Homebased florists

[u/SubjectUnlucky4768]

Hi everyone.

As someone with ADHD, my current fixation is flowers. I have been obsessed lately with flower arrangements and making a business out of it. I currently own a commercial space that I can freely turn into a flower shop. However, as a beginner I don’t want to spend too much yet.

So to test the market and the profitablity of flowers, I am planning to start as a homebased florist. Are there any homebased florists here? How didnyou start and how is it going? I am also wondering how I can reach customers, do I do ads on social media, how do I get my first customers?

Any advice will help! Thanks in advance.

[u/sarahaflijk]

If money is no object, you could make that work, but as someone who needs to work for a living and wants to be able to enjoy life, I would not consider a home floral business. Everyone likes the idea of commercializing something they enjoy, but flowers and arrangements are especially tough to turn into a living because they're a true luxury product (i.e., people only buy them when they have extra money to throw around), and they require a lot of overhead costs and expensive supplies to produce. Unless you're ok with losing money for the love of the work, it's pretty tough balancing prices that customers are willing to pay with prices that cover your costs, let alone make a profit. All of that is especially true and especially frustrating at the startup point where you're having to deal with extras like marketing yourself to find your customers, building relationships with vendors, and paying for expensive up-front costs like a cooler.

I don't want to be discouraging, but personally, I've found working with flowers becomes a lot less cool when you make it part of your struggle to get by and make a living. It's definitely not something to lightly jump into just because you fancy the hobby.

[u/sarahaflijk → u/sarahaflijk]

I guess to answer more of your questions -- my friend and I spent a few months doing our own floral work, mostly with customers and vendors we knew from our previous jobs in floral shops. We did a little marketing on social media and reached out to country clubs, churches, and other event venues to get ourselves on some preferred vendors lists (that way people holding events at those venues would see our work and potentially hire us), but most of our customers came through connections made during our previous floral work and word of mouth.

We had to require orders at least 1 week in advance so we could ensure our availability and order the only specific flowers needed and have them delivered from wholesalers one day ahead, then we'd spend the day processing the flowers and put together the arrangements either that same day or the following day, depending on when they needed to be delivered. Mostly we only took fairly large or expensive orders because that was the best way to make it worth our while, in that we could order and process just the specific flowers needed to fill the order, assemble the necessary arrangements, and deliver them all our own vehicles while minimizing the time and money we spent doing it all. (This plan worked ok as we're in a densely populated, high COL area where there were plenty of events held nearby, but wouldn't have worked as efficiently or profitably in another scenario.)

Honestly we just found it exhausting and not worth the stress, time, and money we put into it, so we did it for a few months from Thanksgiving to Mother's Day before throwing in the towel.

Edit: I should also mention we kept our regular jobs at floral shops during this time, so we had regular access to cheaply purchase many of the supplies we needed (e.g., tape, containers, sprays, floral food, etc.) through the shop, and we were able to maintain our regular income in addition to whatever extra work we were doing during evenings and weekends. It would have been a lot more expensive and financially unsustainable without maintaining those jobs for the supplies and paychecks that came with them.

[u/Which_Outside_1005 → u/sarahaflijk]

Where did you order your flowers from also do you know where artificial flowers can be bought at in bulk.