Where florists buy, and what each channel costs you
Every buying channel trades one thing for another: price against choice, choice against certainty, certainty against flexibility. Knowing which trade you are making is more useful than knowing which channel is cheapest.
The Florist Heaven desk / Chapter 3 of 5
The channels
Cut flowers reach a florist through a small number of routes, and most working florists use more than one in the same week.
Local wholesalers
A trade counter you can walk into. The advantage is that you see what you are buying before you commit, you can adjust on the spot when a bunch is not what you hoped, and there is no freight to add. The limit is that you buy what they have.
Online wholesale and importers
A much wider catalogue, ordered ahead and shipped in. You gain access to varieties a local counter may never carry, and you give up the ability to inspect before purchase. Freight is a real line item, and the lead time means a problem discovered on arrival is a problem you cannot fix by driving somewhere.
Farm direct
Buying from the grower, locally or shipped. Freshness and provenance are the draw, and the constraint is that you are buying what that farm has growing at that moment, which makes it excellent for a palette led design and difficult for a specified one.
Standing orders
A recurring commitment placed ahead of demand. It smooths supply and often improves your price, and it transfers risk to you: the flowers arrive whether or not the work did.
Freight and minimums decide more than the unit price
The advertised stem price is not the price you pay. Freight and order minimums can invert a comparison entirely, and the arithmetic is worth doing before the season rather than during it.
landed cost per stem = (stem price x stems + freight) / stems
(($1.80 x 100) + $65.00) / 100 = $2.45 per stem
Add the freight to the whole order and divide by the stems it brought. A stem that looked like a dollar eighty landed at two forty five, and the illustrative figures here exist to show the operation rather than to describe anybody's prices.
Freight per stem falls as the order grows, which is the entire economic argument for consolidating orders. It is also the trap: consolidating into a larger order to cut freight per stem only helps if you use the flowers. Buying two hundred stems to make the shipping efficient and designing with one hundred and twenty has raised your real cost per stem, not lowered it.
true cost per used stem = total order cost / stems actually used
$245.00 / 120 used = $2.04, against $1.63 if all 150 were used
Divide what the order cost by the stems that made it into work. The gap between that and your intended cost is the cost of over ordering, and it belongs in your cost of goods.
Where freight and shrink land in the percentage, and what moves it.
Read the cost of goods chapterChoosing a channel for the job in front of you
The right channel is decided by how specified the design is and how much time sits between the order and the event.
- A design specified down to the variety, with weeks of lead time: order ahead from a wholesaler or importer who can confirm the variety, and accept the freight.
- A design specified by palette and shape rather than by variety: local or farm direct, chosen on the day, is usually both cheaper and better.
- A last minute change or a shortfall discovered on the bench: the local counter is the only channel that can help, which is a reason to keep a relationship there even when most of your buying happens elsewhere.
- Recurring predictable volume: a standing order, sized to the demand you are confident of rather than the demand you hope for.
A specified variety and a tight budget frequently cannot both be honoured. That is a conversation for the consultation, not for the week of the wedding.
What to do when the flower you specified is not going to arrive.
Read the substitution chapter