Like so many, I started flower farming with just a basic plan in mind.  See if I could grow flowers in Philadelphia and if I could sell them.  That was pretty much it.  That first season, I never thought about what it would be like to do this work in 15 years.

And here we are 15 years later.  The 2023 growing season has wrapped up and I am once again in my winter planning mode, considering the evolution of my Philadelphia flower farm.  At the start, I sold flowers at two farmers markets.  Then a handful of weddings came into the mix the second season.  The third year weddings really took hold so I left the farmers market and also added a flower CSA.  In the fourth year at this Philadelphia flower farm of mine, I began teaching workshops at the farm and added selling to two local independent grocery stores.

Everything trucked along nicely until a global pandemic sent us all reeling.  In 2020, this Philadelphia flower farm relied heavily on our amazing community to keep the farm financially stable after our main income stream – weddings and other events – was erased in a blink of the eye.  Our flower CSA – rebranded as our popular Porch Petals Prescription program – saved us that year.   In the fall we were able to add back open air workshops and we were humbled by how many friends of the farm came to those workshops when most of the world was still hunkered down.

As that tumultuous year came to a close, I started thinking hard about the long-term future of my Philadelphia flower farm.  I was emotionally, physically, mentally and financially threadbare.  It wasn’t just the pandemic.  I had been working so hard for over a decade to juggle four demanding sales channels along with running a complex flower farm.  I was stretched too thin.  It was time to simplify.

And so began an overdue longer-term plan for evolution for my Philadelphia flower farm.  We have let go of our grocery store bouquet program in 2020.  And 2023 was the last season for wedding flowers.   Lastly 2024 will be the final year for our flower CSA.

The focus moving forward is two-fold: workshops at the farm and selling wholesale to other florists.  Narrowing down to these two offerings means that we can still engage with our wonderful local community through the workshops and also make sure that local weddings and other events still have beautiful locally-grown flowers in them, albeit not designed by my own hands.  A welcomed side effect would be for me to get a little more rest too, but I’m not one to sit down for very long.

Evolution like this in a small business can sometimes be viewed as giving up on something that customers felt was wonderful and so it can feel like failure.  But let me assure you that it’s not. Each of those many sales channels for my farm were highly successful in their own right.  I just need a change and I am confident this focus moving forward will ensure the long-term sustainability of my Philadelphia flower farm and actually lead to greater success and customer appreciation.

Reposted from a January 2013 post here on Love \’n Fresh Flowers.  All rights reserved by Love \’n Fresh Flowers.  

Let\’s face it. Weddings are expensive as a whole. A lot of couples are suffering from sticker shock after just a few meetings with potential vendors. It\’s one of the things I like least about this industry. It\’s also a good reason couples need to sit down at the start of the planning process and really prioritize what\’s important to them and what’s not. Some may choose to have a high-end caterer because they’re foodies. Some may choose to have the most killer band because they love to rock out. Some may choose a big expensive venue because they love being surrounded by all their friends and family. Some may choose to have an elite florist because they adore flowers. These are my people!

But even flower lovers still have to decide exactly how to budget for wedding flowers. Since most couples have never shopped around before for flowers for a wedding (and hopefully never will again!), it can seem like a foreign idea, figuring out what\’s a fair price for bouquets, centerpieces, and all the other pretty pieces that make the day special. There is certainly a huge range of pricing for wedding florals.

I like to compare the process of choosing a florist and floral budget to shopping for a chair…

You can buy a chair at Walmart.
It will be quite affordable. Probably downright cheap. It will be made of synthetic materials, likely plastic or compressed sawdust. It will look like so many other chairs in the world. It\’s nothing special, but it will certainly suffice if all you want is a place to put your butt. Company that comes to your house will probably not notice the chair and almost certainly won\’t admire it. Sometimes Walmart is all you can afford and that\’s okay. (I say this with real heart since I grew up in a Walmart household, and we were very grateful for affordable goods.)

