Jenny (00:29)
A flower subscription program or a CSA can either feel like the best thing you've ever added to your farm or the most frustrating. I've seen a lot of farmers build subscriptions or CSAs that are complicated, hard to manage, and honestly, not that profitable. But when you structure it the right way, it can become one of the most predictable, efficient parts of your business.
And in case we haven't met, my name is Jenny Marks. I've built a multiple six-figure flower farm growing flowers on less than an acre. And I've been farming for my entire life, but I've been operating my current cut flower farm business for about 11 years or so now. And I now help other flower farmers stop guessing and actually make money doing this because flower farming is way too hard to not earn a profit at it. And so today I'm going to walk you through exactly how we structure our CSA program.
⁓ which stands for community supported agriculture. And I'll walk you through why we made the decisions we did and what I would recommend if you want something that's both profitable and a little bit easier to run. So first of all, if you're hearing the word CSA and you're not sure what that means, let me take a second to explain. CSA stands for community supported agriculture.
It is a model where people pay farmers upfront for a share of their harvest, where in return they will receive regular fresh flowers or produce. So this idea originated in the veggie world. Basically it started with people, consumers could pay farmers and they would pay them over the winter time, but then throughout the actual...
farming season, they would get a box of veggies every week throughout the growing season and basically get a share of their harvest. So that's why they're called CSA shares. But in reality, it's basically just a subscription program. We have always used the CSA language, probably because I came from the CSA world. I worked on a veggie farm for a long time where I
did a lot with their CSA program. And so when I started my flower farm, I was like, well, I'll just do the same thing, but with flowers. But now we're starting to really get away from that language and just say subscription, because essentially that's all it really is with a CSA model. Technically the consumers who are buying shares from you are also sharing the risks and rewards with the farm. So if for example, the farm, you know, has a tornado come through it or a hail storm, they lose all their crops.
the consumer who paid takes on that risk and wouldn't get a harvest. Now, I don't really feel like that is acceptable for me ethically, like for me to offer my customers anymore. I used to feel very strongly about it, that they should share the risks and the rewards of farming. But I think the reality is nowadays people would be really upset if they paid for flowers and didn't get them. So,
We've really moved away from that language and are now settling on just saying like subscriptions. anyhow, I'm going to be talking about subscription models in this episode. So I'll be using the word subscription and CSA interchangeably in this episode. But when we first started,
doing our CSA program, our subscription program, it was right from the very beginning. That was the first thing I ever tried to do because I actually started a veggie farm on the property we farm on now first and then ended up switching to flowers like within the first year that we were here. But I actually had started selling a vegetable CSA and then switched to flowers. So from the very beginning, I've always done that. But the way that we designed it was around peak
production periods, not the full flower season. So ours follows big spikes in production of the flowers, not just like everybody's calendar. So we don't run a traditional every week, all season CSA, the way that a lot of farms do. Actually, that's not true. We do have that as an option. But we basically run it monthly during peak production. So we have an option for people to sign up for the month of May.
And pretty much they just get a bunch of vernunculus every week during the month of May. So they get a big bunch. It's wrapped in tissue paper. Then with craft paper, it looks all fancy and nice. But it's pretty much, they're just getting one crop, but they're getting four different colors. You know, every week is a little bit different. Then in June, we do peonies. So we have a whole...
subscription around, can sign up for a June flower subscription and you will get different varieties of peonies every single week. August is a little bit different where we do mixed bouquets in August because during the summertime you have so much abundance. You have so much variety. It's just kind of like a little bit different thing for us to offer. Plus July and August are our lowest sales months out of the season.
and offering mixed bouquets is like a little extra incentive for people to sign up for that month in August. But typically we only do three to four ingredient bouquets. ⁓ Pretty much every week you'll see some variation of eucalyptus, dahlias, orzinias, lyceanthus, and then if we have them, snapdragons. And that's pretty much what's in the mixed bouquet every single week, but every week they get different varieties, different colors.
