Who is the customer?
When we started our flower farming journey the first hurdle to tackle was whether we could grow flowers. We didn’t give a lot of thought to selling them, much less to honing in on who was our ideal customer. With time and moderate success growing a few things, we began to think more carefully about what this business could look like. More importantly, what we wanted the business to look like. One of the most exciting things for us was the opportunity to create something that reflected our core values. When you spend your entire career working at someone else’s direction on someone else’s vision, it feels exhilarating to be able to steer the ship instead of sitting in the backseat.
We learned early on that flower farming could be a vocation that provided for our livelihood, but it probably wasn’t going to make us rich. That was ok and it still is. What other things could it give us that we hadn’t found in our corporate careers? It was definitely giving us time together, time outside and exercise. It was giving us some money too but we knew that the road to real “riches” would be found in our connections with nature and with the customers we cultivated.
We decided early on that farmers markets weren’t for us. In 2018 and 2019 we had a small presence in grocery stores and obtained a few neighborhood customers. But then we met floral designers. That pretty much changed everything. We were hooked. We admired from afar initially through Instagram, and slowly thereafter in person at events or just volunteering to work for them. We’ve said it before but we’ll say it again, flower people are some of the nicest people we’ve met in a long time. Both farmers and floral designers are so generous and collaborative. But floral designers have a special place in our hearts. They are brilliant artists and they see color, texture and nature collide in the same way that a landscape painter does. It’s simply the most satisfying part of our job to see our flower babies in works of art. There have been a few designs that have literally made me cry because they are so beautiful.
So who is our customer? In any business, you are asked to really think about that and then market to that group. I think we have done that and this year, even in the midst of a global pandemic, we have expanded our relationships with new and innovative designers who routinely blow our minds with their creative visions. It feels like the perfect melding of our love for growing beautiful organic flowers and finding the stewards who thoughtfully create wonder with them. Oh and have we mentioned that the floral designers we’ve worked with are really amazing humans too? They are and we feel privileged to provide our product to them and hope to continue to do so for many years to come.
Next week on the blog…
Our Bethesda Green Journey