Bouquet Subscriptions are a common outlet for the flower farmer who is seeking to sell their blooms direct to customer on their terms. Today, I want to share our bouquet subscription’s humble beginnings and evolution over the last several seasons.

Sometimes seeing the various steps in the journey of another can help inspire and guide you through some ideas to better help you dive into a product offering with confidence. It may also help you learn from our experiences to guide you on your own bouquet subscription offering.

To not create one giant blog, we have broken up the blogs on bouquet subscriptions, to learn more of the nitty gritty on how to start with the how-tos on this particular product offering, you can check out the blog on that here.

Take a trip down memory lane with me as I go through the differences and tweaks we’ve made to our bouquet subscription offerings over the years!

Flower Subscription: 1.0 aka “The Flower Share”

The idea of a CSA model wasn’t even that well known when we first started our journey, consumers are a lot more in the know with these concepts today than back then, at least in our area.

While conceptualizing my flower farming business… I knew I wanted to not only bring locally grown blooms to members of my community but also the experience of knowing their grower face to face.

Selling at market or other outlets were fun but also exhausting. We also wanted to take payment upfront for our product, I really needed commitment and couldn’t afford to leave it to chance whether or not they would come back and purchase from me. One of the hardest experiences you can have as a new flower farmer is to spend all day harvesting, processing and making bouquets only to have no one purchase them.

Enter the flower share.

I liked the name. It struck me as cute and friendly. You know, you pay so much up front and you get a “share” of the flowers each week or every other week.

The name ended up being too cute and it took a lot of explaining to consumers of what exactly they were getting. Once again, this was a super out there concept for our market at that time. However, we got more signups than we thought we would, which was amazing and so exciting! Also nerve-racking…

That year we had seasonal options: “SPRINGing for Flowers”, “SUNsational Flowers” and “FALLing for Flowers” (yes I was very proud of my puns!). Each season went over the course of eight weeks with four bouquets total for, I think, about $80. Gasp!!!

In the beginning, I only offered bi-weekly options and had customers in “A” and “B” weeks. After all, we only had 1500 square feet of growing space back then and we were also attending farmer’s market. I wasn’t confident enough yet in my output so spreading out the bouquets seemed safer to me and more manageable.

We only offered the flower share in our town and used a friend’s shop as the pickup location. In the beginning we had a pickup window of time where I would actually stay their and hand out each bouquet, personally! I found myself waiting for a two hours for folks to pick up. Time windows! So laughable now but I was working within the limitations of the hosting shop owner and I also had to be there to hand out the flowers and make sure to wrap them up with a baggie and a damp paper towel for transport.

Mid season, I abandoned the pickup route and just started making home deliveries. With my two babies in tow, we drove house to house and did a flower door dash before Door Dash was a thing… or at least before I knew Door Dash was a thing.

There was a lot of learning curves that first season but I also started to see the potential in this particular product offering. I enjoyed my weekly orders more and more, all the while forming customer relationships.

Enter Flower Subscription 2.0

The following season, I renamed the Flower Share to a Flower Bouquet Subscription.

I found people understood the concept of a subscription better, and back then I related it to magazine subscriptions! “You pay up front and you get X amount of bouquets, like paying for so many issues to your favorite magazine!” This was before Amazon really redefined and made subscriptions trendy.

We made some changes for this season. We skipped over pickup sites all together, I figured I could deliver faster rather than sitting and waiting for people (then doing the delivery anyways). With my two girls in the back, it became our outing and we would always end deliveries with a park, ice cream or coffee date.

I also braved adding a weekly option to our subscriptions. Still only offering the subscriptions broken down into seasons. I once again, I only offered the subscription in our town.

We did this model for the next season as well.

At the close of our third season is when we moved properties and things started getting real.

Flower subscription 3.0

With a huge upgrade in the amount of land, we revisited our bouquet subscriptions offerings. We had a lot of requests from potential customers to open our offerings in other near by towns. I decided to go big and offer our subscription program in two nearby towns, one about 30 minutes away and the other fifty minutes away.

I broke delivery days into two days a week. Tuesdays I delivered to the further away towns and Thursdays in our small town. I broke it up this way so I could be close to home and be able to prep for farmer’s market or weddings later in the week.

We had quite the demand that year!

We lessened the amount of times we did Farmer’s Market. Our weddings were growing and our bouquet subscription grew tremendously, not leaving much room for our other outlets.

This particular year, I began tip-toeing back into the idea of pick up locations. We had some friends open up an adorable shop that revolved around selling only handmade goods from local artisans. The feeling of being overwhelmed was creeping in with the new demand of our bouquet subscription with deliveries. At least in our small town, we used their shop as a pickup location and it worked wonderfully! After the experience of our first year, I wasn’t sure how it having a pickup location would work or be received. I did not have pickup locations yet for the other towns so I continued with home delivery that season.

Quickly though, the home deliveries were becoming too much for me to handle. The towns are very widespread, I was going all over the place. One day, due to traffic, it took my almost seven hours to make deliveries. I was exhausted and near in tears. It was one of the last deliveries after a long season and I decided I needed to revisit pickup locations for the upcoming season.

Deliveries for the girls were becoming really torturous as they got older. It simply wasn’t working anymore. I knew removing home deliveries would be a risk but for the sake of my sanity and my family’s, not to mention the quality of my products, I had to move on from home deliveries. We grew too much. Which was wonderful but definitely presented some challenges!

Flower Bouquet Subscription 4.0

As we entered our fifth season the world changed. Literally. Oh the great 2020!

I had finally lined up having awesome pick up locations then… everything got shut down. Weddings were beginning to get cancelled. Fear and sadness had a grip on people.

Well, back to home deliveries.

