How many of you actually are considering,
going to a farmers market or who have sold at farmers markets.
It'd be really fun to have a discussion of what's worked well for different people
at farmers markets.
Before we get into that, a little bit about me. I,
grow in South Jordan.
I have a my micro farm.
I have two sites, one at a neighbor's property
and the other is just in my backyard.
I'm going into my fifth season farming
and it's our fourth season with markets and with subscriptions.
My first year I just sold to neighbors off Facebook
and things like that.
I also teach the backyard cut flower garden course
at Snuck farm. And,
we do workshops and consultations.
So that's a little bit about me.
Farmers markets.
So I love farmer's markets.
I've always loved farmers
markets.
And looking at them.
And so when I moved here to Utah, I wanted to find flower farmers,
at our local farmers markets, and there just weren't any.
And so that's kind of how I got started, even,
with the business of flower farming.
So some of the business, or the benefits
from selling at a farmer's market,
every new grower wants to know how to be seen
in their community, how to help people find them.
And,
selling at a farmer's market is so helpful.
in being able to
be seen in your community and make those contacts.
Networking at a farmer's market, talking with other vendors,
you can find more opportunities to sell your flowers.
Market managers.
Just this week, I had two emails
from one of my market managers telling me about a different market.
One in Payson, one in Herriman,
and then also an opportunity to sell my flowers online.
So you expand your horizons a little bit
beyond just selling at a market.
For me, it's been a stepping stone.
A lot of my subscribers have come from being customers at the farmers market.
Maybe they weren't able to make it every week,
and they wanted flowers every week. And so,
they'd sign up for subscriptions,
a lot of them ask me growing questions,
which leads to them coming to workshops.
A lot of times they'll ask about weddings, and I've done a few for them.
And a great way to make sure you get the most of that
is by gathering,
emails while you're at the market.
It was a little tricky this last year.
I did not gather any emails
for this year, but, hopefully once we, you know,
maybe you can try a QR code or something like that.
And then the other thing is it's a little bit less exacting than florist sales.
And I don't necessarily mean quality, but you can take what you grow.
So if you only have red zinnias that year, someone will buy them.
Or that week, someone will buy them.
Whereas it might be hard to find, an event florist
that wants, you know, a mishmash of things.
Okay, so I think a big question.
I have lots of friends that have tried selling at the market,
and I think a good thing to do before you start is to
find out whether it's really suited for you, before you take the time
and the energy to invest in tents and market fees
and all those things.
Do you have the time? Most markets, most successful markets
are on weekends and, or weeknights.
And if your kids are all in sports and that's important to you,
it might be really hard to take the time out of your busy family's
life to go to the market.
Do you have support?
Do you have childcare?
It is a really hard thing
to take a small child to the farmer's market and try to sell.
Resources.
Do you have a car?
Can you produce flowers over a season? Or are you worried that you will have them
for July and August, but maybe none of the rest of the year?
And then personality.
I really don't think that you need to be an extrovert to sell at a farmer's market.
But you do need to be friendly.
You need to be able to
talk to people and be able to approach people.
If that's really hard for you,
you might find the farmer's market really overwhelming.
And then you might be like my 14 year old if it's a real slow, slow market.
He gets really bored and drives me crazy.
So if you get bored easy, maybe that's not well suited either.
Okay,
so, I did want to mention this was my first farmer's market.
This picture, and obviously I did not have a lot of product,
so I'm going to refer back to that later.
Choosing a market.
If you go to a market and talk to vendors, a lot of these vendors
sell at different markets and they can tell you which markets
are the busiest or the most profitable in our state.
Find out things like foot traffic.
Are they busy?
If you go and visit them, you know, in the market before you plan on selling,
then you have an idea of what kind of foot traffic.
Location.
Some areas are just a little more affluent and we sell a luxury item.
So looking for those areas is pretty good.
Pretty important.
Whether it's a producers only or a resale market.
Resale markets will typically have lots of crafts.
Whereas producers are more focused on farmers.
There are pros and cons to both.
I sell at the South Jordan market,
and that's a producers only and I sell at the Daybreak Farmers Market.
And that is a resale market.
And so,
you get a very different clientele at each.
And there's, I love them both, but it's important to think about.
What their fees are can be an issue.
Just make sure that when you are applying for a farmer's market
that they know that you're not a crafter, you should be paying farmers fees.
They're typically lower. And,
but a lot of market managers won't understand that at first.
So it's somewhere that we have to do a little bit of education
in our community.
And then season length.
I have a market that starts in June.
I love it, and then my next market starts in August.
And that kind of helps me with the glut of flowers that we end up
at that time in the season, and so it's nice to have them staggered that way.
