
I also think a lot of people like myself are selling to just like gardeners and hobbyists. And so we'll talk about that more in a second, but thinking about marketing here, because I don't think that the market is totally saturated. I think there is more room for everybody. Clearly there is demand here, but marketing around your Dalia tubers and your Dalia tubers sale is important. And again,
higher prices doesn't always mean better business. Higher margins work best when you align your sale and your pricing and your varieties and what you offer with who you actually wanna serve. So just thinking about your customer, like not just what looks lucrative on the internet. ⁓ I know that there's like all these unicorn varieties out there and all these farms that are really focusing in on selling those
like super highly sought after new, very expensive varieties. And I think that's a great market. ⁓ But there's a point where I realized that that was an opportunity for my
I realized at one point that I could sell one Dalia tuber for like 30 or $40 or I could sell another Dalia tuber for 10 or $15. And I thought, wow, same exact amount of work. You know, the tubers grow exactly the same. You dig them through the same, you divide them the same, but you get quadrupled the price and however many times the profit. Like that sounds amazing. I'm going to do that. So I started to lean into that for a bit.
And yes, you can make more money that way, but you're also dealing with a completely different customer. And honestly, my values didn't really align with that space. Like I said, I've been selling DaliaTubers for the past nine years and two thirds of my customers are actually just backyard gardeners who just want something beautiful. They are local customers in my local market around like Rochester and the Finger Lakes region of New York.
probably only about a third of our customers are nationwide flower farmers. And I loved those customers that were local because they just wanted something beautiful. They didn't care about the brand new variety or that slightly different shade of pink or blush. And I realized by kind of leaving that market for a little bit and trying to sell those like unicorn, fancy, expensive varieties that I actually loved serving,
those backyard gardeners more than the customers who wanted like super high quality unicorn varieties. And so over time, I dropped a lot of those unicorn varieties and kind of came full circle back to where I started. So this is a classic case of like shiny object syndrome. I mean, I also had very solid reasoning behind why I made that business move, but.
It came down to marketing and understanding who my ideal customer was. My ideal customer is somebody who just wants beautiful flowers in their garden or their farm, and they want varieties that are proven, tried and true, tested, and that work. So this is why knowing your audience matters, not just for pricing, but also for long-term sustainability.
So know your audience. Are you going to cater your Dalia tuber sale to backyard gardeners? Or are you going to cater it to collectors? Because the kinds of varieties that you grow are going to change based on those audiences. And how you market to them is going to change based on those audiences. Totally different expectations, totally different education, and just a totally different approach.
And so profitability needs to include enjoyment of the customers you're serving in alignment, not just price. So
I could go on and on about the marketing piece of Daliotuber sales, but this is the base of it, is knowing who your customer is and how you're gonna sell to them. I will also say that most people do sales launches with their Daliotuber sales, and I have found that this works extremely well. Some people don't like it or they don't wanna do that, and I totally understand, but it does work when you set a certain day.
at a certain time and you tell people when your dahlias are going to be available and give them the opportunity to shop during a specific window, which by the way, my dahliatubers sale is happening on Tuesday, March 24th, 2026. Sales open at 10 a.m. Eastern at trademarksflowers.com if you're interested in buying our dahliatubers. But anyhow, I have found that the sales launch method works pretty well with dahliatubers, but definitely not something you have to do. Again, know your audience.
Okay, I will stop belaboring the whole know your audience thing and move on to execution of Delia Tuber sales. ⁓ Systems here are going to protect your time and also your reputation, which is everything when it comes to this. Now, execution breaks down when things like your inventory isn't tracked or when losses aren't planned for. Where overselling and stress
creep in. so knowing your data around your inventory and around how you're going to actually sell things is really important here. So optimism is expensive, data is calm. I like that saying. But what I think is smart here is to just think through the entire DaliaTuber process.