You can buy a chair at Ikea.
It will be more expensive than Walmart, but generally won\’t break the piggy bank. It will be the product of the imagination of a savvy designer, but still made of standard materials and mass produced in a factory. It will probably look stylish in the moment, and company that comes to your house might notice it and even ask where you got it. They could go get the exact same thing. That’s cool. I have a serious love affair with Ikea for this very reason. It\’s decidedly reliable mass design.

And then you can buy a chair from a master craftsman, the type that often seems to live in Maine.
It\’s expensive. But you greatly value artistry and having something so truly unique. The chair will be made out of hundred year old solid oak. The craftsman will have walked his woodland, knowing each tree in it, and picked the perfect specimen for the project. He will have cut the tree down himself and milled the lumber by hand. He will have waited patiently for the lumber to cure to avoid any cracks or flaws. He will then spend hours sawing, whittling, carving, sanding and joining the pieces together. It becomes a one-of-a-kind piece of art. It couldn\’t be duplicated if he tried. When company comes to your house, they notice it immediately. You feel proud to have it and love sharing its story with your guests. After all, you really enjoyed getting to know the craftsman who took such care in creating it. It’s a cherished piece. It makes the room. It\’s timeless. It’s worth every pretty penny.

It\’s up to you to choose where to buy your chair flowers and why. All the options are valid. The results, however, are drastically different. Use a Walmart florist and you\’ll get a poof of babys breath and standard roses, not dissimilar to bouquets in every grocery store across America. Use an Ikea florist and you\’ll get a trendy bouquet of garden roses and maybe some succulents, not dissimilar to bouquets popping up on Pinterest every minute. Use a master craftsman and you\’ll get a bouquet that is grown specifically for you, crafted with dozens of varieties of blooms and foliage you may have never even known existed. It\’s exquisite. It\’s truly one-of-a-kind. There are no Pins that look just like it, and you certainly would never find it in a grocery store. You\’ll love sharing its unique story with your guests who will be commenting continually on how beautiful your flowers are and how “you” they are.

Because they are.

I make a regular habit of taking slow strolls around the entire farm in the evenings after all the crew are gone and all the major tasks and distractions of the day are done.  I let myself focus on single blooms and pieces of foliage.  It’s like shopping at the department store for that perfect outfit.  Try this top on with those pants.  Maybe this skirt instead with the top.  That’s good.  But now what about these earrings to tie it all together?

Just like shopping it’s best if I don’t go into these color strolls with any agenda in mind.  If I’m hunting for something specific, I’ll never find it.   So, I let my creative mind drift and toy with various ideas.  I snip individual stems of this and that as I walk.

After gathering an interesting collection of specimens, I get a small bottle to use as a vase.  Then I play with floral design color combinations by trying a stem of this with a stem of that and paying attention to how each color plays off the other.  Put a stem of dark foliage into the bottle and suddenly everything feels a little moodier.  A touch of light blue brightens it up and makes it feel summery.  The differences are subtle when in this small bottle format, but once applied to a larger design, each choice really makes an impact!

I take some quick snapshots as I go along, so I can remember which color combinations I liked the best.  It’s nice to have these pictures to show wedding clients too, serving as inspiration for their full floral palette.  It’s amazing what an evening stroll and a small bottle of blooms can inspire!

It’s been 10 very eventful (and event-filled!) years since I officially launched Love ‘n Fresh Flowers in January of 2009.  I was talking to a dear flower friend the other day and reminiscing about how it felt back then to open up my heart to a business idea that seemed so exciting and yet so terrifying without any solid florist training or experience.  I just had a dream back then.  I knew essentially nothing about the floral industry. What I did know was that I wanted change.  I knew I wanted to get back to something more tactile than the paper-pushing I had been doing as a corporate cog.  I wanted to do work that mattered.