And people love, love, love that one because Elysianthus last forever. So that's August. And then we also offer one more month of September, which is just dahlias. So they get different dahlias every week in September. Now we also have a full season option where they can sign up for the full 2026 season and they will get a bunch of flowers or a bouquet of flowers.
every week of the season, May through September. So they get flowers every week, May, June, July, August, September. Now the reason why we don't offer July as a ⁓ regular subscription month is because in the past, we have a lull in production. have a, it's not a gap in flowers because we have been able to have steady production, but it's definitely like,
lower volume. don't have like a big focal flower that we love to sell or that everybody loves. in the beginning of July, it's definitely a slower month in terms of production out in the field. Like our spring flowers have pretty much stopped or really slowing down. And we're still kind of waiting for our summer flowers to come into full production. So we're still kind of waiting on Zinnia as those first couple weeks in July plus 4th of July is like dead.
up here where I live in the Finger Lakes region of New York. ⁓ it's, there's a lot of lakes around us, hence Finger Lakes region. And so everybody goes to their lake house for like two weeks in July. There's they're all on vacation, enjoying their summer. And it just is like a slow time of the year. So obviously we try to do things to increase our sales that time during that time, but this is a feature of our business, not a bug.
So a lot of times people complain like, the summer is so slow. it's like, if that's true for your business, sometimes it's easier to just kind of go with it instead of trying to force something that's not working. So that's kind of where we were at with our thinking around how we do and structure our subscription programs. So people can buy one month. So they could just buy my May or August, or they could buy multiple months. They could do main June, or they could do June and August or whatever.
Or they can sign up for the full season. It's pretty flexible. That being said, ⁓ we always make sure that the months are four weeks long. even if may has like a fifth week in it, ⁓ I actually don't even know if that happens. Does that happen? I know it happens sometimes in some months. So, ⁓ but it's always just four weeks long. It's we just keep it the same and we charge the same for all of the months. Now it's $140.
for a month, so that's four bouquets, and we just kind of build the bouquet or the product, the bunch, whatever it is, to match that price point. We made that change at some point because we had different months with different price points and people were really confused by it. They were like, well, why does June cost more than September?
or why does September cost more than August or whatever it was. And it just got to be really exhausting trying to explain to them like, well, dahlias are higher value flower than zinnias. And that's why there is a cost and the difference. And so we were just like, let's just make it easy for them to buy and make everything the same price. And that way they just pick off of what flowers or what works best with their schedule that they like instead of just buying like the cheapest one, which I don't think actually really happened that much, but it was a definite pain point that we heard from our customers.
Another reason why we structured it this way by the month is because another big pain point we had in the very beginning was for us specifically, and also for our customers is we would say, you can sign up for the spring CSA and you'll get spring flowers. But then we didn't tell them when it was going to start because we're like, we really don't know when our CSA season is going to start or we don't know when the flowers will be in bloom.
And it caused a lot of headaches with just customers missing pickups, not knowing when they would come missing the communication from us, ⁓ as to when the CSA was starting. and then they were out on vacation and they couldn't make it that week. And so it just was a big headache. So we just decided upfront, we're going to plan the dates. So you just get your bouquet. You pick it up every Wednesday in May, starting with this date to this date. And it cleared up so much confusion and so much.
management friction for us. We almost never get a question now of when do I pick up my flowers, when is it ready? It's just we can run it so much more efficiently doing that way. But because we're doing that, we do kind of miss out on a couple of weeks of opportunity. And this is a trade off, right? If our flowers like this year, they started blooming a little bit early, like early April for us, we could have had a subscription in April.
and I would have liked to have done that and had the revenue, but because it's so wildly unpredictable and my stress levels don't wanna handle it, we just say, this is what we're gonna do, these are the dates, we know that we'll have flowers during these dates and so that's when we're going to do our subscription program. Instead of stressing out about whether we're gonna have flowers or not or if we have enough, this just works for us.