And then weather.
Some of these markets,
if it's on a Wednesday afternoon and it's super hot and there's no shade,
it might not be a good fit just because it could damage your product.
And so you want to think about that as you choose a market.
Okay.
So I think one of the biggest worries that we have
when we go to a farmer's market is what if there are other farmers?
And like Heather was saying that it's
not a bad thing to have competition.
It makes you a better farmer.
But you can also distinguish yourself.
And there can be multiple farmers at the same market.
Just like when you're shopping for a pair of blue jeans or something
and you go to the mall and you want to have lots of options to try on.
You'll go to somewhere where there's lots of stores
and that's, you know, a market that has lots of flower farmers.
They can become become known for that.
And the people who want lots of options and lots of varieties
for flowers will go to that market.
It'll become a draw.
You can also look at different ways to sell your flowers.
If the lady down the row
is selling bouquets, you can think about selling single stems.
I remember someone talking about selling at the Salt Lake Farmers Market,
and they didn't sell sweet peas, and the farmer down the row from them did.
And so they would send people looking for sweet peas down there, and vice versa.
So, the most important thing is not to be
so worried about not selling your flowers because there's other farmers there
selling flowers that you lower your prices.
You really need to base your prices
on what you need to make to be a sustainable business.
And if you get scared, you don't want to to have a race
to the bottom where you lower your prices and become the cheapest.
Cheap isn't best.
Okay, so
some things about really killing it at the farmers market.
If you want to really have a consistent business
where people are coming back to you every week because they know
your flowers are the prettiest and the longest lasting,
then you need to bring the best product you have.
If there's something that's
kind of wilty, I don't like to take it to the farmer's market.
Because that first time you sell a bouquet,
that's like one of your your only chances, right?
And if they don't have
the best experience with it, they might not buy from you again.
So you want to be knowledgeable in the varieties you grow,
know your harvest stage, hydrate them well,
and they'll keep coming back.
And what's great is when they come back, they'll tell other people.
It's pretty common for people to walk by,
customers that returning customers will walk by with someone else.
Someone new is buying a flower and say, hey,
those flowers are going to last two weeks.
They're the best. You should buy it.
And I don't have to do the selling.
It's my customers doing it for me.
So it's kind of awesome.
If it's a really hot day, I like taking frozen water bottles
and sticking them in the buckets, I always keep my tent.
My flowers are in the shade.
And then another big thing is when people are walking around,
they don't think about it, but the flowers will wilt pretty quickly.
And so I like to offer to hold them while they shop
so that they're not walking around with their stems out of water,
if they're going to be shopping for a while.
Let's see. So,
when you are setting up your display,
there is a
catch phrase that says stack them high and watch them fly
that vegetable farmers use.
And I think the same thing applies to our displays at the farmers market for flowers
We want to show abundance.
People like to have lots of choices.
It looks good.
It's appealing.
It stops people in their track.
So bring everything you have. Pack it in so it looks lush.
And I think it's, it's always those last two bouquets
that are sitting on a mostly empty table
that are the hardest to sell. So,
clearly mark your prices.
People are shy. They don't want to ask you.
It also makes it clear that everybody's getting the same price.
I have three price points, I have three.
I have my petite bouquets, my regular bouquets, and my mason jars.
And sometimes I'll do a premium bouquet that's a little bit larger
and a little bit more money, but I don't go beyond that.
Simple is easy for you and it's easy for your customer.
I also really like long tablecloths.
I don't want my junk hanging out on the bottom.
Underneath my tablecloth.
That's kind of nitpicky, but
it's just one of those things I think makes you look so professional
and then think about whether they can find you again.
Do you have business cards?
Do you have a banner up?
Do they know if if they can order from you again?
It helps with repeat business.
Okay.
So pricing. Pricing came up a lot in Heather's talk.
Pricing is hard.
I think it's a really hard thing when you're starting out.
And one of the most important things you can do is start tracking
your expenses and your labor.
The costs of really producing those stems.
Labor is our biggest cost.
And I think that it's the thing that we like to discount the most.
We don't think about it because it's just our time.
But our time is valuable. So,
really knowing your true costs,
looking to break even, track your hours,
all of your hours, even if it's time, posting on social media, or
time stripping the bouquet, you know, stripping your stems
and making bouquets and weeding all those things add up.
And, you probably work more than you think you do.
So and then,
watch your stem counts.
It's one thing to say my bouquets are $20, but what does that mean?
Is it a ten stem bouquet or is it a 25 stem bouquet?
You know, one of those going to be much more profitable than the other.
And then I have this picture here,
and these are some David Austin Garden roses.
And I don't take them to the farmer's market.