Like as you are dividing your Dalia tubers, we track how many clumps we divide and how many tubers we get from each clump. So that's great data for us just for knowing like which varieties are most productive and more profitable. And so we do that with both the stems that we harvest and sell and also the Dalia tubers. I think it's great data if you're going to get into the Dalia tuber business,
but you also want to know what your inventory is. So you can also plan for what you have available to sell and what you're going to hold back for losses. So every farm does this differently, but on my farm, we hold back about 30 % of inventory for planned losses. Now, in general, we don't really have problems with loss of our Dalia tubers, but it just happens that you think you divided a Dalia tuber that has an eye on it and it turns out it doesn't.
you know, you get a little bit of shriveling or you get a little bit of mold or something, it happens to almost everybody. And it's just more helpful to account for that. So after we count up all of our DeliTubers as we're dividing, we look at how many we are going to keep for our farm and keep a few extra. And then we hold back about 30 % from each variety. So we don't put that up as inventory to sell.
Now, if it comes down to it and we have those extra 30 after the initial sale, I'll go ahead and add that later, but I always want to make sure I have enough to give to our customers if they ordered a variety. One thing that absolutely sucks is when you oversell by accident and then you're panicking because you don't have enough for yourself. You don't have enough to get your customers. You either have to disappoint them by giving them a refund, which hurts your reputation.
Or you need to go buy tubers from somewhere, which who knows what kind of quality they are and try to sell those in place of the tubers that you had. These are really simple systems that be perfect ones. And I think that planning for this last year is professional, not pessimistic. And that's just how we do it. And then just looking at your systems overall in terms of how you do everything specifically around shipping. So
That's actually a great segue into shipping. With shipping, efficiency is the difference between sustainable and profitable and absolutely miserable. Like shipping is not a side task of DaliaTuber sales. Obviously, unless you're doing an in-person DaliaTuber sale, it seems like that's becoming more popular now, but the vast majority of people who sell DaliaTubers ship them. When I first started my DaliaTuber sale, it was...
in person mostly and then we also shipped. So I had our local people could come pick up their Dalia tubers from our farmers market or from the farm and then people who weren't close enough to do that we could ship their Dalia tubers to them. This actually became a logistical nightmare because people wouldn't come pick up their Dalia tubers or they would forget or they'd want to come on a different day or they want to meet me at
nine o'clock on Friday at the farm and it was just like miserable. So we ended up moving to an all shipping method, which like no matter where you are, unless you're literally my neighbor next door, which we have a couple of people who are, that we give Daliatubers to or sell to, we ship everything now. But shipping can be a bear. So let's talk about it. My very first Daliatuber sale, I actually, might've been the first two, I manually typed.
every single person's shipping address into the USPS like click and ship program on their website. I tried to batch it. I lost the information and erased it all. I had to do it again like three times was reentering it was losing addresses. It was so painful. I think I'm not sure how many orders I had that year, but I remember it took me forever to do. And I was like, there's no way I can keep doing this. And so if you have been there, I can relate to it.
Now we get hundreds of orders and so that's like not even, you know, feasible anymore, but very, very early on, it became clear that we needed automation. And that's when we first signed up for shipping software. So we use ShipStation. There's a bunch of them out there. There's like Shippo, think like Shopify has their own or something. And you know, this isn't about being like fancy or like automating everything. It's about making the process like basically survivable. ⁓
and more efficient so you're not spending all of your time doing these manual things and so it makes it more profitable too. So some tips I have on this is to one, ship all your orders at once if you're shipping for efficiency. If you're like piecemealing, like I'll pack up a few orders this week and ship on, then a few next week, like as orders roll in or something, it's just gonna be a waste of time. It's so much more efficient to batch everything into
just one day or a week or a couple of weeks to send everything out at once. Then of course, I mentioned use shipping software. Don't do this manually, learn from my lessons. We use USPS, so United States Postal Service. I found that it is cheapest and they also provide free boxes. So if you ship USPS priority, we used to do the regional rates, but they discontinued that. You can order free boxes from them. They send them to you right through their website.
So you don't have to buy boxes. It's included in the price of shipping priority. So that's great.
