Florist School Online: Growing Your Business with Local Flower Sourcing with Ellen Frost

Cultivate Your Customer’s Passion for Flowers

Registration Opens November 2020

Ellen Frost of Local Color Flowers at her studio in the Waverly neighborhood of Baltimore, MD. (Photo by Laura Chase de Formigny)

Florist School Online: Growing Your Business with Local Flower Sourcing with Ellen Frost

Ellen Frost has built her floral business exclusively on locally grown flowers. She designs wedding centerpieces with them. She delivers them in birthday  bouquets, She peddles them in bunches right out of a bucket. The flowers growing on her neighboring farms are more than simply the product she sells. They make sense to her. They represent her values. They tell her story (and she tells their’s). Most importantly, locally-grown flowers set Ellen’s shop apart and build a loyal community that makes her business thrive.

Customers are passionate about flowers and want to have a meaningful experience when making their purchase. They want to go to a place they belong where there is always something new and wonderful. They want to hear stories about the flowers, how they’re grown, who grew them, and about the farms. Customers want to know their florist. They want interesting designs and unique blooms. Local flowers provide the florist a precious opportunity to make their customers a member of their flower tribe by building loyalty and fueling a sales engine. Seasonal, unique, locally-grown flowers create the stories, make the connections and create the valuable community of flower buyers committed to your business.

Photo by Laura Chase de Formigny

Establishing yourself as a trusted local resource and maximizing the potential of featuring local flowers in your business can produce tremendous benefits. As you might expect, sourcing local isn’t as easy as cold calling the farm down the road for an order. Establishing and cultivating those business relationships require guidance and knowledge from a seasoned professional. In this course, Ellen shares her lessons learned from over a decade of exclusively sourcing local flowers for her floral design business:

Ellen will teach you:

  • How to build relationships with farmers
  • The logistics of procuring locally-grown flowers
  • Marketing, selling and differentiating with locally-grown flowers
  • How to build and sustain a network of local, interdependent suppliers and consumers
  • A overview of the landscape of the global and national cut flower industry and the significance of locally sourced flowers in the industry and to your business
  • How to examine your motivation for going local and capitalize on your authentic story
  • How to build a loyal and returning customer base for a thriving floral business

If you are an aspiring florist, an established florist looking to re-invigorate sales, a farmer-florist who needs to embellish your own output, a farmer looking for new sales outlet, this course will provide you with a thorough roadmap to source your product locally and insight into the business of local flowers.

This 6-week self-paced course includes video classes plus weekly live Q&A sessions and a private discussion panel for students. Students will speak directly with Ellen and be able to ask anything during these Q&As to get her feedback and advice on their own florist efforts.

Registration for this course will only be open for 5 days: November 16 to 21, 2020. The 6-week course will begin on January 4, 2021. Course cost is $495.

What is NOT included in this course: This course is focused on how to source local flowers for your business and ways local flowers benefit your business. This is not a flower arranging, growing or taxonomy course. This is a business course solely addressing local flower sourcing and does not include other elements of business planning, budgeting, development, or execution.

Meet Ellen Frost:

Ellen Frost loves flowers. Even more, she loves owning and operating a flower studio which exclusively sources local flowers. Ellen founded her company, Local Color Flowers, in 2008 as a part-time wedding floral business to provide Baltimore area couples a more sustainable flower option for their celebrations. Over the past 12 years, Ellen has grown Local Color Flowers into a thriving business adding floral design classes, corporate events, subscriptions, and retail as well as creative social and educational community events – all using 100% locally grown flowers. Ellen’s business is a vital contributor to Baltimore’s local economy and a vibrant community resource. Read more…

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