Why flower recipes are the key to profitable floral design

Flower recipes can help you create or rebuild your operation into a more profitable floral design business. In my last few posts, I've discussed why it's important to sell and market your products and services using a price formula, shifting your mindset on pricing for profit and combining those tactics to convey a luxury experience to your customer. One way to establish a secure foundation and consistent customer experience is through recipe-based floral design.

Let's explore why flower recipes are essential to your profitability.  

When asked why are recipes important Chef Martin Bayer wrote, "Recipes are important because they contain the information necessary to make a dish properly. As with any set of instructions, you rely on them to give you all the information you need. There isn't always someone nearby who has that knowledge.

Recipes also ensure standardization. If you eat at a chain restaurant in San Francisco, fly to Boston, and eat at another one, they will be the same.

Recipes also help control costs. Restaurants depend on their cooks to follow recipes so their food cost stays in line. The menu price of an item is determined by costing out a recipe. Following the recipe ensures that I make money."

Recipes have a place in the kitchen.

Does a chef need one to make a simple sandwich? Not necessarily, but it would certainly help her to offer a consistent customer experience and keep her restaurant solvent.

Does that same chef need recipes to make an elaborate 3-course meal for 8 guests on your parents' wedding anniversary? Yes, to keep a standard of quality to the food, keep costs in line, and to simplify communication with her team, recipes are key. The larger the restaurant the more important recipes become because they help facilitate both standardization and service.

Recipes also have a place in our floral studios and retail storefronts.

Are you starting to see the connections to how this process can help your business?

Do you need a recipe to make a $50 arrangement? No, but it can help standardize your orders and keep costs in line. It's something you should seriously consider if you're currently struggling with consistently pricing for profit in your business.

Do you need a flower recipe to create a bridal bouquet, 8 bridesmaids' bouquets, and 25 centerpieces? To ensure you are profitable, I argue that you do.

I believe the chef's comments about recipes also apply directly to floral design. You need a recipe for several reasons—most importantly to make sure you are profitable.

I owned my floral shop for over 12 years and we used recipes for every order in some capacity. The structure of flower recipes will offer you peace of mind. You'll know that your business is performing to the standards you have set for your financial success. You can then start to focus on more important pieces of your business growth. You will naturally spend less time worrying about making money on each order. This means your desired margin is not just an ideal target, but an integral part of your process that flower recipes help you consistently implement.

If you need to create a more structured, profit-driven, purposeful business, flower recipes are for you. So, let's get into the details. Here are five reasons why recipe-based floral design can increase your profitability.

Flower recipes make ordering and allocating product simple

At the end of a wedding or event, how much product do you have leftover?

If it is a significant amount, it's time to start thinking about why you tend to over-order and how to limit that, and how to make the best use of the leftover flowers.

Bouquets built with flower recipes are more profitable for floral designers

Recipe-based floral design is crutial to profitability in your business.

This is where flower recipes come into play for wedding and event designers specifically.

You can easily see how many flowers go into each design when planning with a recipe. Once you have a feel for your floral style you can build recipes to use repeatedly for different weddings and simply tweak details to customize them for each client. It's building a portfolio of templates that help you get your wedding orders completed faster and more accurately. Recipe-based floral design can make you more efficient and streamline your process.

Recipe building also helps with the waste that accompanies over-ordering.

This is because you can take your extra stems from your wedding bunches and use them efficiently. Each flower variety comes in a distinct pack size. You need to order 50 Tibet roses for your wedding, but you only plan to use 28 of them. The client either needs to pay for the other 22 flowers or you need to use them in another order to minimize waste. Even if you save 7 roses as extras in case of breakage, there are still 15 leftovers. Those roses need to be put to good use and paid for by a customer.

Here are some examples of how to use those otherwise leftover flowers.

