The 3:5:8 rule and florist pricing method

What we can honestly tell you about 3:5:8

Less than you were probably hoping. The shorthand circulates, the versions of it disagree with each other, and we could not find a named, citable authority that states it. Some tellings read the three numbers as multipliers for different categories of item. Others read them as multipliers for different price tiers, or for flowers against hard goods against labor. We are not going to pick one and present it as the industry rule, because we would be inventing the authority to do that.

That is less of a loss than it sounds. The useful part of any multiple is not the number somebody gave you. It is what the number does to your invoice, and that part is arithmetic you can check.

A multiple is a summary, not a method

A markup multiple answers one question: by how much does the price exceed what you paid. It cannot tell you whether the price is right, because it knows nothing about the recipe underneath it. Two bouquets at the same multiple can be wildly different jobs: one is thirty stems of a single grocery variety, the other is a wired and taped garden rose piece that took an hour and a half at the bench.

So the order of operations matters. Write the recipe. Cost the recipe from the invoice. Decide what the job has to earn. The multiple is what falls out of that, and it is a useful thing to know afterwards, because it lets you sanity check the next quote quickly. It is a terrible thing to start from.

A recipe you cannot repeat is not a price. It is a guess that came out right once.

What any multiple does to your margin

Markup and margin describe the same transaction from opposite ends, and mixing them up is the most common way a quote comes out short. Markup multiplies what you paid. Margin is the share of what you charged that you keep. Neither is more correct; they are two readings of one number.

Read the table for the shape rather than the rows. Margin climbs steeply at first and then flattens: going from 2.0 to 3.0 buys you 16.7 points of margin, and going from 4.0 to 5.0 buys you 5. Past a certain point you are not really buying margin any more, you are testing what the market will carry.

Working out the multiple you are already running

You have a multiple whether or not you chose one. It is sitting in last season's jobs, and it is more informative than anything a rule of thumb can give you, because it is made of your wholesaler, your market, and your habits.

1. Pull five or six invoices from jobs you were happy with, across different sizes.
2. For each, total what you actually paid for stems and hard goods, freight included.
3. Divide the flower portion of what you charged by that total.
4. Write down the range, not the average. The spread is the interesting part.
5. Now do the same for two jobs that felt like a loss, and compare.

The jobs that felt like a loss usually do not have a lower multiple. They have the same multiple and far more hours, which is the whole argument for pricing labor separately.

Where one multiple stops working

A single multiple applied across an entire quote quietly assumes that every dollar you spent behaves the same way. It does not, and there are three places the assumption fails hard enough to notice.

Hard goods are not stems

Ribbon, wire, tape, mechanics, vessels, and foam do not wilt, do not need conditioning, and mostly do not need replacing at the same rate as flowers. Running them at the flower multiple can produce a number you cannot say out loud: a spool of ribbon that cost six dollars and forty cents becomes twenty dollars and forty eight cents at 3.2, which is either fine or absurd depending on whether the client sees it as a line.

Labor does not scale with cost

Sixty stems of hydrangea cost more and take less time than sixty stems of lily of the valley. A multiple that quietly covers your hours works only for the recipe you set it against, and stops working the moment the client swaps a variety.

Expensive stems distort

On a recipe carrying one genuinely expensive flower, a flat multiple can push the total past what the job is worth to the client while your hours have not moved at all. Some florists carry a lower multiple on the high cost line and hold the rest. That is a decision, not a rule, and it should be a decision you make on purpose.

What to do instead

1. Write the recipe down before you quote anything. Without it there is no cost to multiply and no way to repeat the price.
2. Cost it from the invoice, freight included, at what you actually paid rather than the list price.
3. Price labor as its own line, or if you fold it in, write down which hours the multiple is covering.
4. Apply your multiple to the flowers and hard goods, and check the margin it produces.
5. Keep the recipe. The second time a client asks for that bouquet, the price takes two minutes.

Questions this chapter answers

What is the 3:5:8 rule for flowers?

It is a pricing shorthand that circulates among florists, and the versions of it disagree with each other. We could not find a named authority that defines it, so this site does not state one. What a multiple actually does to a price is arithmetic, and that is what the chapter shows instead.

How much do florists mark up flowers?

We publish no industry markup figure, because we have no source for one and an invented number would be worse than none. Your own multiple is the price you charged divided by what you paid, and you can work it out from invoices you already have.