The Floral Hustle

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Hello flower friends. This is Jen and I wanna talk about floral pricing. And this is actually, if you're watching this on YouTube, is my first recording here at the New Farm. And it was unplanned because we have had a bunch of craziness with our animals. Our baby alpaca. Uh, was born on Saturday two months before we expected and just came home tonight from the hospital.

And so it's been a whirlwind day and I'm a person who is always consistent, so I'm like, guess what? I'm just bringing my laptop and I'm not bringing all my recording stuff. So this is just raw and. How it is. Uh, but I had so many conversations come up recently about pricing and I had an experience and you guys, I always have little anecdotal stories that usually lead to why I am talking about what I'm talking about.

But I had a client that had. I thought booked our services through you know, this for this weekend on Saturday and you know, we had adjusted after the tariffs went in place, we had adjusted the pricing a little bit up, not crazy. And it was this centerpiece that I was using, value-based flowers, and I'm using that word, value-based flowers, not cheap.

Flowers because I think cheap does an injustice to and basically says that you are low cost, low budget. So the, the words that you use are so important. So when I'm talking to somebody, I. That is looking and has a lower budget. I talk about value-based flowers, and so this centerpiece had a ton of value-based flowers, so hydrangeas, roses you know, PLI and lots of greens, so nothing extravagant.

And they said, that is so expensive. This was like a $225, um, centerpiece that was tall and basically kind of full of hydrangeas. And it is the lowest price centerpiece that I will make tall. And I have kind of a formula that gets me to my three times markup and my labor and covering, um, doubling my hard goods with that equation.

It is not. Anything crazy. It is not something that I would wanna put on Instagram because it's really basic and I, but it does the job. It accomplishes a tall centerpiece for that budget. And their perception that this is so expensive is a common perception because. Nobody knows how much flowers cost.

And you, if you've been listening to the podcast for a while, I did an episode recently on pricing transparency and how it's so important. And part of that was because nobody knows, nobody has any clue how much flowers are costing. So they of course thought this was so expensive. And because of that, even though I felt.

This is so cheap. This is like the least expensive thing that I would potentially, no, not potentially. I mean that I would offer, period. And they thought that that was too much. So their perception was that this was so expensive and my perception was that this is so cheap that I just. I'm almost offended that I'm having to make something at this point, but it's for my Indian decorator friend and one of her clients, and they wanted 20 of them on top of it, like it was just bananas.

So they started shopping and they actually found someone to deliver this cheaper. And even though we had, I had held the date. Even though they had agreed with everything, with the, my decorator friend and everything, like everything was very solidified. They, somebody else offered this to them for less money.

So that really spoke to me that people do not know how to price and pricing. Is probably one of the biggest things I consistently revisit with people because it is often a mess. It is often such a big mess that when I look at how someone is pricing something, I'm like, oh my God. Like how did you get to this?

And everybody has a different way of getting to these numbers on top of it. I was just looking over somebody's proposal and I then I looked at their labor and set up and delivery and they charge every, all their labor in that line item. So I wanted to just break down the logic behind. Charging your labor and the percentages in the markup that you should be charging, and then how other charges how I label them.

And I'm not saying that this is. The only way to do this because obviously there's a million ways to do everything, but in my experience, this invites less conversation in This allows you to show a a price that all of a sudden you're not later on marking it up because you didn't charge your labor in a separate line item.

And. It gives you, an easy formula to follow. So the first thing that I do is figuring out your regular markup. Take your wholesale cost of your flowers, times some formula. A lot of times people do three times. Sometimes people do four times. So depending on what you want to operate your business under, I would say at least three times.

The three times your cost should be what your flowers with your markup is. Then from there, whatever you're making. You add your supplies? I usually double my supplies. So if I have, let's just say a $7 base that I'm using, I would double the cost of that $7 base to be $14. Some people like to triple their costs.

I like to be at least competitive with Amazon, so in my experience, doubling it usually helps me be competitive. Then I need to add my labor cost. What is, I am potentially paying someone or I am making that thing. So the labor for making that is a separate charge that is built in, usually that is a percentage.

