How do you market spring flowers?

Garden Glories
Advise from Leslie Vawdrey, Along the Garden Path, Draper, Utah

For us spring offers a chance to display cut flowers outdoors. It's too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer, but when spring arrives, we put buckets of flowers on the front porch, sitting on old barrels or on the antique chicken feeder that we use for display.

The concept works well because our shop, which is in a renovated, historic home, has an English garden feel, with landscaped areas outside and garden accessories and gifts inside. We arrange the spring flowers in nicer terra cotta pots, or we do basket arrangements that combine spring flowers and plants. Both ways, the customer has something left over when the flowers are gone.

We also combine spring flowers with other, more substantial flowers in arrangements, so that if the spring flowers go first, the customer still has others. I've never had anyone complain about the vase life of spring flowers.

People love spring here. In fact, of all the market times of the year, after Christmas and Valentine's and Mother's Day, I'd say spring is next.

Home Grown
Advise from Scott B. Neal, The Morning Glory Flower Shop, Northfield, Vt.

The winters are so cold and long here that spring flowers pretty much sell themselves. But we take advantage of that by letting people know as soon as we get them in.

For example, our ads on the local TV station might say, "The tulips are in!" We get most of our product locally, and we make sure people know that — that it was greenhouse-grown right here in Vermont, which means it's very fresh, cut just yesterday or today, and very good quality.

Besides showing them in the cooler, we always have a vase full of fragrant spring flowers on the counter, so people can smell them. In our shop window, we use flowering branches, which are big enough to make a statement there.

It's true that some spring flowers have a shorter vase life, and we point that out. We ask the customer, "Are you looking for something that's going to last a long time, or are you looking for something that really has the feeling of spring?" That way, we're letting people know what to expect and are offering them a choice.

By the Bunch
Advise from Nancy Brown, AIFD, AAF, Brown's Floral & Greenhouses, Random Lake, Wis.

Here in Wisconsin, spring doesn't come until May, but we promote spring flowers starting right after Christmas. We have bunches of them in the cooler and a vase of them on the counter. It helps to have quite a lot of them, for an eye-catching massed display.

We also use spring flowers for our corporate accounts, always in clear water and generally a whole bunch of one kind. I noticed that if I send tulips, say, to one corporate account in particular where a lot of people pass through, I'll sell more tulips that whole week. The person who cares for the cut flowers in this office really does a good job; she changes the water every day, and that helps to educate people about how to make the flowers last, which is something we also do in the shop.

Besides the bulb flowers, I force my own spring branches, including curly willow, which says "spring" to people when the little tender leaves appear.

We do two-for-one promotions: Buy a bunch of spring flowers for a friend and keep the second one for yourself. People love spring flowers here, and I think they're more inclined to buy whole bunches of them for self-gratification than other flowers. In fact, I bought myself a bunch of tulips today, just because it's a gloomy day.