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Perfect for gardening enthusiasts at any level, this podcast is your companion to cultivating success and beauty in your own backyard or flower patch. Hosted by Jane Westoby from Fuchsia Blooms Florist and The Hampshire Seed Company.
Each episode is a treasure trove of practical tips, expert advice, and insider flower farming guides designed to help you sow and grow with confidence and harvest with pride. Whether you’re dreaming of rows of neat vegetables or cutting flowers for bouquets all year round, we’ll walk you through every step.
Let’s grow together!
Jane Westoby (00:05)
Hey there flower friends and welcome back to the podcast that believes that flowers should be local, seasonal and grown with love, not wrapped in plastic and flown halfway across the world. I'm Jane, the founder of the Hampshire Seed Company and a flower farmer florist who's gone from wedding chaos to seed packet chaos. And these days I also help other growers to build blooming good businesses.
So whether you are planting your first tray of cosmos or scaling up for serious sales, you're in the right place. And today I want to talk about the very first lesson almost every beginner cut flower farmer learns the hard way. And this is it. Growing flowers is easy, but customers, however, they do not just magically appear. And this is the shot.
that most beginners just don't expect. So if you're new to cut flower farming, it might sound a bit brutal, but I promise you, I say this because you really need to hear it. Most beginner flower farmers, they can grow flowers. Yes, genuinely, you are probably doing much better than you think. You follow a sewing schedule of sorts.
You'll water, you'll protect from frost, you harvest your flowers at the right stage sometimes, but that's for another podcast. We will talk about that another day. And before long, you are standing there with buckets full of flowers thinking, right then, what next? And this is the moment that catches most people out, I'll be honest, because up until this point, everything has felt logical. You sow, you grow, you harvest, it's all beautiful.
you're having the time of your life. But what doesn't automatically follow this is the sales. And nobody really thinks about that part until it's too late, until you have buckets of blooms going on the compost heap every single week because they've gone unsold. And here is the truth. Good flowers do not, contrary to popular belief, they do not sell themselves.
And there is a very persistent myth in the outside world that to be a flower farmer, that you just grow beautiful flowers and people will somehow find you. And that in general, some things just sell themselves. Well, they won't and they don't. And that's not people being read. They're not ignoring you. They simply do not know that you exist.
because posting occasionally on Instagram or mentioning it to a neighbor or quietly launching a website because you're not very proud of it is not a marketing strategy. That's just hope and that's not a business model. The growers you see selling out every single week, they're not necessarily better growers. Trust me, I can assure you they're not, but what they are.
is their better communicators because they talk about what they want to grow, why they want to grow it, when it's going to be available and who it's for and they do it consistently long long before they expect anyone to actually buy those blooms. So we're talking weeks and months before. So marketing really it's part of the job.
whether you like it or not. And this is the bit that can feel a little bit uncomfortable, especially if you came into flower farming because you love quiet work, because you love being outside and avoiding all that kind of salesy nonsense. But here's the reality. If you do want a successful cut flower business, you will actually need to spend more time marketing than growing.
Yes, you did hear that right. You will need to spend more time marketing than actually growing. So if you spend one hour, let's say in the field, you need to spend two hours on marketing activity. But that doesn't mean shouting. It doesn't mean it doesn't mean being cringe.
It doesn't mean dancing on reels, not unless you want to, but I have never done that by the way, and I can't say I ever will. But what it does mean is it means talking about your flowers regularly. It means showing people what's coming and repeating yourself more than what actually feels necessary. Because most people need to hear something several times before they act.
marketing isn't something you do once the growing is finished. It actually needs to happen way, way, way before the growing. Because if nobody knows what you're growing or when it will be ready or how to buy it, well, how can they support you? They just can't. So you might be thinking why it matters so early and it's really important, I suppose, in year one because
What I see time and time again are growers who they grow far too much. And I have an episode all about that too. That's episode 15 and a blog called Planning for Profit, How Many Flowers You Actually Need to Grow. So I will link to both of those in the show notes for you so that you can make sure you're not actually growing too much and you're growing just right. So I see people, so that's off track a little bit, but so I see growers growing far too much.
I see them growing without a sales plan and they end up discounting or composting their flowers and that's really, or giving them away for next to nothing. And that's really heartbreaking because not because the flowers weren't good, but because the business foundations weren't actually there yet. And what marketing does is it allows you to grow with intention and match the supply to the demand.
and build all of those relationships before you actually need the sales. It turns flower farming from a gamble, essentially, into something which is much, much more stable. So if you are wondering what marketing actually looks like for beginners, let's be really clear. It's not huge billboard posters. It's not TV ads.
