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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 (00:03)
Hey flower friends and welcome back to the podcast that believes 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're planning your first tray of cosmos or you're scaling up for serious sales, you're in the right place.
And today I'm diving into something that could completely change the way you run your flower farming business. And that's finding your ICA, your ideal customer avatar. This is more than a marketing buzzword. It's about building a business that fits your lifestyle, your flowers and your goals. and this, know, niche isn't always enough. We hear it all the time in business, find your niche.
But for flower farmers, that can feel really, really narrow and really product focus.
You're told to choose between wedding flowers, subscription bouquets, wholesale to florists or market flowers. As if you can never change that. But that's not the reality.
Ask yourself, who am I actually growing for? What do they value? How much are they willing to pay? And how do they want to actually buy their flowers? And once you have some of these answers, the decisions about what to grow, how to price and where to sell become much, much easier. So let's rewind to my first seasons, my early days. I'm going to...
kind of say the chaos phase, although I never like to think that I've been in any kind of chaos. But I was growing everything for everyone. I did weddings, I did subscriptions, I sold to florists, I did pop-up markets, farmers markets, which weren't the best. They were a little bit of a disaster for me. But I was saying yes to every opportunity because I thought that that's what growth looked like.
it didn't take long for those cracks to show. So I was running bouquets out to customers late at night in the dark. And if it's one thing I hate, it's houses without numbers. And I'm really sorry if you live in a house without a number and you have a house name instead, because it is absolutely impossible to find a customer's house if there is no number.
And some of these new housing estates as well have numbers that are completely out of sequence and you just cannot find the house. And it wastes like half an hour of your time, up to an hour of your time sometimes, just trying to find a house to deliver a bouquet to. So one thing I would have to do before I actually set off is actually check to see if I can actually find the house on Google Maps before I set off. And if I couldn't find it before I set off, I just wouldn't deliver it.
I would contact the customer and ask for very specific instructions about exactly where the house is, exactly what it's next door to. Otherwise, I would just waste too much time. I was also harvesting in the rain because weddings, didn't care about the weather. I was harvesting in the rain, in the dark. You can't see blooms in the dark. It's really not a good idea.
I was growing varieties that were great for weddings, but then didn't really hold up too well for my home bouquet customers, which wasn't ideal. So without a really clear ICA, it was like spinning plates. And it's only a matter of time before those plates start.
to wobble. Now to begin with, you might need to do quite a few of those things to find your niche, to find what you actually really want to do. Having
Having the disasters isn't necessarily a bad thing. The disasters teach you exactly what you don't want to do as a flower farmer florist.
So one of the hardest and best decisions I made was just to step back from florist wholesale. I loved supplying florists, but it just didn't work. Florists will quite often sell a dream into a client and then you have to provide them with that dream. And I just couldn't do that.
And many florists, especially if they were shop florists who'd been working with imported blooms and wanted to make a switch, they just couldn't understand that we didn't have those blooms that week. I didn't care that they'd sold them to their wedding client. We don't have them. And they shouldn't have sold them to those wedding clients unless they were prepared to import them. So it just didn't work for me.
The other thing that didn't work for me was actually supplying DIY customers. So they would quite often again have a certain expectation of what they wanted in their head. And if they weren't picking up what they expected in their head, then they didn't like that. Whereas when I was creating weddings,
for my clients if they were coming to me with a brief and I couldn't fulfill that brief, I was just honest and I would say, no, I can't fulfill that brief. If you desperately want peonies in September, I'm really sorry. I don't have peonies in September. I will pass this to somebody else who is willing to put the neck on the line and say, I will get you peonies in September. But for me, that would have meant hours and hours possibly of my time driving into London.
at two o'clock in the morning to try and desperately find some peonies, which just wasn't good for me. I needed clients who were quite flexible. So, and that's the beauty of knowing your ideal customer avatar. You then get the permission to say no, to say no to work that just doesn't fit. It doesn't make you lazy. It just makes you really strategic and it frees up your focus.
on the customers who can bring you joy and bring you profit and who are streamlined and aligned with what you want for your business. So one of the things which will most likely shape your ideal customer avatar
is your location. So if you're in a rural village, maybe your perfect ideal customer avatar is someone who loves honesty box bunches. Or if you're near a city, perhaps it's young professionals who want a weekly bouquet subscription delivered to their door when they get home from work. Or maybe you're in a wedding hotspot. So your ICA might be couples looking for locally grown seasonal flowers for their big day.
