Evan Carmichael advises building a flower shop around the emotional benefit of calm, starting with pop-up tables and online sales instead of renting a storefront. Test demand cheaply first, refine your product mix and messaging, then scale once you prove the model works.
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How do I start a flower shop business? I got a great question from one of our readers, Jay, who wants to start a flower shop business. And there's so much that's going right with what he's doing right now that I had to share with you guys. There's a lot of lessons here that you can learn from. Now, Jay wrote almost an essay here, so Jay, we got to work on condensing our message here. But basically, he wants to start this business because for him it symbolizes stability, peace of mind because the garden calms him down, and freedom. He wants to make money through the business. He wants to hire his mother and people in his family to make the bouquets. He's trying to get this started. He wants to bootstrap it up. He is trying to find a unique angle where he's collecting small fruit trees and little fig trees, trying to find something different. And he's trying to start small. He's trying to think of ways to start on a website, buying something from Flippa, and getting his business started online before moving into his own store. So this is great. There's so many things that's going right for Jay right now. Jay, you don't even understand how awesome this is. My advice for you: first, tune into your messaging. Okay, you're starting this business for the right reasons. You didn't write in saying, "I want to start this business because I want to make a ton of money," right? You do that, you're gonna fail. You're starting this business because you passionately believe in what you're doing. And thinking about what you wrote here, Stability, peace of mind because it calms you down, and freedom. The thing that relates most to your customers here is a peace of mind and calm. So build your business around calm. Everything that you do should be calm, and you want customers to come in who want to feel calm just like you do. It's something you can relate to. Share your story. Talk about how stressed out you are and how a garden makes you feel calm and why. And you're going to bring in customers who feel the same way. So now you're not just a flower shop. You're not just one of a million flower shops out there. You're the guy who sells calm. That's powerful. That's something people can get behind. So everything that you do in your messaging, in your product selection, everything is about being calm. This is how you pour yourself into your company, have something that is a message that can be spread easily, brings in the right target audience for you, and will lead to your huge success as a flower store owner. So build it around calm. This is great. Second thing is you gotta have something that's unique and different in your product offering. Okay, so you're talking about these seeds, fig trees, unique fruit trees. You know, I don't know anything about flowers or fruit trees, but it's great that you're doing something different because you can't just sell the same flowers that everybody else is selling. Once you've convinced people that you are the place to go for calm, everything that is in your store has to be related to it. So what fruit trees or fig trees or flowers— what is it about a garden that makes you feel calm? And how can you bring that out in your product offering? Everything has to relate to it and it has to be different, and you have to be able to explain it. What is it about a fig tree that makes you feel calm, that will make other people feel calm as well? About growing the fig tree, about harvesting the figs? I don't know what it is. A fig tree doesn't mean calm to me, but you gotta explain that. You have to believe it, and people will then come and buy from you. They're coming not just to buy a fig tree, they're coming for advice on how to be calm. So it's great to have this unique product offering. The third thing is starting small, bootstrapping it. So you're starting with the website, that's great. Your end goal is to have a retail shop. What I would add on top of it, including the website, because with the website you're pulling from an international audience Right? Anybody in the world can buy your, you know, buy your calm fruits and plants. For a retail store, you need to pull from a much more specific geographic location. So still find a way to test it out on a small scale. Come up with, you know, 10 plants that symbolize calm for you. Whatever those 10 things are, and then go try to make a partnership with a local business. Where you are not taking on a huge retail space storefront taking up tons of money and resources for you on a monthly basis, and who knows if it's going to work out. You're not McDonald's. If you go and invest in a location that doesn't work out, that's huge for you, right? This is everything. McDonald's, they can lose a franchise if it doesn't work out. You can't afford to make a mistake here. You have to pick the right location, and the way to do it is to start small and partner up with an existing retailer. Ask them if you can set up a table inside their store, either on a permanent basis, or you're paying them a monthly fee, a small fee to test out the location, or on a weekly basis. Maybe you come in every Saturday afternoon and you sell your flowers, and it could be something where they— where you pay them for it or where they split the money coming in, or it could just be for promotional reasons. You know, you're gonna be outside selling your flowers every Saturday afternoon, and that's gonna bring a crowd in, and you're gonna help promote it and bring people into their business. At one of the salsa companies that I've invested in, we'll have events and we'll have different retailers come and display things outside the store. So for example, we may have 100 people show up to a salsa night at at the studio and we'll partner up with a shoe company who sells salsa shoes and they'll sell their shoes outside our location. It's within a mall. They don't pay anything to us for it. All we ask them to do is promote it. Bring, bring your people. Say you're going to be here. And that helps our business as well. So you may not even have to be out of pocket. Try to get going here without spending money. Say you're going to promote their store. What it allows you to do is a couple things. Most importantly, you're testing your location. This store that you partner up with, if you do, you know, 4 weeks in a row, 8 weeks in a row, nothing is happening, no business is coming in despite all the promotion, you picked a crappy location. And thank you for not having gone out and spending tons of money into a 5-year lease creating your own flower shop. It also teaches you the beginnings of running a business. If you've never done it before, it's hard. There's a lot of things you have to learn. You're gonna have to figure out how you're gonna bring people on board, how you're gonna source your materials, how you're gonna display them. You're gonna make tons of mistakes. You're doing it on a small scale, so if you make a mistake, it's not gonna kill your business. And it allows you to do it part-time. You can keep at your job, have some kind of stable income coming in, give your company the best chance of success because you're not gonna run out of cash. And lastly, you'll see if you really like it. It all sounds great. You have the passion, you have the calm meaning. It sounds like you really want to do this. Once you get into it, you'll see if you really want to commit to it or not, and it's best to do it on a small scale. Jay, I'm excited. You've got so many great things going for you, you don't even realize it. All the elements are already here. Keep going, believe in yourself, and And if you have other questions, let me know. I'm here to answer. Believe. For those of you watching, you like the video, please give it a thumbs up below. It makes me wanna do more for you. And I'd love to hear what you have to think about this video. Leave it in the comment section below. It makes my day when I see comments come in. And if you have a question for your business, leave it below. I'll make a video reply for you guys. Thank you, and I'll see you soon.