This was, a customer
had ordered, an expensive birthday,
bouquet and surprised his wife
with it at the farmer's market.
And so I wouldn't put tons of high value flowers
into a market bouquet
unless I was charging appropriately for it.
So just pay attention to those things
like ranunculus or garden roses or dahlias and
use them judiciously.
Talking too much.
One of the other things that people do is
at the end of the market, sorry.
They will,
ask for discount sometimes if you have flowers left over.
And when you give discounts at the end of the market,
you train your customers to know, hey, if she's got flowers left over,
I can go get them cheap.
And that must be what they're really worth.
Sorry.
So I never discount my flowers at the end of the market.
I would rather take them to a friend or to my mother in law.
Take them somewhere, give them away.
You can think of it as PR.
People enjoy getting flowers, and then you're not devaluing the flowers at all.
It becomes a gift instead of a discount.
And then
with pricing.
I love this quote from Seth Godin.
Cheap as another way to say scared.
And I think
lowering our price should be our last thing.
I think we need to think about,
do my flowers look good?
If they're not selling, do they look good?
Am I getting the word out?
Do people know I'm here?
Am I being friendly?
Am I being engaging? Doing all those things?
Before we think about discounting our prices or,
not charging enough.
Okay, so here are my boys.
They helped me sell at the market because we do two markets on saturday mornings
and I can't be in two places at once.
And so these are a few things that I've,
and they're not allowed to sit
while we're selling at the farmer's market until
all the flowers are sold.
They really love that.
It's good to be friendly.
I usually just say, hi, how are you doing to people?
You can be friendly
and talk to everybody without being pushy.
I also find it.
It's great to accept as many forms of payment as possible.
So credit cards, cash,
Apple pay, Google pay, all of those things.
The easier you make it for people to pay, the
less obstacles there are to them buying your flowers.
Once we sell a bouquet, we usually,
you know, if half a bucket is empty and another half a bucket is empty,
we combine the buckets, we keep our displays looking good.
It gives us something to do while we're sitting there.
And helps our display look good.
And, another collect your email addresses.
This is a great thing because when you want to contact them
later to tell them when the market starts next year,
or to tell them when,
you're selling your subscriptions or that you're starting weddings.
This is how you can contact these people later.
And then I think this is most important as you come back and you do it again,
and then you come back and you do it again.
If someone comes and they buy your flowers,
and I think they were the most amazing flowers in the world,
and they come back and you're not there the next week, you've lost a sale.
So I think that
farmer's market is the most successful when you commit to it, when you go back
year after year or even week after week, if you're just trying it for a season.
There's nothing wrong with trying it for a season
and seeing if it works with your lifestyle.
But I do think if you're going to really have the benefits
and the rewards of
selling at a farmer's market, then you've you've got to have some commitment.
There.
Okay.
So I wanted to talk a little bit about
is sold out the real goal.
So on this picture on the,
the picture with less flowers I sold out that day,
which is always awesome to be able to say I took everything and I sold it.
The one above.
I, I did not sell out that day.
I think I had two bouquets left over, but it was my highest grossing market,
that I've ever had.
It was just our last market, this last season.
And, a lot of times we, we think it's great to sell out,
but if you're selling out super early in the day and,
your market starts at nine and you're sold out by 11 or 12
and you've got another hour to go, think about what what's going on?
Are you,
selling your flowers cheaply?
Are you not bringing enough product?
Can you work on that for the next season?
We are trying to double our production again this year because
we can probably sell it.
And so, those are just some things to think about when you're selling out.
Really, what you want to do is
sell the most flowers, right?
And so it's okay if you have a couple bouquets left over,
if that means that every person
that wanted a bouquet that came to the market got one.
I always felt terrible when I'd sell out early,
and then people would come up to me and go, oh.
I was, you know, I'm here just for flowers or something.
And I knew I missed a sale because I didn't have enough flowers that week.
So something to think about.
And then,
subscriptions, like I said earlier, a lot of my subscriptions come from,
referrals from the farmers market and some selling
after you get those email addresses,
some selling points for when you approach people
about subscriptions, they already know your quality.
They know you have great variety.
That's one of the things my subscribers say when I,
ask them in surveys, what do they enjoy about our flowers?
It's the varieties that they get that they're different.
It's more convenient to have flowers delivered to you
or to pick them up once a week,
then have to go to the farmers market and see if there's any there.
We also do a spring subscription,
and that starts before there are any farmer's markets open.
And so that's an opportunity to extend your, your,
selling period. And,
and then the assurance of being able to get flowers
if you're selling out all the time.
And people might just want to make sure they have your flowers.
So that's kind of.
What I've got for you,
it looks like there's some,
questions.