So we basically align our subscription programs when we know we're gonna have products, when we know we have a lot of products, and it's okay to skip or reduce slower months, and you don't have to force consistency if your farm is not naturally producing it yet. Work with your farm, not against it, right?
Jenny (11:58)
Real quick, if you've got 17 tabs open in your brain right now, just trying to figure out your next move, please do yourself a favor and close them and go grab your personalized profit roadmap instead. It's just a short assessment that will tell you what stage your farm is in and what actually deserves your attention right now to move forward quickly. Because more information isn't usually the answer.
focusing on the real problem that's holding you back is. It's free, it's fast, and it's probably more helpful than scrolling Instagram for another hour. So go grab it at trademarkfarmer.com forward slash roadmap. That's trademarkfarmer.com forward slash roadmap. You can also grab this link in the show notes.
Jenny (12:46)
Now another point I wanna make about this is that simplicity here is what makes it profitable for us.
I think that our customers would probably be happier if we gave them mixed bouquets all the time, because people definitely like mixed bouquets. However, by giving them just Ranunculus in May and by giving them just peonies in June, the messaging around our product is that you are getting these premium.
focal flowers that you really can't get at this quality anywhere else. Sure, they can get peonies anywhere, but we don't really give them like just Sarah Bernhardt. Like they get lemon chiffons, coral charms, like all the fancy varieties. And that is kind of what makes it a little bit different and more appealing than just getting mixed bouquets. But just selling them bunches, and they're big bunches, know, they're,
premium bunches of flowers instead of doing the mixed bouquets makes it super fast and efficient and profitable. We're not making mixed bouquets most of the time, except for August for our customers. We are cutting and bunching in the field. Then all we do in the studio is throw them in a sleeve and they go out the door. So we're not wasting time. The straight bunches are faster to harvest, faster to process, more profitable for us. So
That being said, of course you can offer mixed bouquets, but your price point definitely has to match it. And you have to make sure that you are earning a profit on that. And you're okay with adding in that extra labor. Like for me, I think I would have to hire another person to handle the increase in labor that we would have to do for those mixed bouquets. And I just don't want to do that. So we just stick with doing those single, you know, single variety straight bunches.
So we try to limit the complexity of the program in every way possible. I standardized everything I can. have super simple systems, fast harvest. ⁓ like no one's ever deciding what's going to be in the CSA bouquets that week other than August, which again, like I said, we do very simple recipes for everybody knows like what to cut, what to bunch, what's going on. Super simple. ⁓ and on that same note, we also have fewer pickup locations.
So we have basically partner locations, other businesses that we've partnered with over the years where we go and drop off our CSA flowers and people come and pick them up. I think that if you can offer delivery and your customer is willing to pay for it and you can earn a profit on that delivery, I think it's a great thing to offer because people don't wanna be inconvenienced by having to go pick something up. They want it delivered to their door.
I've seen that increasing more and more over the years. ⁓ but we for now are still sticking with these pickup locations. Obviously we have one at the farm. We don't get too many people picking up at the farm because most of our clientele is in the city of Rochester. So, ⁓ we, we drive out there once a week to drop off our CSA bouquets at. Pickup locations. And then we also have a pickup location at our farmer's market on Sundays. Now we used to have like.
four or five different pickup locations for our CSA. And over the years, we've narrowed it down to just one in the city besides our farmers market.
We had kind of like this, I guess, tactic or strategy in the beginning where we thought if we went to more businesses, we could partner with more places and we would get more traffic and more business from them. And we would get more people on our CSA. But really what ended up happening was that we would have like two or three locations where we'd only have like five or seven people picking up. And then we had one location that we consistently had like 50 people picking up at.
