The 10 Flower Farm Business Models
When it comes to flower farming, it’s easy to think that everyone is the same and they all grow the same flowers, but after doing this for many years I’ve come to learn that everyone’s business is highly unique to their situation and their local clientele and demand of the local market.
It’s all impacted too by who is around you as well. If you’re trying to start a farmer’s market stand but there are already four serious flower growers at the market you’re trying to sell at, your sales will be less than if you find a different niche and income stream. On the other hand if you’re the first person in your area to start growing and designing with local flowers for wedding work and designs, you have the advantage of being the first person to do so and may do quite well accordingly.
I wanted to introduce you to the 10 typical flower farm business models. Although there are some other models out there, most will fall into one of these six categories (with many taking on multiple business models in order to diversify the services and products they offer). And of course there are other models out there that may not have become mainstream enough to take notice, so this may evolve over time as the demand for local flowers continues to grow, but this should be a good start!
1) CSA subscriptions
When it comes to growing flowers, the CSA subscription is probably one of the most straight-forward models I’ve seen as far as sales.
A CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) subscription is a business model commonly found with traditional farmers where a customer supports the farm by investing a set amount into the business and getting a set product in return. For egg farmers that might be nine weeks of fresh eggs, while for vegetable farmers it might be a box of fresh vegetables for twelve weeks over the season.
Customers are able to support the farmer, which helps them to invest the capital back into the business and allows them to grow. It’s great because it allows you to establish your customers prior to starting your business, and marketing and sales doesn’t need to occur since you already have people who have pledged to purchasing your flowers.
It’s very simple and tidy, especially on a small scale - I highly recommend it if you’re just starting out or if you’re not sure about your flower growing business just yet.
2) Farmer/growers markets
When I first started thinking about flower farming, this was the business model that I was most familiar with that would be a way to make income. I had been going to the farmer’s market every weekend during the growing season and had seen the large displays of fresh vegetables and herbs and crafts and jars of jams and jellies and honey and yes - I had seen flowers being sold.
I’ve seen quite a few flower farmers do well selling lots and lots of flowers at market, and the idea is quite attractive and fun. I also know that it usually takes a while to develop the customer base and trust in order to see those types of sales, but it is also a great way to get your name out as a flower farm and as a local business and gets you some face time with customers (or potential customers).
It’s a great model because you have an essentially semi-captive audience that is there at the market, ready to buy and to invest into the farmer’s market experience (and flowers are often a spontaneous purchase) and if you have the ability to have the chance to be at a good market, it’s a very good revenue stream. If you have a very outgoing or extroverted personality, I highly recommend you look at doing a farmer’s market because you will not only have an easy time gaining clients and customers but you will also likely have a lot of fun doing it!
3) Wholesale
When I’m talking about selling flowers wholesale, I’m usually talking about BIG numbers of flowers. We’re talking hundreds (if not thousands) of stems a week that will then be usually be distributed and sold to customers.
This is a super high-volume operation, and one where you make your money based on sheer volume and not a super-high quantity of profit per stem. It usually makes sense to consider this business model if you are growing on a very large scale (a couple of acres) and you have a large volume of product to sell and you either can’t find a market for it or you’ve saturated your local market and you need to find other markets to sell to.
This is where selling wholesale can be advantageous. For example, if you were growing two acres of peonies and you wanted to ensure that you were able to (almost always) guarantee that you made money off those peonies every single year (basically a fixed and expected income stream) finding a wholesaler to take all your peonies makes much more sense than trying to chance selling all those peonies individually.
The amount of work it would take to find retail customers and florists to purchase all your peonies locally would be a logistical and marketing nightmare with the added hurdles of transportation and delivery and getting them to your customers - while selling them wholesale means all you have to do is harvest, bunch and drop them off with the wholesaler.
Even larger companies like Mayesh may be interested in purchasing your product, and with the supply chain for flowers being frequently disrupted (or at least shaky) now’s a great time to consider this model.
4) Florist wholesale
When we first started growing, we did a lot of sales to florists. We were not only growing the right types of flowers - a lot of elegant and muted colored flowers like Cafe au Lait dahlias and Queen Red Lime zinnias - but also having had a floral design background we knew exactly what items would sell and what would not and how they would be utilized in design.