I mean, if that's not like in line with your branding or whatever, of course, it's not like a make or break thing, but this is just what we do. And then deciding on how you're actually going to charge for your shipping. So your shipping pricing model, like you can just charge flat rate. You can charge by the tuber. You can charge kind of like by piece or by weight. So like I've seen some farms and we used to do this a long time ago where if you buy 10 tubers or less, it's like, you know, $15 if you buy
15 to 20 tubers, it's like $12 or whatever. There's a lot of different ways, but the important thing is to figure out what your costs are going to be to ship. And then no matter what, just make sure that you are covering your shipping costs, including your labor to box them up and ship them. And then one of the big things is setting up your packing space very, very intentionally to be super efficient.
This has taken me years to perfect, but basically what we do now is in our barn and our studio, we have rolling racks and then we also have tables where all of the varieties are laid out in crates in alphabetical order.
So the first variety in line is Allamode. And then the last variety in mind is something with a Z, Zorro. I don't think I have either of those varieties right now, but there you go. And just A through Z, line them all up. And then we have a big sheet of paper on the front that's super clear with what the variety name is. So it's very easy as you're going down the line.
to find the variety you need to pack with the order and put it in there. So we print all of our orders out at once. So it's just a big stack of orders. And then you just pick up the order on the top, go down the line. You have your shipping box with you as you move along. So you can put the tubers in your shipping box as you move down the assembly line. Then you get to the end, pack it, put the little card in there, and then tape it shut. And then you just do that over and over and over again.
The layout is really important to make sure you're not walking back and forth a bunch of times. You kind of just want to go like in a straight line or in a circle so you're not repeating unnecessary steps. And I'll tell you, I have timed this and it is amazing how much faster it goes just with a more efficient setup. So highly recommend doing it that way and taking a look at your system for shipping. So, you know, here's the big picture. Profitable DaliaTuber sales come from
making really clear decisions upfront with who you serve, how you price, how you plan for losses, and how you protect your time with systems and efficiency. And so I would love it if you did this action item to help you out with this today. If you're going to do DeliaTuber sales, sit down and write out every step of your DeliaTuber process from, you know, digging and...
storing and dividing to shipping and even like setting up your sale on your website, that too, and marketing and circle any steps that feel like heavy or chaotic or like they're not working that well. And this is where you want to examine the systems that will give you the biggest return because you can put systems in place for anything, for the marketing, for the shipping, for the DaliaTuber dividing, all that stuff. And this will really help you think through
not only how to make your DaliaTuber sale work for you without it being like exhausting or stressful or chaotic, but also to make it a truly profitable endeavor for your farm. So you can get like a little cash injection in the middle of winter or early spring or whenever you do your DaliaTuber sales to carry you through a little bit of a leaner season. Now, I honestly love doing our DaliaTuber sales because it kind of like...
gives me a little bit of a purpose in winter, like something to do that's not that stressful, you know, just listen to podcasts or whatever while you divide. And then you get this cash injection that like just makes you feel a little bit lighter before you move into spring.
If this episode helped you think more clearly about tuber sales and you wanna learn more about profitable dahlia production, whether with flowers or tubers, I'm speaking at the Profitable Dahlia Summit coming up on March 3rd and 4th, 2026. It's a totally virtual summit all about growing profitable dahlias and I'm speaking on profitability on the 3rd. It's gonna be a great time.
I am gonna drop the link to sign up for that in the show notes of this episode. So if you're interested, check out the show notes or you can shoot me an email and I'm happy to send you over the link, but it's the profitable Dalia Summit on March 3rd and 4th, 2026. And if you're looking for high quality Dalia tubers, our Dalia tubers sale is being held on Tuesday, March 24th, 2026. Sales are going to open at 10 a.m. Eastern on trademarksflowers.com.
Most of the varieties we're gonna be selling are up there now. No promises though because we haven't done our final inventory review, but you could check it out there if you want and that's on March 24th. So thanks again for listening to 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.
