Jenny (00:29)
If bouquet making takes over your entire day, I want you to know that you're probably not slow and you're probably not behind. You might just be making it harder than it needs to be. And I say that with love because I have done the exact same thing. I used to try to cram every stem I grow into one bouquet. Like it's a floral sampler platter, like every single ingredient on the farm had to go into those mixed bouquets. ⁓ but here's the truth. Simple still.
sells and simple is faster and faster is usually more profitable. So today I'm going to walk you through how I make profitable mixed market bouquets that are easier to build faster to produce and actually can make you more money. And a quick note, this is probably not advice for like bespoke floral designers out there creating like custom one-off pieces. mean, maybe you might be able to pick some things up from this, but
This conversation is really geared towards farmer's market and everyday retail bouquet production people. Not to say that these systems can't be applied to floral design, because they absolutely can, but gonna be more focused on selling retail or even grocery bouquets. So probably not for high-end wedding clients. But the first thing,
to stop doing is just stop using 17 different ingredients in your mixed bouquets. If you're selling at a roadside stand or at a farmer's market or to a grocery store or just like a retail mixed bouquet, more ingredients does not necessarily equal more value. When every bouquet has a different mix, like two of this, one of that, three of those,
And you're just kind of taking whatever's available on the farm and shoving it into a bouquet. You're slowing yourself down dramatically. Plus your customers probably don't even care and don't even notice. You're also complicating harvesting. You're complicating the pricing, you're increasing waste and you're increasing decision fatigue. Most customers who are buying retail mixed bouquets, they're probably not counting stems. They're buying a feeling and.
Most of the time they like what it looks like even when it doesn't have, you know, seven different ingredients. Cause when I first started flower farming, someone taught me that I needed five different things in a bouquet for it to be finished or look nice. So it was a focal flower, filler flower, a disc flower, a spike flower, foliage, and something whimsical. Actually, I think that's six things. Did I say six things? Anyways.
Those are the things that someone told me had to be in every mixed bouquet. So as I'm making these market mixed bouquets, I'm trying to put one of every single one of those things in. And I'm telling you that you just do not have to do that. At one point in my career, I realized I was like, I think it was like a week where I didn't have all the things. So was like, screw it. I'm just going to put in like three delias.
three Lysianthus and like a few stems of eucalyptus and hopefully they sell. And you know what? They sold better than the other ones I had been trying to cram all these complicated ingredients into. And so like light bulb moment, these bouquets took me half the amount of time to make probably less than that actually. And they sold even better or just as well. And so I just completely radically changed my whole thinking around making mixed bouquets.
So instead of making these recipes or just grabbing things that you have and stuffing them in, try just three to five ingredients total. So an example of this would be three focal flowers, five filler slash disc flowers, and four greenery or foliage. And then just repeat that general recipe over and over and over again and batch harvest by the recipe.
You want to batch build identical bouquets for your markets, your farm stand or whatever. And here's the funny part is that people will still stand there for 20 minutes trying to decide which one they want because uniformity equals speed, but your customers probably are still going to notice the subtle differences between them and feel special getting to pick out their own. When you have that uniformity, you go fast.
And when you have speed in making your bouquets, because they're simpler recipes, your labor cost goes down per bouquet. And that lower labor cost means you make a higher margin on them. Simple is not cheap. Simple is strategic. Okay? And this is all we do now with our market bouquets. They're very, very simple recipes. We write out the recipe ahead of time.
We go and harvest specifically for that recipe. So for example, if I am putting five zinnias in every mixed bouquet and I'm gonna make 25 mixed bouquets, I know I need to harvest 125 stems of zinnias. So it makes harvesting super efficient. It makes the bouquet making process super efficient. There's no questions for our employees of like, well, how many of this do I put in? Like, what about that? It just makes it super streamlined and easy.
So the second thing to consider doing is building your bouquets on a table, like all the ingredients flat on a table, not out of tangled buckets.
Jenny (06:14)
If you're feeling stuck or scattered in your flower farm right now or totally overwhelmed with information, I made something for you. Most flower farming education just throws more information at you, but what actually grows your farm isn't more info, it's knowing what to focus on and knowing which problems to solve in the right order. So I created something different for you. It is a free personalized profit roadmap.