And so I saw the signal, noticed the pattern, and I was like, you know what, for these like, you know, 10, 20 customers who are picking up at these other random locations, I bet they would be willing to just drive another couple of miles out of their way to come to this one big pickup location. And so we consolidated all of our pickups into one pickup location on Wednesdays. And this is great for us because
We are not driving all around the city going to all of these different places, dropping things off because that added a lot of time and a lot of labor costs into our CSA program. Now we just go drop off at one location and we also bring them to our farmers market. I was really scared for a long time to add a pickup location to my farmers market because I, one,
needed an outlet to move the flowers that we harvested in the beginning of the week. So anything that blooms Monday through Wednesday goes out to our CSA or the majority of it. I was scared that if I just offered pickup at my farmer's market, the numbers on Wednesday would go down because people wanted to pick up on weekends and I wouldn't have a way to move flowers in the middle of the week. I was also afraid that my regular customers at the farmer's market would sign up for the CSA
I don't know why I had this fear, it's so silly, but I was afraid that our farmers market sales would decrease. And to my delightful surprise, that did not happen. And our farmers market sales have increased along with our CSA sales increasing beside it because we are having a pickup location on Sundays. And it's actually been really great for everybody involved.
So I'm just telling you kind of through the iterations of our subscription program, because I want you to think through what's going to be efficient for you, what is going to help you get sales, and trying to find a balance between those two. I would start finding pickup locations if you wanna do that kind of thing, with places that you already go to, your customers already go to, and that are convenient to get to, that have good parking.
And there are already a lot of other customers to that business. ⁓ it can help a lot with setting up that, you know, satellite pickup location for them. And to be clear, I know somebody was probably thinking this right now, but we don't pay that pickup location in the city, any rent. We just give them free flowers every week, which we always seem to have and they love it. And it's a delightful partnership. And if you can make that happen, it can be really, really fun.
Some businesses might want something from them. They might want, ⁓ you know, like a rent or a fee or consignment. But the way that we have worked it out with this pickup location we have now and other ones in the past is that we are getting a lot, like a significant amount of foot traffic into their business without them having to do anything on a slow day of the week for them. So, you know, they've seen an increase in sales. We've seen an increase in sales with their customers buying our.
flowers and our customers buying their wine because it's at a wine bar and it's just been great all around. Next thing when it comes to setting up a successful CSA for profit and retention is really having clarity in connection with your customers. That's how you have retention. It costs so much more to acquire a new customer than it does to just.
keep a customer and have them coming back again and again. So retention is something you really wanna try to prioritize if you have a subscription type program or really anything in your business. You want your customers to come back again. And people stay when they know what to expect from you and when they feel connected and special, at least for a small local business like mine. So like I've iterated before,
We are very clear about how the subscription works. You can sign up for a month or the whole season. The pickup dates are set. We have a clear schedule and calendar upfront. We are very clear about what they're getting, what's included. And we want to be very clear about that because in the past, when things have been unclear, that has led to frustration for our customers, which leads to frustration for us. And that can lead to drop off.
So having a lot of clarity, it's very, make it very, very easy for your customer to understand exactly what they're getting and when they're getting, when they are making a decision to sign up for it or not. Then the connection piece is really just staying connected with your customers on a personal level. We send a weekly email to all of our CSA customers and we tell them about what's happening on the farm, what they're getting, a little story behind the scenes.
They get a reminder to pick up their flowers every single week on the day they're supposed to pick up because you'd be surprised people forget and they appreciate the reminder. And this connection piece is huge for retention. I find that storytelling works really well with our local customers.
They want to know about your farm and your family and your pets and what's happening. They like to learn about the flowers and they want to learn how to use their flower.
So make sure that when you send them emails, when you're talking to them, you're providing them value. You're telling them how to take care of their flowers, how to make them last longer, how to arrange them at home. If they're giving them as a gift, how to gift wrap them or offer to gift wrap it for them for a fee or whatever it is. Make sure you're just giving them that connection to you as a human being and to your farm and the spirit of your farm and your business.
Next, let's talk about pricing. We don't really discount our CSA. We just try to make it a better, more elevated product for our customers. A lot of people discount their subscription programs because people are buying it over and over again and they wanna reward that. And I get that and I think there's a lot of value to it.
