Two Types of Wholesale

 Hi everyone. We are starting to wrap up our wholesale sales for the Valentine's Day holiday. I want to share some thoughts around wholesale and some information that might help you when you're considering what direction to take your business. We do two types of wholesale here.

We do wholesale to florists and we do wholesale as pre bunched bouquets that go to like local resellers. Wholesale to florist is the most recent addition to our business. It requires having lots of quantity of each variety of whatever you want to offer. It also requires some experience and know-how in terms of understanding what is going to be blooming when because sometimes these buyers want to purchase a few weeks ahead of time.

It requires a lot of nimbleness and flexibility and constant inventory checking to make sure that you are listing what you actually have, that your crops are coming along as you hope they will. It also requires disappointment. You have to be willing to reach out to people and tell them that you're gonna have to substitute something if you have to substitute something.

So there are a lot of things to think about. It's not just like, oh, I, have a few extra bunches of flowers. I'm not selling every flower. I should just, you know, try to find a florist to buy them. It's not quite like that. If you can make that work for you, more power to you, maybe you can find a florist who's willing to, you know, blanket purchase, whatever random 10 bunches of flowers you have each week, some kind of deal like that.

But the florist that I'm working for are more specifically wanting to dial in certain varieties for these large events that they're planning.

The wholesale to local resellers like coffee shops and small grocers, things like that. I find that to be much easier, much less stressful, much more simple because they don't have any “say” in the types of flowers that they're getting.

They just order a certain number of bunches. And whatever you make for them is what they're getting. This is a great sort of gateway into wholesale work and it's not stressful at all and it's something that you can also enter into with a smaller quantity. So when you're in the situation where maybe you're selling your flowers retail and you're noticing that you could put together, you know, 10 or 20 or 30 more bunches of flowers a week if you just had a place to sell them—-then a local reseller is probably a good idea for you.

We have a relationship with our primary little local vendor and they buy from us almost year round, and it's about 600 to $700 of revenue per week from them, from this one shop. That's a great relationship and we hold onto that year round.

Yeah, so those are some of my thoughts about wholesale. If you're starting out, I think that your best value for a smaller quantity of flowers is obviously to sell them retail, to not have to mark them down at quantity, but to sell them retail. Your highest value is if you can do something with those flowers, if you can design with them—-if you can make some kind of arrangement. Because then you're also able to earn some money for your labor in a different way (for your creative labor). So the value per stem is going to be highest in that situation, and then it's gonna go down from there.

And that's one of the reasons that I focused so heavily on event and wedding design work at the early stages of my business, when I was really looking to gain revenue for building out my infrastructure and growing my business, that was a heavy focus because there's an opportunity to take advantage of that.

And I'm going to share with you in the next video a little bit more of an explanation for how I grew and why I made that decision and, and also why I think it was necessary for my situation. So, Let, let's set wholesale aside and we'll go and we'll talk a little bit about the growth of Little Farmhouse, what we've done here, and some questions that I considered that might be helpful for you to consider.

What I don't want you to do is to take my model here and think that it's going to apply directly and perfectly to what you're doing, because the choices that I made here are very much dependent upon my particular situation. So have a listen, take a look at those resources and let me know if you have any questions,

Cheers!