8 Tips for Growing Your Wedding Floral Business This Year
Growth is something every business strives for, even in times of uncertainty. The road to finding floral business growth is not always an easy or a clear path—especially in difficult seasons—but boy howdy! It is doable and can be pretty fun. One of the ways I’ve done this in my floral business is through genuine, caring relationships. Learn how to grow your business by changing your friendly relationships with your fellow wedding vendors into real friendships and watch your business blossom. Here are eight tips that will help you get there.
1. Get Social!
Become Facebook and Instagram friends with other vendors in your area and treat them like real friends. Follow their personal accounts as well as their professional accounts. Like posts when you see things that strike your fancy, comment when you have something to add, and share the things they do that you believe in. And play Instagram tennis! When a vendor tags you in a post, like, comment, repurpose, share and be sure to tag them back. Be sure to tag all participating vendors in your posts. This is an excellent opportunity to introduce yourself to the ones you don't know.
2. Share the love of Flowers
Now that you have more insight into your new friends, send your love through flowers. You don't need to send flowers to every wedding vendor you interact with, but when a photographer has a baby or when a planner loses a family member, you bet you should send flowers. As flower people, we know arrangements are a heartfelt gift. Sending flowers to your vendors shows them you care, and it also allows them to get to know and appreciate flowers.
3. Find other ways to collaborate with your vendors—get creative with it
At our shop, we invited one of our wedding photographer connections to help us with a funeral photoshoot when we were redoing our funeral collection for our website. We are also planning our Christmas party to be catered by one of our local wedding caterers. We feature one of our local baker's cookies in our Valentine's and Mother's Day collections. By doing this, you have the opportunity to get to know one other better and you can support their businesses. A general rule we follow is good friends pay for their friends' services. They graciously accept good deals if offered, but they always pay for their friends' services. We expect this of our friends, and we kindly return the favor.
4. Participate in styled shoots (and attend the shoot)
Giving product for free for a campaign that may or may not be featured can feel a bit risky—but don't just send the flowers, use it as an opportunity to get to know the other vendors participating in the shoot. For us, most product isn't able to be reused, so we gift different pieces to various vendors as a thank-you and only ask for our containers back. This gives you another opportunity to see your vendor friends again.
5. Give discounts on personal orders
Our wedding vendors are not just preferred vendors. When we are recommending a great business to work with, they also get a percentage off of their personal orders. We want our vendors to be our advocates at the consultation table and in their everyday life. We have a wedding coordinator that has a huge family and loves to throw a good party. We see her at least once a month and sometimes more for all of the birthdays, baby showers, and brunches she throws when she comes in to buy loose bunches, centerpieces, flower crowns, etc. We give her a good deal, and she gets our name out there more than almost any other connection we have.
6. Give Other Wedding Vendors something to blog about
In the offseason, everyone is looking for ways to fill their Instagram and blog feed. Ask your vendors if there is something they are curious about and let them take pictures of the pretty flowers.
For example, recently at lunch with a wedding coordinator, we got onto the topic of things she wished she knew about florals. We invited her to the shop and tried to answer all of her questions. One of the extra services she offers to her brides is donating the leftover flowers from weddings to nursing homes, but she always feels that arrangements like arch pieces always look silly as a donation. We gave her tips on how to dismantle an arch piece and design the flowers into vases, so it's easier for her to donate the flowers, and she took pictures and added to her Instagram story as she went.
We have also invited in a wedding photographer to have her take photos of our favorite baby’s breath alternatives and made a few examples of cost-effective centerpieces that are not in mason jars (is this trend over yet?!). This gave our vendor friends great content to share, gets our name out there, and gives our future brides a better product and service overall.
7. Be genuine
These last two tips are easily the most important to keep in mind when you are building your vendor friendships. People can tell when your heart is not in it. Without a genuine interest in getting to know and love your fellow vendors, this won't work. You don't have to be best friends with everyone. There will be people you get along with better than others. Let those relationships blossom and be open to more. They want to be friends with someone who truly gets the industry as much as you do.
Many vendors are small businesses and women who work out of their home. They don't have a person to chat with and vent to about how great or terrible a wedding went and how exhausted they are. It's kind of magical to find someone who may not be a florist but can appreciate good floral design. A friend who understands the demands of a wedding and the pressure we are all under in the wedding industry is a treasure to find.
8. Lastly, don't be cliquey!
The wedding industry is predominantly women, and as women, we tend to create tribes. This can be helpful for a moment, but it ultimately will not help your business.
Be the person who is unabashedly friends with everyone. That means, reach out to the new vendors, don't put others down to have a better relationship with another vendor, introduce different vendors to each other. Be kind. Over time, fostering these relationships will grow your business. We genuinely care about how our community is doing and know our shop does better when we all do better. As a result of these relationships, we have seen significant growth in our wedding department.
When brides come in to talk to us, they now comment about how their engagement photographer and their beautician both recommended us, so she had to come in. We have wedding coordinators bringing their brides directly to us. We have brides who say that they saw us tagged in Instagram photos of all of their favorite vendors which made us the obvious choice. Active friendships have grown our business more than we imagined possible. It's incredible how kindness can be so impactful.