All you do is answer a few quick questions and I'll send you what stage of business you're in, what to prioritize right now, and what you can safely ignore in order to move your business forward. Because honestly, trying to fix everything at once is exactly why most flower farmers stay stuck. You can grab it at trademarkfarmer.com forward slash roadmap.
That's trademarkfarmer.com forward slash roadmap. I'll also link it in the show notes.
Jenny (07:09)
When you have all of your stems in a bucket, all the stems are getting all tangled and it's a silent time leak as you're trying to sort those all out. I just, for some things, I will say there's an exception to this, for some ingredients that are especially fragile,
or that get bruised really easily, sure, you might wanna put those standing up in a bucket, but for the most part, we just try not to grow anything like that, so we can just take armloads of stems out of a bucket, lay the stems flat on a table, make it so all the stems are sticking out straight and flat, so we can just pick the one off of the top and keep going.
Sure. There are things that got like very tangly that can be hard to make moquets with like Rebecca. Triloba comes to mind with this, but it's also very hardy. Like we kind of like pick up a stem and just like shake it to get a stem out of the pile. ⁓ if you're trying to take that out of a bucket, it would be absolutely impossible. ⁓ so you want to harvest all saleable usable stems, you know, into your buckets while you're harvesting.
And then when it's time to lay out your bouquet recipes, you just take that big handful, lay on the table. And then the other thing about that is that you're not going to be digging through the stems, trying to find the perfect stem. know people who do that unconsciously and they're losing minutes that turn into hours over the time. And I know when you kind of sort through the stems to find the perfect one, like I might fail really creative, but operationally it's really messy.
And so again, I'm speaking to like, not bespoke wedding designers out there, cause you might have a different process. have a different kind of client, but for like people who are just making mixed market bouquets for farm stands, grocery retail, you know, farmers markets. This is who I'm talking to right now. When you don't have like clear systems in place, it just eats your profit. So this is what I recommend doing.
You have your recipe before you start doing anything you harvest for that recipe. Then, you know, when you're ready to make your bouquets, probably after they condition in the cooler for a little while, you're laying them out on the table systematically. So all of your zinnias or, know, whatever will fit on the table, as many as you could handle. So they're not like sitting there drying out, but you put all of the zinnias in one spot in the table. Then you put all the snapdragons in one spot on the table.
Then you lay all the eucalyptus laid out on one spot in the table and you build assembly line style. So you go through and you grab the stems you need as you walk down the table. Then when you get to the end of the table, your bouquet should be made. And so then you cut off the stems, hopefully with a stem cutter, not using your snips, please for the love of God, just buy the a hundred dollar stem cutter. Maybe it's $150. don't know, but it save you so much time. Bandit.
throw it in a sleeve, stack it on the table. We usually put five bouquets in a stack. So three laid on the table, then two more on top of that. So it sort of makes like a pyramid of bouquets. Then we pick up all those at once and slide them into a bucket. We usually put five mixed bouquets per bucket. And that goes on a rolly cart and it sits there until the rolly cart gets filled and then it gets rolled into our cooler.
So basically you're grabbing, you're wrapping, you're stacking, and you're repeating. Grab, wrap, stack, repeat. Say that 10 times fast. It's almost boring, almost too simple. But almost too simple is where the profit hides. And I'm telling you, we just bang out bouquets like this so fast every week. All of our bouquet recipes make it so we can make bouquets in like 60 seconds or less.
sometimes faster, sometimes a little bit longer depending on what we're dealing with, but it really makes the process go so much faster and it makes it so your bouquets are so much more profitable. And it's just really changed the game for us.
The next thing I wanna talk about is just doing the math and allocating for your labor time, because your time is not free. If bouquet making takes you four hours, that's not just time, it's money. So let's just say that you value your time at $30 an hour. $30 an hour times four hours is $120.
Are you going to make enough bouquets to cover the cost of actually growing all the stems, harvesting all the stems, your overhead to run the business plus your time or your employees time to physically make them? Cause it has to do that. Otherwise you're just breaking even or you're losing money. And so the whole piece of this that has really helped me out on my farm is just radically simplifying everything. So you'll see that that's a theme today, but
Let's say that you simplify your recipes and you cut production time from four hours to one and a half hours. That's two and a half hours saved per week, okay? Over the course of a season, let's say your season is 35 weeks long, that's 87 and a half hours. At $30 an hour, that's over $2,600, and that's really conservative.