Take for example basil - we knew that foliage was always in demand with floral design, and having interesting or unique foliage (that wasn’t eucalyptus, ruscus or salal) in the form of basil would help our designers set themselves apart from the competition and enable them to create more beautiful and magical designs.
Selling to florists is great because they appreciate your flowers in a way that a retail customer may not. Especially the high-end flowers like dahlias, specialty zinnias, lisianthus, sweet peas and other flowers that you might not be able to justify pricing higher for the retail consumer, florists often are very willing to pay you for top-notch floral material.
It of course requires you to be able to grow well, harvest and process and hydrate properly and have a great relationship with your floral designer customers, but if you’re able to do this well you’ll find selling to florists highly rewarding. It’s also great to have flower friends that just really appreciate the amount of time and effort you’re putting into growing your flowers, and it’s also really great to see your flowers in their designs as well. And the more local flowers we can supply to floral designers, the better!
5) Retail bouquets
Retail bouquets are a good way of selling flowers that is a bit more hands-off compared to selling at market or selling to florists. As opposed to having to necessarily be actively conversing with, interacting with and selling your flowers that way, the beauty of the retail bouquet is that you’re able to drop off bouquets and have them advertised and sold by someone else.
Take for example selling at Whole Foods. Once you get established as a vendor, they’ll take a set amount of bouquets from you every week that they will display in their store for sale, and customers will be able to purchase your flowers from them. And aside from the work that you do to prep and get those bouquets delivered, you don’t have to do anything else. There’s no active care or active marketing or sales involved, you just deliver new flowers at the next drop-off.
Of course it isn’t quite that simple - selling retail requires a steady production of high quality materials, and may require other things like purchasing a UPC code and following the retail location’s guidelines. And usually the retail location has control over the pricing and will often take a portion of the profits (i.e. selling on consignment). There is also sometimes the issue that the flowers may not always be properly taken care of (changing water or discarding flowers that have gone over) and unfortunately quite a few flowers that flower farmers grow don’t have an extremely long vase life compared to more conventional floral materials like carnations and mums, but it can be a great business model if you have the correct setup and know-how to make it successful.
6) Flower Stands
Direct to consumer is one of the (surprisingly) popular flower sales that popped up during the pandemic, involving marketing and selling directly to individuals. Since the supply chain for flowers was disrupted during the pandemic and was combined with a sudden demand for flowers from people stuck at home during quarantine, it has since exploded into a very viable model for many people.
In fact, one of the most popular methods of the DTC business model is that of a flower cart or stand - located usually at the grower’s farm or residence - and allowed for people to come and purchase flowers on their own and place money either into a moneybox or utilizing something like Venmo or another cash app to collect payment.
The marketing is quite simple and is usually done directly on social media (IG is quite popular) A post of the flowers or arrangements or bouquets available is posted and alerting customers to the flowers this available (or when they have sold out!)
This model is quite popular with flower farmers who don’t perhaps have the time or availability to go out marketing or selling in other ways. It’s a very passive way of selling flowers - you literally just harvest the flowers, maybe do a simple arrangement into a small mason jar or a bouquet and set them out for people to help themselves. Great for busy parents especially who may not be able to commit to a full farmer’s market or delivery route but can stock flowers at a home-based outlet, refilling as they sell out.
As an added idea, you can also make the farm stand a bit more of a hybrid model by making a flower car or truck that you sell your flowers out of. Quite an attractive display, and you can have the advantage of taking your business almost literally anywhere!
7) U-pick
A U-pick flower farm is probably one of the earlier business models that farmers have used to be successful. It’s actually pretty genius as far as a business goes - you don’t even have to do any of the harvesting, you let your customers do it themselves!
Especially in the past few years, there has been a strong yearning for a return to a simpler life and to reconnect with nature and a more balanced way of living, and many people have been drawn to flowers and agricultural settings as a result. A U-pick flower farm is a great way to be able to experience that, where people can be surrounded by rows and fields of flowers, making for the ultimate immersive flower experience.
