An Over-Abundance oF blooms
What do you do when you have too many flowers? It’s a good ides to have a plan and start thinking about what you will do when you are graced with a situation when you have TOO MANY flowers. I know. it may seem like that day will never come if you’re new to farming and feeling a flower drought right now, but I bet you’ll find yourself in the opposite predicament at some point. Maybe sooner than you think.
Here are three ways to turn heads and grow your business and recognition of your brand when you have too many flowers and no sales outlet for them. I hope these ideas a inspirational. Scroll down for additional insights and suggestions in the text below.
A .pdf download with ideas for surviving flower droughts (the opposite situation) has been added to the Downloads page in the Pro Library.
Abundant flat lay photos.
An abundance of flowers is what set you apart from casual home gardeners and it can help you be seen as a reliable business with products to offer. Use your flower flood to your advantage and capture it for marketing purposes.
To reach a larger audience with your flat lay image posts on social media, label the varieties in your images and/or write a thoughtful caption explaining what you're showing. Posts that are viewed as resources are saved and shared more often. When viewers perform these actions, your posts gain traction in the algorithms online. To make your posts EVEN MORE attractive to viewers, link your content to a valuable resource, like a blog post with more helpful information (shopping links, planting how-to’s, design tutorials, etc). If you have a detailed iamge, consider splitting it into 2 or 3 images. When a viewer has to scroll through slides, your post’s engagement time also improves. Here are some sample images. Let me know if you’d like a step-by-step tutorial for making and labeling images like these.
2. UnEXPECTED INSTALLATIONS.
Look for opportunities to present flowers in an unexpected way to your community. I am always looking for inspiration for whacky installations in our area. One person’s trash can absolutely be your treasure! Choose high traffic locations and structures that lend themselves to being “flowered.”
3. RAISE the bar on Fundraising.
What I’ve learned about fundraisers is that if I’m invested (financially) like I hope or expect others to be, really good things happen. Donating flowers to people who could use a boost is always a good move. But what if you could encourage others to participate in the giving, too, and essentially multiply the good-ness in a way that makes every participant feel EVEN better?
If you’re going to give away flowers consider selecting both a recipient of the flowers AND a recipient of money from sales of these flowers due to a fundraising effort. Donate all money that comes in— your original plan to donate flowers did not involve generating income. And your generosity with this move will make you and a lot of other people feel really good!
We were able to raise $10k in a short period of time last year due to our decision to give all the money that came in to the organization we wanted to help. We didn’t take any money for the cost of our goods, our labor, or our delivery efforts. We sold flower bunches in our webshop. The flower bunches went to hundreds of residents at local long term care centers and the money went to Razom for Ukraine. The donors were motivated to participate because their gifts did twice as much “good.” We publicly thanked as many donors as we could through video announcements on Instagram that named them specifically for participating and tagged their businesses. Our project caught the ear of local and regional NPR affiliates.
We continued our efforts to raise funds for this organization after the end of our project by encouraging other flower farmers and florists to participate, too. I made a couple of these poster designs and shared them on social media.
There are MANY ways to turn your lemons into lemonade. Creating a line of value-added products is another great way to turn an over-abundance of flowers into something that could be sellable later.
I hope these ideas are helpful. Cheers.