Your location is not, don't see it as a limitation though. It's just a clue to what that could be.
So let's talk about weddings for a second. I've already touched on weddings and how I have stopped doing.
DIY weddings. So one of the reasons is the customer's expectation for what they want in their bucket. If they want to choose and they want to pick what goes in their bucket, then they need to go and buy them and choose them individually. That's not the service that I offer. Having said that, I have never had a complaint from any of my flowers, any of my wedding customers.
not one single one of them has ever ever complained that the blooms weren't the blooms that we discussed or they weren't the blooms that were in their proposal because I would always pick and still do pick everything which is looking absolutely fantastic for that week and I will make it look absolutely stunning.
And if there is something in there that I know the customer wanted that I can't provide, I contact them ahead of schedule to say, look, we have had a bit of a problem and we did grow this out for you, but unfortunately we had some problems with pests. And I had this one year with ranunculars where one of my customers wanted burgundy ranunculars. And unfortunately the mice ate my ranunculars. What was left that I could plant out, the deer then munched on.
and we had none left. I contacted all the local flower farmers, nobody had any burgundy ranunculars for this wedding. And I then went to a wholesaler to see if I could get some imports. There weren't any, they could not get hold of any for me. And I knew this like a couple of weeks beforehand. So I did contact that client a couple of weeks beforehand and we put something else in place and that was good. That was okay.
You know, I managed to just say to her, look, we'll put something else in there, like some burgundy roses for you and some other burgundy flowers.
So let's talk about weddings again, because weddings can be really incredible. Now I've already mentioned that I don't do the DIY weddings anymore, just the stress of having to provide exactly what a customer wants in their wedding bucket. You know, when they're kind of getting a discount in a way on them flowers, because they're not having to pay for
my full time to arrange them all. That was one of the reasons. It just wasn't as profitable for me and we have limited space here. So if I want to grow, I want to grow and get all of the profit from my crops. Now, if we had more space, that decision would probably be a very different decision. If I had more space, I would probably open up the farm and customers could come and choose. And then there would be
no disappointed customers that they didn't get the exact shade of the exact balloon that they wanted in their bucket. But with limited space, that's the decision that I have made. The other reason why I don't do the DIY wedding buckets anymore is also because what I found is that clients don't really know what to do with them. They don't know how to cut them properly, to condition them properly, to open them properly.
And I've even tipped up to one of my weddings where I was still providing bouquets and boutonnières and a top table arrangement. But the bridal party were doing all the flowers for the tables. And I had explained to them exactly how to calculate how many flowers they needed so they didn't have to guess. So they ordered their flowers. They came to collect them the day before.
And when I went to the wedding the following day, I realized that they had miscalculated, didn't quite get it right, and they'd gone to the local supermarket and bought some more blooms. Now, they could have contacted me and said, hey Jane, could you bring us an extra couple of buckets tomorrow when you come down because we don't quite have enough? But they didn't. They chose to go to the supermarket instead. And I'll be honest, those supermarket blooms, they looked awful. They looked absolutely awful.
So that's another reason why I've kind of shied away from doing the DIY because I don't want to be associated with other people's work, essentially. My weddings are stunning, they're beautiful, and I would put my name to them, but I don't want my business name to be put to other people's weddings, if that makes sense. Okay, but having said all of this, weddings can be incredible. They can be creative, profitable, and they can be a joy when you get a dream client.
But, and here's the big but, they can also be really, really stressful and unpredictable. Especially when a client really, really wants something. They want, you know, let's say lots of peach blooms and it's really difficult to get hold of peach blooms in those particular weeks. You maybe don't have any and none of the flower farmers have any and then...
then you have to get some from a wholesaler just to make their dream happen. And it can totally take over your life in peak season. So if you choose weddings as your ICAs, you need to make sure that you do build systems. You need to grow backup crops because your crops will never ever grow. You you'll never grow the right shade of every flower in exactly the right week that you need to grow it in.