If you don’t have the time or means to be able to sell at farmer’s markets or retail or to florists and you’ve got the space to grow in this manner, a U-pick may be a good business model. Keep in mind of course that you’re going to have people coming to your property (and home) and that requires firm boundaries and good customer service and business sense to be able to keep things from getting out of hand.
It also requires you to keep the fields looking relatively clean and attractive, and that can cause issues when you’re also trying to work on the farm that could interfere with the U-pick experience (such as setting up a hoop house in the middle of your U-pick field or fixing an irrigation issue when a large amount of customers are present) but it can be a great way of making income if you’re not interested in active sales or design.
8) Agritourism
Agritourism has picked up in the past decade or so with the inspiration for farmyard, barnyard, rustic and pastoral settings being high in demand for weddings and events. In many cases, it seems the more rustic and magical the setting, the better.
But it’s not just weddings anymore, there are so many other agritourist opportunities out there. Photography - both of flowers and nature as well as of people and styled shoots has become popular, and you can charge quite a bit for people to have the opportunity to either photograph or be photographed on your farm.
Similarly if you can either host or co-host certain activities, this can be not only a way to gain an income but also to network and therefore gain customer bases with other businesses and business opportunities. We have several friends who host concerts or retreats or farm-to-table dinners or even yoga on their farms with great success.
Agritourism works well if you offer other activities as well such as the aforementioned U-pick setup, seed starting and gardening workshops, floral design and wreath making workshops or even if you have a small retail shop or store on your property.
The sky is the limit when it comes to your ideas for agritourism!
9) Full service floral design
When it comes to selling flowers, the highest price you will get per stem (and the most profit per stem) is when you are doing active floral design for your customer.
It makes sense - you are using your expertise and your talent to be able to take raw floral materials and fashion them into something that is quite more beautiful and magical than the sum of its parts, and are able to charge more accordingly.
In fact, many flower farmers have turned to full service floral design because it is the only way for them to be profitable as a flower farmer. You have to sell a lot of stems and bouquets in order to make a considerable amount of gross sales (and we’re not even talking about net income yet here) and that can be a lot of really hard work.
Using us as an example, we turned to full service floral design because we had a background in wedding floral design but also because we had a limited growing space and had hit the limit of our physical ability to grow and produce more and more importantly wanted to be more effective and profitable with not only our growing but also our floral sales as well. If we could make more profit per stem, that meant that for the same amount of work to grow and harvest that flower we were making that much more.
Full service floral design is definitely a change from the other income streams. It requires good skills at managing clients as well as managing work and time and budgets (there’s a lot more math and computer skills than one would think - it’s much more than playing with pretty flowers) and it can be quite time consuming and harrowing at times.
However there is always the reward that you are creating a unique and special beauty for what will likely be one of the most important days of a person’s life, and that right there is the ultimate reward. To be able to work with and create flowers that can bring such joy and beauty and emotion to people is quite the feat.
You can of course include flowers other than weddings as well (weddings are just the most popular and consistent for most people) that include other events like anniversaries, birthdays, retirements, graduations and bereavements to name a few.
10) Limited floral design
I’ll confess that although we loved doing weddings for a time (it’s so exciting and unreal to see all the flowers you have grown being enjoyed and experienced by other people in quite a magical setting) it did start to get to be a bit much. Both of us work 9-5 jobs during the week, and full service wedding designs started taking up almost all of our weekend time to the point where we were getting really unhappy with our work-life balance.
We still do some weddings, but they are smaller weddings with fewer flowers. Bridal bouquet, boutonnieres and corsages and bridesmaids bouquets, some simple centerpieces and maybe a single large arrangement but nothing too crazy. We don’t do anything that requires setup or tear down and certainly nothing that remotely resembles an arch or chuppah or major installation - just your standard wedding flowers.
It’s been great for us - we get to use 100% farm grown flowers by us (which makes our life easer and our design process consistent) and there has been a lot fewer headaches overall.
I hope you found this useful
There are so many business models for flower farmers of all scales and situations out there, and I hope that you find those models that work for you.
If you want to learn a bit more in depth regarding the different flower farming model businesses, check out the Flower Farmer eBook bundle! Chock-full of informational eBooks on everything from growing flowers for floral design to selling to florists to growing on a small scale, there’s something for everyone.