If you are a retail florist, you can sell the extra flowers before the wedding in your daily arrangements. In my old shop, we'd process on Wednesday and sort through all the flowers. As we made our daily arrangements we'd note that we could take those 15 Tibet roses and use them for the orders that needed white flowers. That's an easy and efficient way to use up those flowers that would otherwise go to waste. If you don't have a flower recipe you won't be able to use flowers efficiently in this manner.

If you are a wedding and event florist there are other ways to use the flowers that are way better than them ending up in the trash after the wedding is over.

One great way to sell those would-be leftover flowers is to use them in weekly client arrangements.

Work out a deal with a restaurant or small boutique hotel to sell those blooms! You can brighten their guests' experience and sell all your flowers that otherwise would have gone to waste.

Another option is to have a pop-up floral kiosk at a retail business with whom you want to cross-promote your brand.

Create a few little arrangements or farmer's market style bunches and drop them off on Thursday morning for your partner store to sell. It is a great way to build awareness for your brand and it's an opportunity for the store to promote beautiful fresh flowers for their customers on select days! This is a way for them to drive customers in the door with a special promotion. So, it benefits both of you. Check out number 13 on this list for example.

You can also choose to charge for the full bunches of flowers you need to order as a wedding and event florist. There are a couple of ways to go about this. The first option is to adjust your markup to accommodate for those blooms. For example, if you usually mark your wholesale flowers up 3x you could start marking them up 4x to account for all the overage you order for each wedding. The second option is to build those flowers into the recipes to utilize the full amount of each bunch as you are pricing out your client's proposal. Many floral designers opt to do this if they are solely in the wedding business and the strategy keeps them profitable.

No matter how you slice it, the flowers you order must be paid for by a customer.

You will have a few stems included in those counts for breakage and spoilage, of course, but the goal is to get down to as little waste as possible and maximize your profits.

Flower recipes can increase the margins on your designs

In last week's blogpost, I mentioned that a mix of the right container, the right price, and the right mix of flowers will land you in your client's good graces. You can take that a step further by also choosing the most profitable blooms available. When your customer is happy because you've got the right mix and you are using flowers that increase your profitability it's a win for everyone.

Here's how you can do this. If your local flower farmer or wholesaler shares their flower offerings and prices with you weekly, you can customize your designer's choice arrangements and bestselling designs to incorporate those flower varieties.

It's important to take advantage of the blooms that fill your flower recipe needs at the best possible prices.

That is how you maximize the profits on your designs.

Every spring without fail customers want peonies and garden roses. They simply capture the essence of the season. I learned quickly that one of my wholesalers offers a great box deal on both of those flower varieties throughout the spring. When those box deals were available, I jumped on them. They would frequently lower my cost on a peony by at least $2. They'd lower my cost on a garden rose by $1.50.

Now, I'm going to let you in on my profitability secret here. I did not change my retail price when I designed with these less costly flowers.

I kept my retail prices the same. That's right. The customers were charged the full retail price.

There was no need to add more flowers to the arrangements either. I considered them to be full price. I would not adjust my flower recipe to add more or lower the price at all.

Is your initial reaction is to think that's just wrong? I assure you it's not! As my dear friend Gaynor would say "That's how you make money, honey!" And he's been in the flower business for 40 years!

I know that my customers fully expected to pay the retail price. The flowers were gorgeous, the value was there, and they were happy. The only difference was that I made more profit each time I ordered one of those box lots.

Using flowers purchased at a lower cost can increase margins.

This peony was $2 less than my typical wholesale cost, but the arrangement was priced at full retail.

The key here is that I had trained my customers to expect a certain standard for my designs. Therefore, it was easy for me to keep that retail price, increase my margins, and still have satisfied customers!

You can do that too. You can build a menu of offerings and then lower your costs while keeping the retail price the same. It is one of the best ways to increase your profitability without increasing your sales.

Have you ever seen the show Shark Tank? They talk about lowering their manufacturing costs to increase their margins all the time! This is the same thing. By doing this you manage to offer a great perceived value to your customer. Then you increase your profit on each design that goes out your door. The customers are happy! You win!