Fortunately, I hadn’t had any sign ups for the town furthest yet by the time everything hit, so we only did deliveries for the locations within a thirty minute drive. I didn’t want to be too far from home, the girls had distant learning at the time and it was when the whole essential versus non essential thing was happening.

It was a bizarre yet beautiful time to do home deliveries.

Our members were lonely (who wasn’t at that then?) and having flowers show up or being able to chat through the door to another human was amazing. It also allowed the girls and I to get out of the house, which was incredibly welcomed. In the midst of tax season and distant learning, the girls were missing friends, teachers, dad and grandparents. Going on deliveries became a treat, though finding bathrooms on the route was impossible!

Who knew something so simple would be something we were most hungry for?

The streets were filled with families biking and walking. A time of the ultimate isolation also a time of community, family and unity like I had never seen it on my deliveries before. Usually the streets were empty. Usually the doors completely shut. Usually there was plenty of parking in the barren streets!

Once summer hit things began to open back up right in time for our summer subscription to start. When we opened up sign ups it was selling out in minutes- it was absolute madness! The demand for flowers! The transition to pickup locations ended up being more seamless than I ever imagined. People wanted out and wanted to support small businesses. It was humbling and it was wonderful!

Having the pickup locations was night and day compared to our first season trying it. We had made connections with shop owners who liked the idea of being a pickup location and have been amazing! Some locations are self serve while others have employees hand the bouquets out and check names off the list. As a thank you we always brought our hosting businesses flowers and sometimes other surprises such as dahlia tubers or holiday wreaths. Since most of the pickup locations were porch pickup, we weren’t as worried about whether people forgot though for Carson, we did still find ourself last minute taking flowers to forgetful members while out on vegetable deliveries later that evening. Vegetables?

With the pandemic, we did pivot and offered a vegetable share. Yup, I brought back the cute “share” name but this time people totally understood it! We did do home deliveries with that option. There were people who were still fearful, we wanted them to feel safe while being able to have immune boosting vegetables and spirit lifting blooms to help them through it.

For the bouquet subscriptions offering, we still broke them up into two different days. Throw in the vegetable share and we actually broke it all up into three different days. It felt like we were constantly harvesting and assembling. Even without being vendors at farmer’s market or the pop up shop and weddings being cancelled: we were busier than ever!

At the end of this season, we knew we needed to revisit our options once again. We got away with putting all our focus on subscription offerings that year but the weddings were all back the next.

Flower bouquet subscription 5.0

2021 was the year I felt like I couldn’t catch my breath.

Life is back. People were kind of back into routines and going out of town.

After the last season of our subscription spots selling out and due to the demand of our loyal members, we introduced our Season Pass offering.

We also had our first full season having pick up locations and even picked up an additional locations. Our locations have remained awesome and many of our members are now in a routine with the pickups.

Our Season Pass is truly the traditional CSA model I always wanted to achieve. A commitment to us the entire growing season and then we know how much we are committed to in return. Along with this, we still offered our seasonal subscription offerings and the vegetable share with home delivery. We brought in an employee and figured we could handle it all….

Yeah, no.

Between weddings, home deliveries and retraining subscription members in the middle of the season, it was overwhelming. Not to mention the thick cloak of smoke we lived in for months. We had a great season but it was an exhausting one. I did love the season pass and so did our members. We realized though, it pushed us to our limits and we needed to figure out how to better address some of the challenges we experienced and regain some quality of life.

Flower bouquet subscription 6.0

Can you believe pretty much every single year we tweaked our bouquet subscription offering?

It really is crazy to look back at it all and see all the macro and micro changes.

For this season, we made big changes. With these big changes I also anticipate a decline in signups but not necessarily a decline in profits.

We are still using our same pickup locations but we removed our seasonal bouquet subscription offering.

After six seasons, we decided with the growth of weddings, I could no longer retrain or market for the different seasonal options during the peak of the season. We needed to simplify life. We chose to simplify our subscription offerings as one way to do just that.

Along with removing the smaller seasonal subscription offerings, we also removed the vegetable share as a stand alone option. Instead, you can add on vegetables to your Season Pass bouquet option. It’s like the invert of what vegetable market growers do, after all we are a flower farm first! We also have moved everyone to pick up only at one of our locations. No more home deliveries. Given the crazy gas prices, looks like we decided that just in the nick of time!

It’s a lot of change but ultimately I would rather have less options and members to be able to provide a higher quality product and experience than being overwhelmed.

Taking a leap and making such drastic changes is definitely unnerving but we aren’t here for the sprint, but rather a marathon. I needed offerings that were more sustainable and manageable for our own life.

There are many different approaches to bouquet subscriptions, as you can see we’ve done various trial and error over the years but I think that is to be expected every year for every grower. You should always be revisiting your offerings, methods and such throughout the season but especially after you have recovered from the season. What worked? What didn’t? What was efficient? Profitable? Not profitable? You can always ask your members as well through a survey and such. We’ve used the feedback from our members over the years to help guide our decisions.

The evolution of our bouquet subscription was the result of tough lessons, growing pains along with the different stages of life and business. In the beginning days, I had more time than flowers to sell. As the business grew, my time lessened. Some of our approaches I can’t even believe we lived through it!

Thank you for going down memory lane with me, I hope it gave you a little insight into the ups and downs we had with our bouquet subscription and how it evolved and increasingly becomes more sustainable for us as the farmer as it grows. Know that each upcoming season is a chance for you to start anew. Not simply with your crops but with your offerings. Take the time to evaluate your business, product offerings and life in general. If you think offering a bouquet subscription is something you want to explore for your flower farming business, check out our blog on that here to get all the nitty gritty details.

The Evolution of Our Bouquet Subscription