We started with hand-painted signs, which were totally great, but upgraded to professional wood signs. Over the years I built up to about ten road signs, indicating exactly where to turn, where to slow down, where to park, and how much farther. I drove the route and then I drove it again, trying to do everything in my power to get drivers to stop on their first pass by, rather than their tenth. It worked!

Farmers who don’t carefully consider their pricing structures end up leaving a lot of money on the table. Our main product was a $30 bouquet, so we did everything to channel people towards this purchase. We tried to always have a $50 bouquet for sale in order to anchor the $30 option and make it look cheaper, and we rarely sold flowers by the bunch, which led to more sales of the signature product.

I marked our flowers up 3X from a wholesale to florist price, almost without exception. In this way I knew that I was always getting that specific gross margin. Though the farm stand was not free to run (I paid $500/month to rent it), the huge margins more than made up for the expenses. When I bought in flowers from other farms to resell (about 10% of the flowers at the stand) I did the same thing.

We didn’t skimp on design. I made sure that my bouquets were the most beautiful, unique ones around, with elevated color schemes that more resembled wedding flowers than supermarket ones. More importantly, my finely-honed design skills allowed me to maximize space and form in my bouquets, making them full and special in spite of being small.

We made and wrapped bouquets in about 30 seconds (though if we were designing in small batches, setting up the work area each day added a fair amount of time to that. If we designed just 2-3 times a week, we were more efficient.

If you’re in an exceptional local with lots of the right kind of traffic, you might not need a huge audience to start with. If you’ve got a huge audience, you don’t need to be in a good location. We played with these factors and were really insistent in building the stand in the most choice location we could imagine.

I dialed in and refined my checkout process over the years, eventually settling on a clipboard that asked for just enough information for me to learn about customer behavior (and collect email addresses), but not too much to dissuade the busy passerby. By knowing what people were buying and whether they had shopped there before, I could fine tune my offerings.

And fine-tune I did! Each year the stand got more dialed in. I could predict what sales would be (except for that six-month road closure, yikes), and make little improvements all the time.

We chose to be open 24/7 (rather, dawn to dusk for safety), and aimed to always have the stand stocked. I knew that once people got used to knowing they’d always find great flowers there, I couldn’t let them down or traffic would slow, they would call me (boo, grouch over here!) or perhaps shop elsewhere. I was religious about it.