You'll also need extra help on harvest days and when you are, you know, if you're doing bigger installs, you'll need extra help as well. So you'll need other florists to come and help you. And you need to set really clear boundaries in your contracts for what you can and can't provide, especially when it comes to the flowers and seasonality and be...
in a way vague but specific. So I would always promise my clients beautiful flowers. I would promise them a color scheme, but I won't promise them individual flowers in individual colors or any named varieties when it comes to things like peonies or roses. Because once you go down that promise route, it's very difficult to come back.
that. And if weddings aren't your thing and they are incredibly stressful then that's fine. I'd say the other thing that you really need to get nailed is your timing for weddings. If you are always late, constantly late and if you don't know how long it makes you to take a bouquet, to make a bouquet, then I'd say weddings are not your thing. I know that I can make
wedding in a certain, I know that I can make my bouquets in a certain amount of time, I know how long each boutonniere takes me, I know how long it takes me to decorate my moon gate. So I always know exactly how many hours a wedding is going to take me, I know how many people I'm gonna need to get in on the day, on the day before, how late I'm gonna have to stay up.
But if you're not great with numbers and if you are not good at doing those calculations then I'd say weddings are probably not going to be your thing.
And there are plenty of other ICA types that you can choose from. So you don't need to worry. So, you know, other examples that I've seen work really brilliantly are things like, you know, the weekly bouquet buyer, you know, they love fresh flowers at home. They value the convenience of having someone deliver them and they are happy to pay a subscription. There are DIY wedding couples. I have obviously decided to not do the DIY brides.
But if you have the space and you can let customers actually come along and choose and cut and point to, yeah, I'd like this flower and that flower in your actual field, then that's a really good way of actually cutting huge amounts of blooms.
Okay, then you have high-end brides who want full service design, local luxury flowers, and they are willing to pay for that. You've got market goers who are impulse buyers.
No. So you've got, so there are lots and lots of other ICAs that you can think about and think about if this fits with your business and your lifestyle. So you've got weekly bouquet buyers who love fresh flowers at home. They value the convenience. They're happy to pay a subscription to have them delivered on a regular basis. And they love the fact that they are local.
blooms, okay? But this would mean you going out and actually delivering. You know, if you are working, you know, maybe shift work or you're working a nine to five, you can deliver on a weekend, you can fit things in around your job, that could work really, really well. You've got the DIY wedding couples who I've already mentioned. And if you have the space and the ability to let customers actually come and choose and see the flowers,
⁓ as you cut them or to help come and cut them. That's a really, really great way of selling your blooms because they really appreciate the seasonal color palettes, especially when they can see before they're cut. You've got high-end brides who want full-service design, local luxury flowers. They're willing to pay
but you need to make sure that you are actually growing those luxury flowers for them. know, corn flowers are not going to, know, corn flowers and calendula are not going to be the flowers you need to grow. You need to be growing peonies and dahlias and roses, China asters, all of those kind of high-end luxury florals. You've got market goers. So if you've got a really good
farmers market near you with good footfall. And I emphasize the good footfall here. So I did farmers markets for probably, I think I only did one full season and I did manage to get myself a handful of really regular clients who shopped with me until I actually left that location. They would shop with me, I'd say probably once a month for their kind of daily, you know, like,
like the weekly bouquet things that they kept themselves and then they would also buy bouquets from me for special occasions as well. But generally the market that was near me, the farmers market, didn't really have enough footfall to justify me cutting large numbers of blooms and taking large numbers of blooms. It just didn't really
equal profit for me but what it did do is it got my name out there, I got a handful of regular clients and I did actually get some bridal clients from it as well. So that was pretty good. So you'll need to test that market. If that's a market you want to go into, you might need to try a few different farmers markets as well to see which ones work the best. Or you might want to sell wholesale. You might want to sell to actual florist shops.
They buy in bulk, but they do want quality and consistency. So you need to have something for them every single week. You cannot have dry weeks where you have nothing. So, and the trick here is to pick one of these is your main focus and to build your business around them. And then you can have a couple of your fingers in a couple of other pies. You can have secondary customers.
but your main ICA should drive your growing and all of your marketing decisions. And then your add-ons, if you find that your add-ons are actually working better than the one that you've picked as your main focus, switch those around. There is no reason why you can't pivot your business six months in or a year in, see what's working, then start to hone in on that niche.
