To help streamline your own business systems, you’ll first need to identify the category/capacity in which you are best able to serve the market at this point in your life and in your business. Kelly breaks down the market into three basic categories: client designer, simple service, or full service.
Maxine Owens is proof that inspiration and passion can come from the most curious beginnings. Always passionate about botanical life and living things, she earned a degree in Zoology before beginning a career in creative design. While bringing life to retail displays for trendsetting brands and leading teams of designers, Maxine learned firsthand how creative spark, vision, and eagerness to experiment brings people together.
Flower farming takes a lot of time and energy. Sometimes after putting so much thought into your seed and plug orders, planting, maintaining, and harvesting your flowers, making sure to properly transport and deliver them may be something of an afterthought. But delivering the flowers without experiencing any wear and tear on the way to your destination is a crucial step in maintaining your reputation for quality. Dive into this article for comprehensive tips for transporting flowers from your farm.
My name is Hannah Hunt, and I am the owner of and designer for Golden Thistle Design in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. I love wedding floral design, but once I opened my business and started designing full-time, I became concerned about the impact of the industry upon both the environment and my health.
Watch this clip from the Team Flower Bouquets and Personals class. Here, Kelly demonstrates how to make a double wrist corsage (everybody’s favorite, right?). Even though pin-on corsages and hand-held posies are becoming more popular, the wrist corsage is a classic piece that every wedding designer and shop owner should have the skills to create. Watch to see a few tricks Kelly has learned in order to make wrist corsages easier and more feasible.
We are chatting about the three books Naomi has written—one on snowdrops, one on orchards, and the most recent on dahlias. You’ll hear about fruit trees and the roles they have played (and continue to play) in our lives, you’ll learn about the sweet, delicate snowdrop and how to grow and care for them, and Naomi is also walking us through her book on dahlias and sharing several helpful tips on growing dahlias successfully.
As floral design styles shift more toward natural, loose arrangements, the demand for locally grown flowers has followed. This increased demand and awareness of local flowers from florists has created an excellent opportunity for flower farmers to fill a void in the traditional market. However, the challenge is how to supply the volume needed and the convenience offered by conventional wholesalers.
When you’re first starting in the world of flowers, finding the best tools to use can be daunting. However, once you get into to your rhythm, it's easy to pick your favorites. Here are my go-to, can't-live-without, favorite floral tools that I HAVE to have in my event day toolbox.
In this centerpiece time-lapse video, Kelly quickly pulls together a centerpiece for your inspiration! Learn how to become a florist and take floral design classes online with Team Flower. Here you can even learn tips on flower gardening for beginners. We'll show you how to do flower arrangements in flower arranging videos.
Give yourself the gift of grace when running your flower business and raising a family. I hope these words will encourage you in the midst of all the not-so-perfect days, whether you are nurturing your own baby flower business or your sweet baby. That gift might just give you what you need to keep moving forward with hope for your future.
The flowers of dahlias offer such a fantastic range of color, size, and form that it is hard to resist trying out every variety.
In this video lesson, you’ll learn how to observe floral elements for inspiration while adjusting your arrangement layers for a small floral centerpiece. Ingredients used are Spirea Foliage, Gold's Dart Ninebark, Diablo Ninebark, Polka Dot Pippa Hybrid Foxglove, Ranunculus, La Belle Epoch Tulips, Coral Bell Foliage, and Geum.
Growing delphinium as a cut flower crop can have its challenges, but if you follow an orderly process, it can be a very rewarding flower to grow. Delphinium has several advantages such as its striking, dramatic quality and large stature which can be useful in larger arrangements. It also blooms during that early June window when your spring flowers may be finished, but your summer annuals aren’t flowering yet, helping you fill in that gap. It also provides that hard-to-find true blue color in both light and dark shades.
Ready to use extraordinary florals and to boldly go where no florist has gone before? Foraging for your own flowers just takes an extra little bit of creativity and a sense of adventure. Here’s some insight on how to use unique and foraged local flowers in your designs.
Small businesses grow one step at a time, and most often, the really important things unfold slowly right under our own noses. You probably remember those early moments of your floral business, too, where you were crunching the numbers and fitting in floral work where you could on top of others jobs…
In this episode, Juliana is walking us through her unique bouquet delivery as well as her philosophy behind it. We are chatting about the importance of client interaction in floral design, client intake processes, what to look for when booking a client, and how involved clients could be in the floral planning process. We are sharing a few stories of our bouquet deliveries and how to interact with clients who want to be involved in every detail.
Amy Cohen reached out to me several months ago and introduced me to an area of flowers I was not familiar with: flower remedies. It’s also called plant medicine or botanical healing. At the time, I was familiar with essential oils and could speak to the life-giving effect incorporating plants into my life, so this was intriguing. Flower remedies are different than oils though, so I thought it could be fun to invite Amy to teach us a little more about this topic.
Whether someone has been in floral design for a year or more than 20 years, the stories shared when designers get together range from heartwarming to hair-raising. We’ve all experienced difficult situations, and it’s my hope that the tips below will help avoid, clear up, or settle any tough stuff with our clients.
Watch a fun & bright time-lapse bouquet celebrating Valentine's Day!
