Pricing Flowers with Confidence

How to Charge Properly Without Apologising

If you’ve ever ended a fully booked weekend exhausted, hands muddy and feet aching, only to glance at your bank account and think, “How am I still broke?” — this is for you.

Whether you're prepping posies for a Saturday market or designing floral installations for weddings, your pricing shouldn't leave you burned out and underpaid. Let's fix that.

The Truth: You're Not Just Selling Flowers

You're selling:

• Time

• Skill

• Labour

• Admin

• Emotional support (yes, that's a real thing)

• Planning and risk (hello, deer eating your Alchemilla Mollis)

The supermarket model doesn’t apply here. They’re not planting, weeding, harvesting, and comforting a nervous bride about her bouquet 24 hours before the ceremony. YOU ARE !  And your prices need to reflect that.

The Real Cost of Flowers

Let’s break it down.

Behind every £75 bouquet or £450 install is a pile of costs no one sees:

• Seeds, tubers, compost, fleece

• Labour (even if it’s just you)

• Packaging, fuel , invoicing time - the list goes on and on !

• And oh yeah — your website, your marketing, your insurance, your tax

These are not optional extras, they are all necessities . And when you undercharge, you’re not “keeping it affordable.” lets get real .  You’re subsidising someone else’s flowers and happiness, with your own time, sleep, and sanity.

How to Actually Price Flowers With Confidence

Let’s talk formulas and I know some of you are allergic to maths and formulas, and spreadsheets  — BUT  “gut feel” isn’t a pricing strategy.

For a profitable business For florists: You can use a markup formula like:

2- 3 x flower cost + 2 x sundries + 20–30% design fee

So if you are making an arch, or a bouquet  you are investing your time an the more flowers there are the more time it will take you to create that piece. So you need to ensure that  the flowers mark up covers all of your overheads like marketing and insurance  etc and then your design fee is your actual wage. 

So when you are thinking about those florist over heads  you need to ensure that your flowers mark up does cover your overheads and this will be different for everyone.

Take some time to write all of your costs down so that you can check and refine the formula above. It should look something like this:  

So now you can add up all of your monthly costs. In my example its £1,135 per month and that covers everything from rent to  cleaning supplies  and insurance. What is does not include are all of the Costs of goods such as Flowers, Tissue, Ribbon,  etc which can be directly apportioned to each item. These are your COGS ( Cost of Goods). 

Your cogs are all direct costs which you can directly aportion to each item  or sale.  The list for this should look something like below: 

However it does include set up costs. Things like buckets and scissors, a printer, a fridge etc which you would have paid for with an initial investment  or even ongoing investment. You would typically calculate to pay that back ( That could be through a  personal loan to your business)  over a longer period of time such as 5 years.  So you would add that on to the  monthly number to ensure that you can continue to invest in the business and you can also replace items when needed. It's tabled under # 6 Set Up costs. 

So once you have your monthly number and for my example I have £1,135  per month you can Divide overheads by income to get your overhead percentage:

My Example 

• Overheads: £1,135/month

• Lets say  - Sales income: £6,000/month  (Listen to  Podcast 15 to learn how to calculate  your target, or you may already have a monthly revenue ) 

• Overhead % = £1,135 ÷ £6,000 = 18.9%

• 
  

Lets round that up to 195  and add 19% onto every quote or bouquet to fairly cover overheads (so a £30 bouquet includes £5.70 overhead, and a £3,000 wedding includes £570)

If you are a flower farmer

Well this is where is gets a little more complicated as you also need to figure out your cost per stem. Which I know is difficult, but pricing flowers correctly is the difference between a hobby and a business. You need to keep accurate records but you don’t need to do this for absolutely EVERYTHING you grow . Just work it out for 1 bed as an example. 

Whether your seed packet costs £3 or £3.50 is not really going to dramatically change your price per stem. The seeds are actually often the cheapest bit - it’s the labour that costs. So I’ll do a separate Podcast all about efficiency and for now lets concentrate on getting the numbers right. 

So just focus on one bed , you need to think about : 

The total in my example comes to £232.97 and as you can see it the labour that’s the killer! That's why efficiency is so important. It’s great that you found cheap seed supplier where you can get 50p off a packet of seeds but that’s not really the deal breaker for your flower farm! You can see its the labour ! 

So split that cost across the stems you expect to get from that space. If you’re not sure then head back to last weeks Podcast number 15 where I explain those calculations and there’s a blog to go with that too.

So lets say you were growing Snapdragons in the bed in my example. It’s a 1mX4, bed so you'll need around 100  plants  and you'll cut  around 1k stems from it.  So that’s nice easy maths - I love it when that happens. But if you want a calculator for this then check out my FLOWER FARMING PLANTING PLANNER.

So £232.97  is the cost of the bed and we divide that by 1000 so each stem will cost around 23p to produce - that's cost of goods.  You’ll also need to do the same calculation for overheads that the florist does and add on a % for overheads. 

Your flower farmer overheads are likely to be a lot more than for florists as you will need to hire more land and have a lot more equipment so i’d say double it easily to around 40% 

• That will add on an extra 9 pence to the cost 

• £0.23 + £0.092 = £0.322

≈ 32p (rounded to the nearest penny)

So with a 40% overhead/profit margin added, your 23p stem becomes 32p - That's the bare minimum you MUST charge to cover all your costs. That's without a profit. If you want profit which i'm sure you do! and you want to invest ion your farm and growth then you need to charge more. 

Know Your Numbers, Know Your Worth,

Confidence comes from clarity. Pricing is not about what your customer can afford — it’s about what it actually costs to run your business.

Here’s your action plan:

• Work out your Costs 

• Audit your offerings to Cut & reprice anything draining your time or profit

• Update your website with unapologetic pricing

• Create pricing guides and bouquet recipes

• Use testimonials to justify your price

  
  

But What If They Say You’re Too Expensive?

Let them. You are supposed to be too expensive — for the wrong people.

You are not for everyone. You are for customers who care about quality, seasonality, sustainability, and style. 

Those people do exist — but they need to see you valuing your work first.

Remember: Pricing isn’t about what you can afford. It’s about what it actually costs to run your business.

And remember — clarity in pricing leads to confidence in business.