You know, we're not talking playing with the big boys here. For beginner flower farmers, good marketing is just really simple. And what you need to think about is talk about what you're growing, sharing the process, letting people know when things will be available and then making it easy to buy. And I'll come back to this later on. I'll come back to this in a minute.
But just remember you don't need to be on every platform. You don't need complicated funnels.
but you do need visibility. If people don't know that you grow the flowers, they can't buy the flowers from you. It is literally that simple. You just need to tell people what you're doing constantly and consistently. So what really needs to happen is that you need to essentially re-evaluate the role of a flower farmer because this mindset shift
is the thing that changes everything because you are not just a grower, you're a grower and a business owner. And that doesn't make you less authentic or less proper about what you're doing, less professional. It makes you sustainable because a flower business that doesn't sell is just a really expensive garden. And if that's what you actually want, then that's fine too. That's actually okay. But you need to be honest with yourself about what you want. And if you...
really cannot be bothered to do the marketing, then you just won't sell flowers long term. Let's just be really brutally honest here. And I am, anyone that knows me personally will probably say, well, Jess Jane's a bit rude, but I don't mean to be rude. I just want to be brutally honest with you because your business is not going to be sustainable if you can't be bothered to do the marketing.
I know that marketing can be really, really disheartening. It can feel like a little bit like a one-way street, like you're just talking to everybody and nobody is talking back to you. You have to be very thick skinned as well. And, you know, and I say all this with love because I see it every single day, if I'm honest. So, so let me make this really practical for you. So when I say marketing, I don't mean sitting at your laptop panicking about
know, Instagram algorithms and what's the algorithm doing next? Who cares what the algorithm's doing next? For a beginner flower farmer, marketing is kind of, it's for four kind of very unglamorous, very effective things. So the first one is that you need to pick a place to show up or maybe two places to show up. think two is probably, you know, wise. So
That could be Instagram and email. could be a farm gate sign and a farmer's market. I know genuinely, it really doesn't matter which ones, just pick one or two of those that you can start with. Because actually a lot of beginners fail, not because they're bad at marketing, but because they scatter themselves everywhere and then they don't gain any traction anywhere because the number of hours required to keep doing this is actually quite
high. So, you know, if you're posting on Instagram, you can post what you're growing, what's coming next. You can post it when it's actually going to be ready. And that's it. It really is as simple as that. You know, we're not talking trends. We're not talking dancing. There's no pressure to be entertaining. If you want to be entertaining, then by all means be entertaining.
But I'll be honest, I've never really done the entertaining thing as a flower farmer on there. But the second thing you need to do is that you really need to talk about your flowers before you have them. And this is the bit that everyone skips. I know it is actually very, very difficult before you actually have any flowers, because you don't have any flowers to show. And it is a bit of a catch-22. You do actually need to sow the seed, but then...
talk about that, talk about what you've just sowed, talk about what's overwintering, talk about what's coming. Have you got a you pick coming? Have you got Friday flower deliveries coming? What's going to be ready in spring? If it's not your first year and maybe it's your second year, you know, what sold well last year? What did you sell out of?
And this is weeks and sometimes months before you have anything for sale because people, they often don't buy flowers on a whim. They buy them because they've actually been quietly expecting them. know, Ooh, this person has peonies. Ooh, fabulous. I'm going to, you know, I'll expect those. I'll expect to see them in June and then I'll buy some. It's not necessarily on a whim, although sometimes it is when they see them.
as long as it's the right time of year, but you need to build up that email base to expect things which are coming along. then the third thing is that you need to say it again. You need to say the same thing, literally the same thing again and again and again and again. And this is where most growers feel awkward and then they stop too soon. And I'll be honest,
You know, even me with my seed business, I have a lot of grow alongs. I teach a lot. have a lot of resources and I constantly sit there while I'm looking at what I should post and what I should email my customers about. And I think, but gosh, I did this a couple of weeks ago. Are they really going to want to hear it again? Yes, they do. And I've proved it time and time again.
They need to hear it again. They need to hear it several times. And I can't remember what the number is now. It's something like, you know, it used to be seven or eight times, but it's like 80 times now. I mean, it's just crazy how many people, how many times somebody needs to see something for them to actually make a purchase. It's over and over and over again. And, know, and this is not about selling. You're not, don't think about it like you're selling your flowers.
