Customer Education: The Story of our ‘flower dollar’ poster
The Flower Dollar Poster
To save you all money on shipping, we’re now offering this as a JPEG file for you to print at home or at your local print center!
People have no idea how expensive flowers are to grow. They have no clue that when they buy a $30 bouquet from me, only a small fraction of that money goes in my pocket. And they have no real understanding of where that same $30 would go if they were buying a grocery store bouquet.
There are lots of ways to try to educate customers, but one method I see flower farmers using - to their own peril - is shame and guilt.
I’ve been working so hard to grow you these flowers.
Please support our farm - every little bit counts.
We need you to buy or else we can’t stay in business.
Sure, that last one may work if its used sparingly and truly applies, but in general, this tactic doesn’t endear you to potential customers. People want to feel good when they buy something, and being guilted just doesn’t feel good.
So what does work when it comes to customer education?
Enter my idea for a poster to make and display at my farmstand that would show my customers the financial reality behind running a little flower farm. Just pure information, made clear, displayed in a fun visual way, for them to check out on their own time.
It had many iterations, starting with my first sketches in 2018.
Version 1.0: A simple chalkboard.
I started small. I’m the world’s worst artist so don’t laugh at me too hard! It wasn’t great but it worked! I started engaging in conversations around the percentages and categories with customers, and it really opened up some doors there.
Version 2.0: A better chalkboard, with better, customer-generated language.
By this time it had been a few years and I’d been able to both talk to customers in person about the poster, but also watch/listen to their reactions on my security cameras. Creepy? Sure. Amazingly helpful to me? 100%.
I often would hear a partner or husband of a shopper reading the numbers aloud while their partner shopped. I could hear their surprise at certain things, their realizations (“well, I guess that does make sense that a farm needs to pay for things like bookkeeping”), and most importantly, I could discover what language they used and adapt the poster to fit their definitions.
One example came from them not understanding that the owner’s pay came out of profit, so I then changed the category name and pulled out asset expenditures into their own category.
Version 3.0 : A professional photograph with real flower petals, improved graphics and further refined customer-generated language!
This is what you see today. I worked with the great Molly DeCoudreaux to take the photo, and then I overlaid it with graphics and text I created in Canva. It started early in the morning in my field in Petaluma, CA, where I scurried around as the sun was rising to get petals of all different colors. I hopped in the car, drove the 90 minutes to Molly’s studio in SF, where I promptly realized that I had left the bags of petals on the processing table. D’oh!
So, as one does, I drove over and double-parked in front of Bi-rite market, the cutest specialty grocer you’ve ever seen (one where I’ve sold many bouquets over the years), to buy flowers for petals only. What a funny experience. I ended up with a mixed bouquet from the great Full Belly Farm.
I pulled apart the petals and we went to town trying out different backdrops (slabs), and eventually decided on this cool black one. We worked and reworked the circle, colors and pie slice sizes until we knew we had it.
Then I took to Canva, and the rest is history!
I’ve loved seeing this poster in farm stands and market stalls across the country. It warms my heart!