Business is full of changes

Entrepreneurs operate in an ever-changing environment. Political and economic changes thirty years ago, the liberation of the market, the subsequent IT revolution and now the increase in the cost of doing business and the high competition in the market make it necessary for companies to adapt to current situation all the time in order to look for the best solutions for the development of the company. Also, florist businesses are evolving – they looked different last century, different 10 years ago and different today. Sources of supply are different, distribution methods are different and customers are different, although they still buy the same thing – flowers.

Since the environment is changing so does the approach that the business must have. That’s why over the course of almost 30 years in the florist business many times my views changed, what once seemed pointless suddenly stopped being that thanks to new circumstances, new arguments changed my attitude and I returned to topics that I had previously rejected.

I want to get all the customers

This is what I thought at the beginning of my business journey. I was convinced then that the goal of my business in the local market was to get all the customers. As I gained new experience, I became convinced that I didn’t really need all the customers, because it’s impossible, because it’s not efficient. Today I am aware of what kind of customer I create an offer for in my flower shops, and I cater my marketing efforts to them specifically. It’s a well-thought-out strategy that works. The customer we attract to the flower shop does not feel lost with us, they get what they expect, they are satisfied with the offer and return often. Flower shops often complain about not getting a premium customer, but in such a situation you have to wonder – why? Doesn’t the flower shop by any chance look like a funeral parlor? Because many florists think that flowers for a funeral are the best sellers! Then it’s no wonder that a customer looking for an interesting, unique bouquet, interesting plants or unusual decorative items avoids such places.

Flower shop display

At the beginning of my flower shop adventure, all flowers were protected from customers behind the counter. Because, after all, they will touch them, they will damage them, they will carelessly pull flowers from the vases and splash on other flowers. This used to be the case, then we decided to put the flower display in front of the counter, now the customer can touch, choose, decide which flowers the florist should prepare a bouquet from. This made me realize that the entrepreneur is supposed to eliminate barriers and not create them. The customer gains the belief that they have a say in choosing the flowers from which the florist creates the bouquet. I was surprised to witness the decisions made with the purchase – often customers choose the most bloomed roses, because they are the most decorative, while earlier it might have seemed that a rose in bud is a better choice, because it will stay fresh in the vase longer.

Pre-made bouquets

The choice between to have or not to have in the current offer of pre-made bouquets is a matter of philosophy of approach to business. Some florists say absolutely NOT, after all, a bouquet should be individually prepared for a particular client, according to his expectations. I, at some point, grew up to the fact that pre-made bouquets have many advantages. First of all, they speed up customer service, which is especially important on days when the demand for flowers increases and this has a direct impact on increasing revenue. Observing customers, I noticed that many people do not have time and do not want to wait for the preparation of a bouquet, they do not like to answer questions – for whom, for what occasion, for what price. Such a customer prefers to have a choice from several proposals and buy the bouquet that will please them the most and the price will not surprise them. That’s why in flower shops we have pre-made bouquets, and for those customers who prefer a custom bouquet according to their instructions we arrange individually, and then they have to wait a little while.

Flowers in a cooler

You know I had a problem with this… and it was not a financial problem but rather a mental one – the display of cut flowers in the cold storage. The theory of visual merchandising says to remove barriers for customers to access products, and here you have to put such a barrier! Up to now, we have managed brilliantly without such a cooler, we just managed to sell cut flowers quickly. But a pandemic year is a new situation, and the idea of opening a new large flower shop involved a lot of risk, especially since we were opening in the middle of a hot summer, in late July and early August. Despite my years of experience, or perhaps because of it, I had concerns about it taking a while to get to the point where cut flower sales were at a satisfactory level.

That’s how I started looking for a compromise and found it – a cold storage facility for cut flowers and bouquets. I was familiar with the subject of floral coolers, but after studying the current offer in the catalog, I did not find a floral cooler with dimensions that satisfied me, so I decided to design and make a greenhouse-shaped cooler on my own. Undoubtedly, such a cooler was much more expensive than a floral cooler from the serial offer, but the end result pleased me very much.

Automatic bouquet sales

I’ll admit that I doubted myself whether BouquetMat in the case of our company makes sense? After all, our flower shops in Boleslawiec are open from morning until late evening, basically 7 days a week. So really, this availability should meet the needs of customers. Is it worth investing in automatic flower sales at night? This was a barrier due to my doubts, which I couldn’t overcome. But at the time I was thinking about installing a flower vending machine near our flower shop.

But as time passed, I thought about it more and more and finally came up with something sensible! We installed BouquetMat in the last week of last year, in a new housing complex in Boleslawiec, in an interesting environment that attracts customers. There is a parking lot on the site and the proximity of our headquarters and home is an added advantage. This location makes the most of its business potential, and BouquetMat has become a great marketing tool for our florist brands.

Big businesses can do more

I used to think that by opening more flower shops I would significantly reduce my business costs. Such thinking made sense, because after all, when you buy more you buy cheaper. Seemingly so, however, the scale of 2, 4, 6 flower shops did not make a significant difference. Today I know that the scale of lowering the price of buying flowers will make a few dozen flower shops doing joint purchases, a few is definitely not enough. Florist is still a business where direct involvement of the owners is important, in the case of one flower shop, two is possible, in the case of several it no longer is. That’s why today we have not 6 but 2 flower shops which are doing very well. In one my wife is involved, in the other my daughter, and I have my BouquetMat, maybe in a while I will add a second one… and that’s enough.

A new way for flower shipments

Unfortunately, in recent times, things have been going badly in the flower shipping market. Some of the intermediary companies in the transfer of orders have raked in the size of fees. There were pathological situations when a customer paid 160 PLN for a bouquet, and the flower shop got a budget for a bouquet of 70 PLN. Once on a florist group on Facebook there was a discussion about the idea of creating a place to exchange information and give each other orders to make bouquets, a list of voivodships was created and there flower shops entered their data and waited for the orders to come. It was a grassroots initiative to transfer orders to each other at no cost.

There was a discussion there about the fact that in order to create such a platform you need a lot of money for investment and this will generate costs and in any such project sooner or later you will have to look for funds for the ongoing management of the platform. And this will generate the danger that at the some stage of development of the project it will be similar to the way other shipment intermediary platforms operate. And so it is, a number of such companies have sprung up in recent years, and they operate on similar principles and outdo each other on undercutting the price of bouquets to gain customers and inflating fees to finance operations.

In the case of Bukietto.pl, we managed to attract interest and raise finances from investors and thanks to this the creation of an eFlowershop on our platform can be free. And the funds for the operation will be collected from the fees… much lower than currently operating in the industry. When I heard about this project I bombarded the originator repeatedly with arguments showing problems on the development of this platform, even in the final stages. But my critical comments were given with good intentions, to make the idea more realistic, to point out potential mistakes, to improve processes. Michael (the creator) accepted these comments, was not discouraged, and got it done.

Changeability ensures growth

Is changing views a bad approach to business? If new circumstances arise, if we gain new arguments then we need to change views, we need to take advantage of emerging new conditions for doing business! Recent years have seen a string of events that are difficult to predict – a pandemic, a war across the eastern border, an energy crisis and inflation. These are factors that, as entrepreneurs, we have no control over, but they do affect our businesses. So we need to observe them and adapt our business to the current situation in the company’s environment. Changes in our approach to business is a natural sequence, what once seemed bad, today under new circumstances can turn out to be quite good. Not surprisingly, our approach to business changes, and this volatility naturally affects the development of the company.