So let's just say that we have a $25 of flowers. We three times the markup. So we are at $75 would be our, our cost of our flowers. Then we have a $5 base that we have doubled. So then we were at $85. Then we need to add our labor percentage. So typically I see florists charging and it is definitely dependent on, are you a boutique florist?

Are you a luxury florist? Are you a, you know, retail floors? There's so many equations that seem to happen that make people choose different percentages. And I'm. Not here to tell you that you know, you should be char charging 25, 35 45. I personally think 25 to 35% is a decent markup for labor, but I.

I also don't have a retail shop that I'm paying for. I don't have all the expenses associated with that. And so if you have those expenses, you potentially need to adjust that formula to make sure you are running a profitable business. Alright then from there we have our wholesale cost of our flowers with our markup, our marked up vase.

Then we add our labor percentage of, let's just say 25%. If we're at $85 for a wholesale cost of our flowers, plus our vase marked up at two times. If we add 25%, we would get to $106 and 25 pennies. So that would account for our labor, our marked up hard goods. Our marked up flowers, the same formula can apply to any type of floral item that you are pricing out.

If you are pricing out a archway, you would be figuring, okay, I would need, let's just say five hydrangeas. I would need half a bunch of leather. I would need three quarters of a bunch of Italian ruscus. I would need seven roses. I want three stems of stock. Whatever your recipe like that, usually that recipe that I just mentioned is a good foundational recipe.

Then I need to double my cage that I am designing my arrangement in. Right now, I think those are like $11. So let's just say that I had $40 of cost of flowers in there. So I'm gonna triple that. So I'm at one 20, and then I'm gonna add, we'll just use $22 for our cage with markup. So that gets us to 1 42.

Then we need to add our 25% labor on top of that. So that would equate to taking, I normally just really easily take my, we were at one 20 I times that by 1.25 and then magic math 150. So $150 for that cage. That's with a very, very basic recipe. So did you see how I spit out? Okay, that cage, this cost five hydrangeas in it, this and this and this.

Those are base recipe formulas. And if you've been listening to the podcast, I talk about making base recipe formulas because that makes pricing so much easier. You have your foundational. Costs and price of an item. So therefore, you can have pricing transparency. You can have things priced on your website, you can have things priced in your brochure.

All of these magical wonderful things start to happen when you start to have some transparency in your pricing. But if this is something you're like, I have no idea, where do we even start on this? These are things that we cover in the floral CEO Mastermind, and we have some spots open right now because we had some of our florists graduate out of being in the Mastermind.

They loved it so much. They stayed in a year, you guys a year. They just, and they were sad to go, but knew that they needed to leave the nest. One of them said, and I totally get it, you always want to try something different, but the support and all of the tools and things that I teach you, along with getting the Florist Foundations course, like automatically built in, so all of those tools are there for you.

You get weekly training, you get hot seats once a month. We have Voxer, which is like, you have a question right now, you can put it in Voxer, and I likely will answer within, usually less than a day. So it is such an amazing resource, and these things are what you need to build and figure out to make your business profitable if you do not have pricing figured out.

You are not failing, you are just learning and evolving. Pricing is the one of the trickiest things in this business. And so o often what I hear people say is they, they'll like totally fricking wing like, eh, I think 1 25. I'm gonna quote 1 25 on that 1, 25. And it's just like you pulled that outta your ass and then you go to actually make a recipe and you're like, crap.

All the stuff that I'm gonna need. My, I totally blew my budget. I'm not making any money. This is a common theme, and so if that is you, this is, that's normal. But we wanna normalize making money. We wanna normalize just having these foundational practices in our business so that we are not. All of a sudden looking at our bank account at the end of a wedding and going, this fucking sucks.

I didn't make any money. I worked really hard. This doesn't feel good. How am I gonna make this better? I don't know what I'm gonna do. And then you, you're, you're just spiraling. No more spiraling. If you want like examples mapped out, if you want like all of the formulas on how to do this, head to the floral hustle.com/pricing.