That's money that you're currently lighting on fire with complexity.
So I really encourage you to do the calculation yourself. So the next time you make bouquets, do it the way you always have and time yourself like time, how long your current bouquet production takes. Then the next week, radically simplify your ingredients, simplify your recipes, see how long that takes you.
And see what the time savings is because it's not only about money, right? It's also about your time is I know that I used to spend hours and hours getting ready for our farmer's market every Friday. It would go till midnight. It would bleed into Saturday and it was just so unsustainable. And first thing we did was we decided to just like stop selling mixed bouquets. We moved to selling mostly straight punches. Highly recommend if you know, you have the customer type that can handle that.
⁓ but then we also radically simplified our bouquet production and now prepping for the market, like actually sleeving everything and making the bouquets and sticking it all in the cooler. takes us like a couple of hours. Maybe I would say like probably two to four hours every Friday. It's not bad. That's just one person working at it as well. And so think of all the time and the money you could save if you simplified this.
And the other thing is like, I say this all the time, but like getting really clear on your costs so you can price these bouquets of appropriately. Cause a lot of farmers just price the bouquets based on their STEM costs, but labor is real and your profit lives in that managed labor. So do the math, see for yourself and you know, get creative with it. So the bouquets actually do sell just as well as your old designs. And so I'll
give you a little trick with this. I think this is kind of the last point that I wanna talk about, is creating just like a default market bouquet recipe, maybe not for the entire season, but like per season or per month. And this will really help you stay on track and force you to get creative on how you can make really full and beautiful mixed bouquets.
with very simple systems. Because the thing is decision fatigue can really kill your efficiency here. Like I know when I used to walk around the farm every week before the week started, I would see what was ready, what bouquet ingredients we would be harvesting that week, and then I would try to make the recipes for the mixed bouquets.
And it would get kind of exhausting to try to like make these bouquet recipes like fit all of these different ingredients into it and just mentally it was draining. If every single week and every single market day requires you reinventing the wheel with your bouquet recipes, you're draining energy before you even load the van or stock the stand or do whatever you're gonna do.
I really don't believe that you need 12 different bouquet styles. You need one solid default recipe that uses what grows well for you, looks abundant, and can flex slightly week to week. Because we all know, whatever you plan is gonna be ready, you know, week 32 for your bouquets is probably not gonna happen. Let's just be honest. you know, we all, like I know I will have a ton of lisianthus in August, but like,
I don't know exactly what variety I'm gonna have, because it changes from year to year based on the weather. And so you also need to be flexible with this. So what we do is we use like one default bouquet formula kind of per season and really more honestly per month. And it basically looks like four ish stems of focal flowers, five ish stems of filler or disc flowers and four ish stems of greenery. So just like.
tape that to your bouquet table, try to repeat it all season. And obviously you're going to rotate flower varieties, but basically keep the structure the same because structure creates speed and speed protects your profit margin. So examples of this is in, well, let me start off by saying in early spring, we don't usually do mixed bouquets. We will maybe do them for Mother's Day, but like we just sell straight punches of Ranunculus and like
Double tulips basically. And those are such high value flowers and they are so different and in demand. Like they just fly off the shelves and they sell as is. So we don't really do a lot of mixed bouquets early in the season. So we mostly start doing them in June. So in June, all of our mixed bouquets are pretty much three focal flowers, which are peonies, four filler flowers, usually fever few.
Three pieces of foliage, it's usually Baptisia, and then three snapdragons or campanula, which is our spike flower. And so this is three focal flowers, four filler flowers, three foliage, and then three spike flowers. And we easily can price that between 35 to $40. And we basically make that same exact recipe every single week, but you know, the colors are different every single week.
⁓ maybe we might have a different kind, you know, one week it'll be snap dragons. The next week it'll be Campanula, but the basic recipe that system is the same. And here's the other thing is it doesn't have to be all the same exact color or anything. Like we will make mixed bouquets with, you know, some will have red peonies and some will have pink peonies. And then people at the market get to pick their favorites. ⁓ you can make them the same every single week. We definitely do that too. Sometimes it all just kind of depends on like what we have available.