Flower recipes help train your designers and facilitate fast efficient design production

Speed is important for every floral design business. The faster you work the more money you make, right? It's straightforward, but it can be challenging to impart that urgency to your new employees. The key to getting your employees and freelancers to work rapidly with a light-a-fire-under-your-ass mentality is to have straightforward instructions and easy to follow recipes.

The best way to learn quick design skills is to be surrounded by other fast designers. Efficiency is contagious!

Flower recipes create a standardized process for designers to pull flowers, prep the materials, and work quickly to knock out a series of the same bouquets or centerpieces for an event. It also helps them to increase speed on daily orders by having a pre-set formula to work from. I know many designers who will spend way too much time thinking about what varieties of flowers need to go into an arrangement. By the time it's made there's no profit left.

Recipe-based floral design takes out that lag time by giving the designer a plan to follow, just like a cook in a restaurant.

This garden style arrangement was built using a flower recipe.

This garden style was typical for my floral studio and flower recipies helped to train the designer who was in charge of this wedding.

Flower recipes also help train designers in the style of their employer.

Recipes will help them learn the nuances of the design elements that make your style unique. You can use flower recipes to teach the composition of design as well. When you use a certain number of focal flowers, line flowers, greenery, and filler flowers in each arrangement it trains employees to learn your unique formula.

Then when the time comes for them to start creating on their own, it's already ingrained in their minds from the repetition of the flower recipes they've worked with before. This frees you up to leave that day-to-day work to them so you can work on your business.

Flower recipes keep your costs in-line with your ideal retail markups

Cost control is imperative for a profitable business. A retail price and cost must be factored into every design. A recipe can help to remind designers how many flowers are used in each design for retail and daily orders. It keeps the designer from adding a few extra flowers to every arrangement and blowing the set budget. The act of adding a few flowers to each arrangement makes a huge dent in your profits at the end of the year.

If you decide on a floral price formula, it's important to keep to that formula or you will not see the profits you are expecting from your business.

Flower recipes for weddings can also help cost control.

If you buy an arbitrary number of flowers hoping it covers all your needs, you will likely end up with lots of waste and a lower overall margin than you planned. You can use recipes to ensure your costs are in-line with the prices you have already quoted your client. It's even common for some floral designers to use recipes to price out their initial quotes for clients. This is a smart choice for new designers because it helps to ensure quoted prices on a proposal are accurate and profitable.

Flower recipes help to keep your products consistent for your customers

Consistency in design is the mark of a luxury floral designer.

Some designers love light delicate blooms and others love to work with fuller fluffy ones. I can put 10 floral designers in a room with the same selection of flowers and each designer's creation would turn out extremely different. A recipe keeps a cohesiveness that is often important to the overall feeling of an event when you have several designers working to create a uniform look. This theory holds especially for freelancers that may not know your style as well as a regular employee.

When it comes to retail or daily flower orders the fullness of an arrangement or bouquet must be equal to others of the same price. So, by using a recipe you are ensuring they all have equal size and weight.

If you sell two $300 arrangements, one goes to the customer's mom and the other goes to his wife, they need to be equal because when these women see each other's designs they will compare it to their own.

The size to price ratio must be a standard that is kept from customer to customer.

Flower recipes are the key to keeping brand consistency throughout your products.

Laguna Gloria in Austin, TX wedding reception

So, now you know the top 5 reasons why flower recipes are key to profitable floral design.

It's time you consider incorporating flower recipes into your business on a more consistent basis. I think that if you do, you will see how the change will create more consistency in design, production efficiency, and profitability by keeping your costs in line. Implementing flower recipes also frees up more of your time because it's so much easier to order and allocate your flowers.

Let me know if you use flower recipes in the comments below. What do you like and dislike about using them? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this topic.

Until next time,

LuAnn