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| The reality is that home is still and will continue to be the centre of most folks’ lives. |
Home Décor With a Florist’s Touch
How to use the interior design craze to your advantage
As the world moves away from making flowers a part of each holiday and occasion, we all need to find new opportunities to grow our businesses. When we look at the most successful small businesses today, we find many are filling special niches in the service sector. Remodelling has become huge as has interior design and landscaping – Home and Garden TV is certainly a testament to that. It strikes me that, as florists, we have an opportunity to shift our focus to create a special niche in the area of interior décor.
The reality is that home is still and will continue to be the centre of most folks’ lives. With time poverty being the overriding issue controlling people’s lives today, they don’t have the time or the expertise to value-add their home experience. This used to be the sole domain of interior designers, but not any more. With limited budgets, many folks are looking for the value-add but not at a huge expense. I see this as having real potential for our industry.
Once Mother’s Day is over, we need more than ‘occasion work’ to keep our stores operating to their full potential. Home décor with a florist’s touch is perhaps that golden opportunity.
• It begins with some in-store changes that reflect this new area. Antique or ‘antiqued’ and custom-design small furniture and accent pieces are what’s ‘hot’. We need to find the items missing from home décor stores.
• We need to accessorize these pieces with old pots, bowls and containers, funky stuff the other folks overlooked. These items are available from gift shows, antique wholesalers, junk stores, garage sales and auctions. We just need to get out there and ‘discover’ them!
• Our strength as trained professional florists is our ability to spot this stuff and accessorize it. Once you bring it into your store and create that special look with these materials, lighting and a slight change of store décor, you will be amazed at the traffic you can generate. The nice thing, too, is that it’s seasonal and can provide new opportunities four times a year.
If you decide to take this route, you must become an accessory consultant. You would be amazed at how many folks need and appreciate advice at this level. They either don’t wish to engage or can’t afford high-end consultants, but would appreciate help from a professional accessorizer. It’s a niche that just isn’t being filled. We’ve been doing half-hour consulting appointments on Monday evenings for some time now and it’s become an ideal opportunity to meet new customers, listen to them, help them out and grow them as customers.
As professional florists we should have the skills to move into this hot, growing and profitable area. It’s a nice tie-in with our current business and can add solid sales all year round.
Brian Minter and his wife, Faye, own and operate two major garden centres, a greenhouse range, two flower shops and a 27-acre, world-class show garden in Chilliwack, B.C.
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