And this is great because it allows us to be super flexible while still having a very simple and streamlined system. And one of the things I have found to relieve or guess alleviate my stress the most with having a flower farm is having flexibility built into your systems because some crops are not gonna do as well as you want them to. Some flowers are not gonna be ready when you want them to or they're gonna bloom too early or
You know, some colors are not gonna go great together, so you're gonna have to mix it up. But for the most part, like, this is really flexible and easy.
So let me give you one more example. So that's pretty much our mixed bouquets in June and then in August, our mixed bouquets are pretty much three focal flowers, four filler flowers, four foliage. And pretty much every single week in August, it's three dahlias, four lissy, four eucalyptus. If we have Snapdragons, we might throw them in there, but honestly, a lot of times we kind of have like a lull in our Snapdragon production in August.
I don't grow like a lot of the summer varieties. I just don't think that they do super well for me, but that's it. It's just three dahlias, four lissy, four eucalyptus, and they freaking sell like hotcakes. And again, we easily price that between 35 and $40. And obviously in these recipes, these are more higher value flowers. So if you wanted to sell mixed bouquets at a lower price point, you just have to either change up your recipes or use.
less valuable flowers like you zinnias or something instead of dahlias. But like again, we're keeping it super simple. So remember this is not for like bespoke wedding design market bouquets and wedding work are two different games. However, that being said, you can still apply this to your wedding bouquet production. Okay. At let's just talk about the difference real quick. Wedding floral designers.
A lot of times you're selling customization, artistry, bespoke design, not always, but if you're like a higher end floral designer, that's probably a part of it. If you're like lower end, you can also just make systems and recipes to pump these out every single week, make it super simple and easy. That's basically what I did when I did weddings. At a farmer's market, you're kind of selling like speed, abundance, accessibility, and volume. So they require different systems.
and systems determine profit. So if you're doing wedding design, you might use more ingredients like you might actually use that recipe of focal flower, filler flowers, spike flowers, little whimsical bits, different kinds of foliage, like a lot more variety, but you can still put recipe systems in place to help you make that process a lot more efficient and easier.
So let me just wrap up this whole thing by giving you permission. You are allowed to keep it simple, repeat recipes over and over, batch build, prioritize efficiency. This is a business, it's not an art contest. And sometimes when I say that, people are like, well, flowers is my creative outlet and I just love being creative with it. And it's like, yeah, that's great. You can also make these really,
beautiful, even though they're simple. And you know, you don't have to take my advice. I'm just telling you what I do and what works for me. And if it doesn't work for you, great. But this is a business and if you want it to be profitable, you have to have some kind of system in place and you have to make it so you could eventually hand it off to somebody else. And so this is the way that I've done it and has worked really, really well for us. And I would love to hear if it works well for you too.
So if you do nothing else after this episode, just take like 10 minutes today and write one repeatable bouquet recipe. Maybe not one that applies for the whole entire season. You can do that, but maybe just think like month to month, like what flowers am I gonna have in May? What flowers will I have in June? What flowers will I have in July? And just write rough, simple recipes to help you streamline things during the season. And time yourself while you're building it.
If you can cut your bouquet production in half and trust me, it's totally doable. You will increase your profit without raising your prices or growing a single extra stem that straight strategic focus right there.
Jenny (23:25)
If you're feeling stuck or scattered in your flower farm right now or totally overwhelmed with information, I made something for you. Most flower farming education just throws more information at you, but what actually grows your farm isn't more info, it's knowing what to focus on and knowing which problems to solve in the right order. So I created something different for you. It is a free personalized profit roadmap.
All you do is answer a few quick questions and I'll send you what stage of business you're in, what to prioritize right now, and what you can safely ignore in order to move your business forward. Because honestly, trying to fix everything at once is exactly why most flower farmers stay stuck. You can grab it at trademarkfarmer.com forward slash roadmap.
That's trademarkfarmer.com forward slash roadmap. I'll also link it in the show notes.
Jenny (24:20)
Thanks for being here and 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.