And download my free guide. I break everything down in this guide, like what your markup percentages could be, should be, you can choose, but at least shows you how to come up with this. How does simply break down, okay, what does a my, a basic recipe look like? All right, I, how do I, how do you guys even figure out the costs of those flowers?

That's like something everybody struggles with because prices change. Prices changed big time in the last two, three weeks because tariffs were enacted. So like how do you even know what to estimate for a rose? And having tools in place like online auctions. On having relationships with wholesalers that you just kind of understand their pricing.

There's all these magical things out there that can help make your business easier, but you need to go out and find that info. Winging it is not going to be a strategy. Long term you need to get data in front of you and if a wholesaler needs to quote something out for you to be able to properly quote, I would not hesitate on asking if I don't know how much something costs.

I, I just ask the other day, Stef tis God, do I fricking hate Stef Tis you guys, like it is one of the worst flowers to design with. And I have a bride that in September. Of course want Stef Tis and it was in her mom's bouquet I think or something, and I'm just like, shit, that sucks. Because I, for when often, like I've just worn gloves whenever I've designed with them because your oils on your hands make them, but they are not a good value.

They actually are like a dollar 50 for something that's the size of a quarter. I could have a rose for a dollar 50 and it's five quarters in size. So I, yeah, but I didn't know, so what did I do? I text my wholesaler, Hey, I have a bride. She's an idiot. She wants Stef Tis whatever. What does that cost right now?

'cause I have no idea. And. He was just like, oh, it's like a dollar 50. You have to buy 'em a box of 25. You have to order 'em by Tuesday so that I can get 'em by the next Monday. Perfect. Simple, but if you don't have the information, you are going to make pricing mistakes. We need to move past the crap. I didn't price this correctly.

And start stepping into that. I price this for profit. I price this to make money. I price this so that this is still beautiful, but that I can pay myself. And if you don't start doing that at some point, like I used to, not price for profit, I had stupid pricing formulas that were just ridiculous and I didn't hardly make any money and I worked really hard and.

You know, of course I did build a name for myself, but it wasn't a good name. Like I built a name that was synonymous with value with being cheap. So I was a ta. I was basically starting to attract all of these budget clients and I'm like, I don't want budget clients. I wanna do bigger things I wanna do.

So that's when I did my rebrand and I basically ripped the bandaid off and it was like. I am completely evolving my business into being something that I love. And you can do that too. If you are in a place, you're like, I've underpriced all of this stuff that I'm just stuck into being cheap. I have heard that exact thing from many florists that is not true.

I changed after years and years and years. Probably like 15 years of not making money. Like I changed that. I changed my brand, I changed the type of weddings I do. I changed the type of clients I attract, and you could do that same thing. So you just need to get educated, get. These formulas, make base recipes.

Go listen to the episode that I did on base recipes and base pricing and pricing transparency. Those could be so helpful for you. Really just understanding the underlying reason of why potentially, maybe you're getting ghosted. I. Because you're going through all this work. You're like an excited puppy, ready to meet with somebody.

I'm just gonna meet with anybody who is interested because I wanna show 'em how lovable I am. And then you do all this work and then all of a sudden they don't ever text you back, or they don't ever message you back because they can't afford you. So having pricing transparency is this upfront way of saying.

Here's some of my pricing and what I look like from a budget standpoint. Can you afford me or not? They can make that decision. They can make the decision, and you are not putting in the work ahead of time other than making this cookie cutter thing that you just share with people. It's so helpful. So go and think about your pricing strategy.

Write it down. What is your pricing strategy? Is it in alignment with where you wanna be? Do. Are you making money? Do you even know how to look at your numbers? Do you have a profit and loss statement? Are there things that you know, you're, you're bleeding money in in your business? Because if you have high expenses, you might need to adjust your markup rate.

You maybe need to do four times or 3.5. Maybe you need to do 35% markup. And then on top of it, we need to make sure that we are charging for delivery, set up, tear down. Those are resources. Those take time. When we order something from a store that is an Amazon that we didn't pay for a membership to get free shipping, we normally pay for shipping.