So finding your ideal customer avatar is also about you and your lifestyle. You might be a busy mom who's doing the school run. So you might have long periods during the day when you are available to work, when you can make up OKs and you can deliver them.
you might be working a nine to five job so you can only deliver flowers in the evening or you're only free on a weekend. So actually weddings might be a ideal customer avatar for you as long as you can take and the caveat here is take Fridays off when you need to because quite a lot of weddings you will actually need to do the work on a Friday to deliver for a Saturday wedding. I'd say most of my weddings are on a Saturday. I get a handful.
on a Friday and a handful on a Sunday, but I'd the majority are actually on a Saturday. So if you can take Fridays off, then you can do that. If not, then your ability to do weddings will be really, really limited.
So look at your past customers. If you've already started out and you're not quite sure what your niche is and you're still doing everything, then just look at your past customers. Who were the easiest ones to work with? Which ones made you the happiest to fulfill? Where did you make the most profit without burning out? And what feedback did you get the most often?
So these are some of the things that you can think about to try and pinpoint your ideal customer avatar. If you're just starting out, imagine your dream customer and start talking directly to them in all of your marketing. You'll attract the right people and then you'll gently discourage the ones who just aren't fit for you. Okay, so once you know your...
ideal customer avatar, you can then choose the crops to suit their needs. And I've already mentioned, you know, for high-end wedding clients, you would need those high-end crops, those high-end flowers, the roses, the ranunculars, the peonies. If you are selling at market stalls, actually, single crops of things do really, really well. So actually, this is where you could do a little bit of both. You could do weddings and you could do some farmers markets.
And actually, if you have a really big crop of ranunculars, you could sell single bunches of just ranunculars with a couple of other things in there as well in springtime. But that works really, really well. You don't need to grow like 50 different flowers and make up huge, huge bouquets. That is, you know, that's okay for farmers markets. But do remember...
When customers are picking things up on a whim, they quite often like, you know, those pick up and go bouquets. Not expensive. They need to be, dare I say it, cheap. I mean, flowers aren't cheap. Let's just be honest, they're not. But compared to wedding flowers, you know, the price point there just needs to be much, much lower. It needs to be grab and go type bouquets. Usually, I'm going to say usually, in brighter
bolder colors for the home rather than the subtle subdued wedding colors that you would get. Although not every wedding is like that, but we're talking in general terms here. Okay, so you do need to make sure that you do choose crops that suit your ideal customers needs in the type of blooms you're growing and the colors that you're growing. Not only that, but vase life. So as a wedding florist,
I don't really care about vase life because I'm supplying blooms for one day and one day only and I will crop them and cut them at just the right time for them to be at their peak on the wedding day. What happens the day after? I really don't care because it's not the wedding day anymore. I bring them to their maximum beauty on that day of the wedding. However, if you are supplying daily bouquets, there are flowers out there that are maybe not the best. So something like
Dahlia's for instance. Dahlia's are not the best daily bouquet flower simply because their vase life is only three to five days. Now I do get a lot of customers that ask for them. A lot of customers do buy them from me, but I just make clear to them that vase life is pretty short on Dahlia's. But for weddings and events, Dahlia's are one of my main crops during August, September and October. That's literally all I use.
So actually knowing that is really, really important. You can then grow in the quantities that actually match the buying habits. You can grow the colors that match your ideal customer avatar. If you're doing more weddings, you can grow more whites. If you're doing more farmers markets, you can grow, let's say more bright colors. And then you can market where these customers actually spend their time. So that might be online.
It might be at events, at wedding fairs, or it might be in person. And then you can price to match their budget and value that they need. But bearing in mind that you still need to make a profit. And I have separate blog posts and separate podcasts about flower farming for profit. I will link to those in the show notes for you because yes, you need to match prices and budgets and value.
but you still need to make sure that you are pricing for profit. So I'll link to that in the show notes. Okay, so that's it for this week.
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Blooming Garden Podcast. And if you loved today's topic and you want to dig a little bit deeper, then head into the show notes for all of the resources to help you define your ideal customer avatar and to shape your business around them and around yourself and your own lifestyle. If you found this episode useful, then do share it with another grower who might be feeling pulled in just too many directions.
And until next time, keep planting, keep growing and keep blooming.