You're just showing them. You're showing, look what I'm doing. Look what I'm growing. Yes, they are going to be available and here's the website, et cetera. you you might feel like you've said, I have tulips in April once, you know, or twice or three times, but your audience probably hasn't noticed it at all. So reputation, it isn't boring. It's reassuring.
Well, it may be boring for you, but the listener hasn't seen it yet. So it's not boring for them. And the more times that they'll see it, the more likely they are to remember it. Okay. So that's number three. And then number four is make buying obvious. Now this sounds really painfully obvious, but it's where so many growers fall down. You need to clearly say when people can buy, of course, how
they can buy and where they can collect from or the fact that you're going to deliver.
So if somebody has DM'd you asking you, these for sale? Then quite clearly, your marketing hasn't done its job yet.
So I mentioned earlier about these two hours of marketing and what these might actually look like. just so this doesn't feel kind of abstract, here is a real example. So let's say that, you know, you spend an hour in the field doing whatever it is you need to do. Okay. So then for your two hours of marketing,
You maybe need to 30 minutes, you maybe need to spend 30 minutes taking some photographs and videos of you actually doing some sewing, some B-roll, whatever it is you need to then be able to do your marketing with. Okay, so you could do that for 30 minutes. You might then spend 30 minutes maybe writing an Instagram post or an email to go out to your email list and you may...
have a really small email list to start with. That's perfectly normal and I know it is really, trust me, I know it's hard. It's really hard when you are literally writing an email and it's going to go to 10 people and out of those 10 people, know, only half of them are going to open it.
And then of the half that open it, only half of them are actually even going to go to your website. So you'll maybe get two people going to the website and then they might not even buy. So it is hard, especially when you have a really small email list to start with, but you need to start somewhere. So you don't need to make it long and onerous. You know, you can use a template, you can make things quick. Okay. So you could spend 30 minutes doing something like that.
you might then spend 30 minutes researching local coffee shops who you can approach to actually sell your flowers through. And then you might spend 30 minutes planning what you'll talk about in next week's email. So that's your two hours gone. So actually, once you start to break down what you'll be spending those two hours doing marketing on, it all starts to make sense. So
And that's, you know, that's it really, you know, it's not no funnels, no ads, no complicated tech, but it's just being consistent and consistency just beats complexity every single time. I can assure you it does. And this week, even for me, um, consistency and just keeping things simple.
I even I've learned my lesson this week on this. tried and I will tell you this now. I'll tell you a little story now about that. I tried this week to be a little bit fancy and I tried to give all of you guys a members area on my website and it was very fancy and you could put login details in and then you'd be able to access all of my growing guides and everything all in one. It was fabulous and I tested it and it was all great.
And within 48 hours of the launch, I had so many complaints from people saying that they couldn't access my growing guides. They were getting spam warnings coming up, telling them that I was trying to steal their details and all sorts. And thank you, if you are listening to the person who sent me that screenshot of the message they got, telling them that I was trying to steal their details. And I am forever grateful to this customer.
this person who messaged me to say, I thought you should know this is the message I've just got because I tried to download something on your website, but I know you're not trying to steal my details. I've bought from you before. I know you're very honest. And so thank you so much to that person because that was the point at which I thought, think I've made things too complicated and I reined it back and deleted it all.
And we went back to basics again. you know, that's a lesson. That's a real lesson. And I will do, I'll record a separate podcast about that, about making things simple and easy, but I tried to be too complicated and, and it just didn't work and it backfired. anyway, so you can always do a U-turn. Don't worry. Okay. So back to the subject at hand. So, you know, here's the people that people, here's the thing, sorry, that,
People just don't like to hear if you are thinking, I just want to grow flowers. I don't want to sell myself. Then I'm going to be really honest with you. Flower farming as a business might not actually be what you want. You might think it's what you want and that's not a failure. That's just clarity. But if you do want to sell flowers,
then marketing is not optional. Marketing is not optional. If you want to sell your flowers, it isn't something you can just tack on later.
it's part of the job just like sewing is, just like harvesting is and just like pinching is.
So if you are in your first year of cut flower farming and this episode hit home, I want you to start talking about your flowers before you expect anyone to buy them. So if nothing else, if you don't take anything else from today's episode, just let it be this, that growing flowers is achievable, but that selling them does require some attention and some effort because customers don't magically appear.
They need to be invited into your world. They need to be informed and they need to be reminded that you actually exist. Once you accept that marketing is part of the job, everything else just becomes much easier.
So thanks for listening and I will see you in the next episode.