So we paid for the item. We pay for the shipping on that item. So if somebody is buying a $225 bridal bouquet for you from you, that bridal bouquet costs the same if they come and get it, but it should cost more if you were providing a service and bringing it to them and delivering it. The same thing a.

$4,000 wedding. If you are taking time, loading up your vehicle, putting all the seats down in your van, making sure that your van is empty, boxing everything up, putting, I often, and I'm putting tables, so I have two layers of tables doing all of these things. Then going and driving to a venue. I'm then going into the venue, finding the venue person, getting carts going and getting and bringing everything in.

Then going and unpacking everything, setting it up, making sure that the table is perfect afterwards, placing the candles on. Having extra staff with me to make sure that everything is perfect, that the candles are straight, so on and so forth. Like I should be charging for that. And I usually, and I've done episodes on how to price your set up and deliveries.

I look at how painful is this set up? Is the building tough to get in? Is. In a parking garage, then I'm having to take an elevator to the 50th floor. Is the person that works at this venue a gigantic pain in the ass that I am going to dread any email communication from them, and then I'm gonna dread that day that I have to talk to them like.

There are venues like that, or a venue that doesn't have any carts, and I know that I'm gonna have to trek 150 feet up the back, 40 to get things into the venue. Or there's venues like my favorite, one of my favorite venues, essence Event Center, that I literally can roll up, roll in. They have great carts.

Staff is amazing, like the whole thing is beautiful. I will charge less to set up and deliver there because I. No, it's going to be easy peasy. Then if I have to come back. I, I've recently even had some wedding planners and I'm just like, are you dense? They're like, well, if you don't charge to come back and move things.

Well, yes, I charge to come back and move things. That is my Saturday afternoon that I'm basically screwing up to doing anything else because I have to come back and move things. That fundamentally, you're repurposing them. So I've already delivered the value. I've delivered what its purpose was, and I understand that that's part of the, this whole process, but I need to be compensated for that time, for that resource.

If my ass is staying up, and I normally don't do this, I like to hire out my tear downs till midnight driving 40 minutes to somewhere. Tearing all this shit down unpacking and then coming and loading it into my studio again. I sure as shit am going to charge for that. And I see people all the time not charging for that.

You are going to spend a gigantic amount of time and potentially money if you are hiring help that. Basically is going to seriously impact your bottom line. I have paid out 16 hours of labor on a wedding setup, and that was not a crazy wedding. That was like a candle heavy wedding and some tall centerpiece, et cetera, like a $7,000 wedding.

I spent 16 hours of outside labor. That is a lot of money. If I am doing $25 an hour, which seems to be kind of an average for a average freelancer around my market, that's $400 just for me to pay the labor. If I rented a vehicle, that would be another $125 usually on the minimum. Um, then on top of that, I might have to put gas in that rental.

If I had a rental. I have insurance on my vehicle. I have my vehicle to pay for that. I, the business owns upkeep and maintenance. Like last year I think I spent between gas and maintenance on my vehicle. The vehicle is completely owned by the business. I spent $3,800. And I have a van with 60,000 miles on it.

That is a big chunk of money. So that is, let's just say a $325 expense monthly for me to cover for the privilege of having my car. And that didn't even include insurance. 'cause my insurance I think is like 70 or something a month. So for me to just have a vehicle that the business uses. Let's just say $400 a month, so that needs to be covered in that equation as well.

If you are struggling with this, please know that this is normal. Please go download my free guide@thefloralhustle.com slash pricing, and if you are needing extra support, if this is like, if you have been stuck in this. For a while, please go check out the Floral CEO mastermind@thefloralhustle.com slash mastermind.

This will change so much in your business that I mean, I can't. Talk enough to the transformations that I've seen, the things that I've seen people do, like some of the women coming outta that Mastermind have been on fire, like they have really listened and grabbed their business, buy the lady balls and just ran with it.

But they had the tools, they had the knowledge to make sound business decisions, to feel confident. Going into and being the CEO in their business and confidence is cash. So 📍 thank you so much for listening, flower Friend, and you have an amazing flower filled day.