I saw a niche that begged to be filled in the floral market (making blooms grown right here in Philadelphia elegant and desirable for weddings), and I decided to just go for it.  I quit my corporate job and started a flower farm (waaaaay before that was a trendy thing to do).  Almost immediately I got asked to do flowers for a wedding.  I’m not going to lie here: I had no idea what I was doing for that first wedding.  None!  I have the proposal for that very first wedding laminated and tucked in my bookcase at my office.  I pull it out on occasion, glance over the numbers and the naive promises made therein, and remind myself how very far I’ve come.

A Need for Professional Florist Training

Back in 2009, I was a self-declared floral professional stumbling around like a kitten with her eyes only half open.  I really should have gotten more professional florist training before launching my business, but I was a) in a hurry and b) couldn\’t find a program teaching sustainable design techniques and on-trend styles.  Instead, I poked and prodded wherever I could, trying to get more knowledge specific to the immediate marketplace here in Philly.  I even pretended to be a bride and visited one of the big shops to ask about pricing, something that bothers my conscious to this day.

I got lucky though and pieced together enough information to bootstrap my way to running a successful floral business.  The key was to connect to experienced pros on a personal level via two great organizations. At Longwood Gardens, I was able to take floral design classes that taught the fundamentals and mechanics of solid design.  And through the Association for Specialty Cut Flower Growers (ASCFG), I learned a lot about business and managing events through informal mentors like Neil and Carol Caggiano and Mike and Polly Hutchison.  Through my membership in the ASCFG, I’ve also fostered utterly irreplaceable friendships with flower farmers and florists across the country that have fed my soul and been a critical sounding board when shit hits the fan in my flower dream machine.

These connections, the generous transfer of hard-won knowledge, the occasional moment of tough love, and the shared tears have made Love ‘n Fresh not only possible, but a highly successful business pioneering a new way of doing that business.  In 2009, the floral trends seemed stacked against me (farm flowers were relegated to mason jars and considered as cheap as the dirt they came from), but my hodgepodge cohort of floral colleagues that were willing to equally exchange best practices and anecdotes meant I could gather what I needed to buck the odds.

I’ve had a lot of leadership roles in these past ten years.  I’ve just started my tenure as President of the very same ASCFG.  I’ve gone back and been the teacher for floral design classes at Longwood Gardens.  And I’ve taught hundreds of students at workshops, classes, clubs, and conferences of all kinds.  And yet, I’ve never felt like I’ve matched what was given to me.  I’ve wrestled with how to send out into the floral world what was so generously imparted to me.

At the same time, I’ve watched this once stuffy and FTD-infused industry evolve and transform into a vibrant, animated, but often chaotic whirlpool that churns with the latest list of the Top Ten Pinterest Worthy Bouquets per The Knot or Our Favorite Florists on Instagram per the NY Times or the Top 62 Floral Designers in the nation per Martha Stewart Weddings.  Not to mention the latest podcast or online course giving glossy generalizations to inspire more creatives to take the leap into flowers.

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve been honored and humbled to be included on some of these lists, podcasts, and courses!  But what these all have done is create a frenetic pace in our industry that can’t be sustained.  There’s a race to get noticed – to be part of the trend – to glean just enough soundbites – to grab market share at dire costs – rather than build a solid foundation for this new floral revolution.  It’s like a 9-year-old kid in a Spiderman costume running around the living room at 11 PM on a sugar rush.  Ironically, while the focus in the floral world here on the East Coast has shifted noticeably toward more sustainable flowers since I started (hooray!), we’ve somehow managed to lose sight of how to build sustainable businesses and, more importantly, an industry that can sustain us all for the long haul.  There\’s a decided lack of professional florist training.  The existing florist training options are generally still part of that old guard, focused on foam and ratios.  I can understand why there\’s not a stampede to join AIFD for florist training.  

While mulling all of this over, a lot of ideas came to my mind.  There’s clearly a problem here.  I’m a natural-born problem solver; nothing makes my brain twitch quite like searching for solutions!  I could start my own podcast and get gritty.  I could create my own online course.  I could write a book.  (Clearly, I like writing…hopefully someone’s still actually reading this!)

