Over the past season, I tried bouquet bars in multiple locations. Bouquet bars are where the flower farmer harvests all the flowers, then offers the flowers for customers to browse through to build their own bouquets. I hosted mine at my front porch twice, and then once at an event with a local business. Are bouquet bars something that I plan for future season?
Front Porch Bouquet Bars
I live about 20-25 minutes from either major towns and about 15 minutes from a smaller town. If our property was on a main road, I could see having farm sales a lot. We don’t, which I don’t regret, but this means I needed to try something neat for my first go at a bouquet bar.
I offered stems 40% off. Instead of stems being $1.00, they were $0.60 each. People did come and it was quite a success for late July flowers.
Setting Up Bouquet Bars
Everything needs to be in the shade so that it didn’t wilt. This is hard since my front porch faces the south. Then, the side of the porch that connects to my drive-way is on the west side. The sunset can just get to that side of the porch that I needed to use. I moved everything closer to the center of the porch and it worked out fine.
Setting up for a bouquet bar was my favorite part. It did take time to organize, but I love creating beautiful things, and I felt that I accomplished this. All those flowers grouped together with their varieties. Ooh, I loved it so much.
One major lesson I learned for the second bouquet bar was to have the flowers set up based on the order they needed to be used for the bouquet. I kept the florals organized based on the type of stem it was and where one should start. First, I had the greenery, followed by, in this order, the focal flowers, spikes, disks, and fillers. This would allow customers to start with the basics and keep adding to their bouquets in the same manner I create my bouquets to sell.
Second Bouquet Bar
Although I improved the layout for my second bouquet bar, I did not offer the first time discounted prices. I advertised the same through social media, but it was a miss. When creating unique things for your flower farm, I think it is great to try different things, then to reflect and decide what works for your flower farm and what doesn’t.
I think when we start we see all these different avenues to sell flowers, but we forget to realize that these experienced, professional growers are not doing it all, even Floret is not doing it all. She hosts workshops, but she doesn’t offer a U-pick. Other flower farms don’t offer U-picks either, like Gardener’s Workshop and Flower Hill Farm. If a U-pick is what you want to try, then try it if your passion and skill is there with it. Try bouquet bars if you love hosting them and it just works with your vision of your farm.
Queen of Tarts Pop-Up
If you’ve never tried a Queen of Tarts cookie, you are missing out. They are giant and delicious. Even if you bake great cookies at home, try hers even just once. She supports our local community greatly, including local family farms.
She reached out to me to do a pop-up bouquet bar at her small bakery. Of course, I said yes. The bouquet bar went great. It was easy to set up. Customers were awesome. I had a mix of customers creating beautiful bouquets and others choosing their flowers for me to arrange.
At this point in the season, I began to realize that bouquet bars this often were not what I was meant to focus on with flower farming.
Future Seasons?
Well, no. I know, I’ve seen so many other flower farmers host successful bouquet bars. They enjoy hosting them and interacting with their customers in that manner.
For me, by the time it came to my last bouquet bar, I was exhausted. Every single customer, you need to repeat instructions of how to build a bouquet. I love teaching, but repeating instructions every few minutes, that was exhausting.
Many customers left with a beautiful bouquet, but I felt like the quick instructions were not adequate enough for them to develop an absolute beautiful master piece. Bouquets were made tightly. Color schemes were okay but not stellar. I didn’t see this as the fault of the customer because no matter what type of bouquet they made, it was beautiful. I loved seeing the unique design of the customer. For my own self-reflection though, I felt like I could do more to help people build better bouquets.
Vision for Next Season
Instead of saying never again to bouquet bars, I have two ideas to try. Once I have a small flower shed built, I would offer a self-serve bouquet bar some days. I’d like to see how that works out compared to having pre-made bouquets.
I’d also like to focus on teaching people more in-depth of creating a bouquet through workshops. I’ve tried it once before my first growing season. Being my first year, I had less followers and my own skills in advertising were still growing. Looking at my skills and passion in instructing, this is the option I am most excited for. It will take work gathering materials, transporting them to a different location, and being ready to greet everybody. I find that the one time I did do a workshop, I was able to develop good relationships with those customer-students.
Conversations and relationships one develops in life are what is important. To seek flower lovers to teach them how to create beautiful bouquets with lots of stems and different types of flowers, along with going over structure and colors and on top of all that to start conversations with them and hopefully build a relationship with them over the years, it feels right and exciting.
Saying no to bouquet bars is not a negative aspect of my flower farm, but a refined one to allow me more time and energy into something I do want to enjoy and focus on with my flower farm.