And I definitely would not discount it. It's just not the way that we have chose to do it. We see pricing about value, not about discounts. Um, you don't need to heavily discount the CSA to make it appealing. We increase the value. for example, our regular. Renunculus bunches that we sell at the farmer's market are usually eight stems. If they're nice, big, healthy flowers, like big flower heads for about $26 that comes out to about $3 and 71 cents a stem.
our CSA bunch, we give them 10 stems for $35, which comes out to about $3.50 a stem. So the stem price is slightly discounted, but they're actually getting more stems, they're getting a bigger bunch, and we wrap them differently. our regular bunches that we just sell at the market, they're just in a clear plastic sleeve.
the ones that we give to our CSA customers are packaged differently. So we do tissue paper and craft paper for those because we want to elevate the product for our CSA customers. We also specifically try to give them the biggest, most beautiful flowers. When we're harvesting for the CSA, we just try to give them the biggest and best, longest stems, biggest flowers, so they're getting a real premium product.
And same thing with our mix bouquets. When we designed those mix bouquets in August, they're getting a different sort of bouquet and product than what our regular market customers are doing. And when we have them side by side at our market, people all the time look at our CSA bouquets and they're like, I want that one. And we're like, sorry, those are for our CSA customers only. You can sign up for a subscription right now if you would like. And then I usually get some customers because we elevate.
our subscription instead of discounting it. Now, I think you can do both ways, like I said, but this is just the way we do it. We just kind of increase that perceived abundance, trying to keep our margins healthy. And profitability just comes from intentional pricing to begin with.
Now we keep our CSA program because it's really just stability for the business. Like the real benefit of having a subscription program, even if it's a small one, is sustainability predictability. Having a set number of shares sold ahead of time, it just makes everything easier. It makes harvest planning easier, makes our crop planning easier.
It makes cashflow easier, especially because we sell our CSA program over the winter time, which helps get cashflow into the business when we don't actually have flowers blooming. It really just gives our season structure. And that's what makes it a powerful part of our business when it's done right over the years. As you've kind of heard from this, we have tweaked things, we have changed things, and we will probably always continue to do that.
If something's not working, we're not afraid to change it. If we feel like we need to do more marketing for certain things, we will do that as well. We really treat our subscription program as a foundation to help with planning and have predictability in the business. We don't plan the entire business around it.
All that to say, I just wanted to go through this episode and talk about how we structure our subscription program, just so you have an idea of our decision making around why we've structured it the way that we have. So hopefully it can help you make some decisions around your farm subscription. I definitely don't think that you should just copy what we do, but I do think that it works pretty well, and at least it works for us. But really think through how we've made our decisions.
to both benefit our customers and our business. And if your subscription program feels complicated or not as profitable as you want it to be, the answer usually isn't to add more, it's to kind of simplify it and align it with both your farm seasons and what your customers are asking for.
So that's it for today. If you found this episode helpful at all, I would love it if you just took 30 seconds to leave a review for us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It helps more flower farmers find the show and to build their own profitable and sustainable businesses. I would really super appreciate it if I could get feedback from you. So please go ahead and do that. And if you've already left a review, thank you so, so, so, so much. It means the world to me.
Jenny (27:59)
Real quick, if you've got 17 tabs open in your brain right now, just trying to figure out your next move, please do yourself a favor and close them and go grab your personalized profit roadmap instead. It's just a short assessment that will tell you what stage your farm is in and what actually deserves your attention right now to move forward quickly. Because more information isn't usually the answer.
focusing on the real problem that's holding you back is. It's free, it's fast, and it's probably more helpful than scrolling Instagram for another hour. So go grab it at trademarkfarmer.com forward slash roadmap. That's trademarkfarmer.com forward slash roadmap. You can also grab this link in the show notes.
Jenny (28:46)
Thanks again for being here.
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.