But no.  I’m not going to hide behind a glowing screen.  I’m not going to generalize and make sweeping statements in a podcast that can be heard in every time zone.  I’m not going to be a static picture on the dust jacket of a book.  Frankly, I’m not interested in helping everyone with broad strokes of advice.  I need to make this personal and powerful.

I want to help just a select few to start – a select few right here in my own region – and build incredibly honest relationships that support and sustain.  And I don’t want that relationship to be singular.  What made Love ‘n Fresh Flowers successful was the professional friends/peers I gathered around me at the beginning of my journey that have been there every day since when I needed them.  They are my safety net, my sounding board, my hive mind, my drinking buddies, my cheerleaders.   They are my cohort.

Floral Cohorts

In 2019, we\’ll be launching an entirely new way to train to be a professional florist here at Love \’n Fresh Flowers!  We\’re calling this new format Floral Cohorts.  If you have dreamed of entering the floral industry or if you have already started but feel a bit lost, joining a Floral Cohort will give you a home base for learning all the fundamentals you need to stride confidently along your creative path.  This is the perfect learning experience in particular for aspiring floral freelancers and small event design start-ups.

So, what is a cohort exactly?  Cohorts are common in graduate school programs where they are used to encourage a more dynamic, collaborative, and supportive learning environment to carry students through their intensive graduate program.  We’ll be adopting this same format for a small-group learning experience based out of our flower farm in Philadelphia.  Each Floral Cohort will be capped at 10 students who will complete the program together over the course of 10 months.  These 10 students will become peers; flower friends for life!  They will be your support network that steers your floral endeavors to success.

While I already teach plenty of dynamic floral design workshops at the farm, they provide only a limited time for students to interact, both with each other and with me.  I  wanted to create a more long-term format that would not only teach critical skills at a professional level and increase knowledge, but also build lasting relationships and a community of sisters in stems so we can foster a healthier and more sustainable floral industry in our region.

Sure, there are plenty of ways to tackle florist training through online videos and courses!  But those online options do not provide you with face-to-face friendships and peer-to-peer support that will last long after the course work is done!  Floral Cohorts are about far more than just flowers.  They are about holding space for one another; for fighting the good fight together to spread more beauty throughout the world in a way that allows you to thrive on a personal level as well.

You’ll earn a Certificate of Completion at the conclusion of your Cohort series to validate your professional florist training.  This certificate carries a valuable stamp of approval to open doors to more freelance design opportunities and full time positions with respected event designers in our region and around the U.S.  And you’ll get street cred with established event florists you may have been wanting to collaborate with or befriend.

Have I piqued your interest?  I truly hope so! This concept is one that I feel fervently is needed right now.  We all need more connections.  We all benefit from training. We all need to learn how to compete fairly.

Oh, yeah, I had better mention right here and now:  this is no #communityovercompetition pitch.  I’m all about competition!  But it needs to be fair competition where everyone got the same rule book in advance and there’s no loaded dice.  Respectful competition that acknowledges how hard we are all working to pay rent.  When customers pick you because you found your niche and you’re making a tidy profit while sticking to your creative guns, that’s when you’ve really got a sustainable business on your hands!  That’s what we’re after here!

To learn more about how a Floral Cohort works, the florist training you\’ll receive, and how to apply to join one, click over to the Floral Cohorts page on our website. If you\’re serious about your flower dreams and you\’re within driving distance of Philadelphia, please consider joining. 

So we thought, “Hey, why not put on a workshop at the end of the season? Ya know, to celebrate!” And so we are! It’s going to be such a memorable two days, full of locally-grown flowers (of course), laughter, good food, good coffee, great cocktails, and a hefty dose of realistic lessons and pure inspiration alike. When I close my eyes and visualize what this all will look and feel like, I get a little breathless. I am so very excited!
The workshop will take place at the Love ‘n Fresh Flowers Farm and the incredible Woodlands Estate in Philadelphia. Learn about all we have planned over on the official Seasonal Bouquet Project blog post. You should really come join us! But don’t delay in signing up. We’re already 3/4 full!!

My finished design from Ariella’s class.