Why did the seemingly beautiful flower shop business become a black hole for entrepreneurship? | Qixi Business Tips

In the past, flower shops were full of orders on Chinese Valentine's Day, but now, flower shops are closing down one after another. Why is this happening? The author talks about the influence of the times, the market of florists, and how to attract customers and expand the customer base. Let's read it together.

This year's Chinese Valentine's Day, the flower shop no longer believes in love.

In previous years, the period before Chinese Valentine's Day was often the busiest time for flower shops. Shop owners stocked up through various channels and would not feel at ease unless their shops were filled with fresh flowers, for fear that they would not be able to handle the influx of orders.

But this year, when you open the short video platform, the advice given by KOLs is unanimous: "Just buy a little more than usual, don't stockpile."

In the message area, there are many players who are lying down. Some of them did not receive a single order, some were left with psychological trauma by the dismal 520, and some made up their minds to change careers after completing their last business on Chinese Valentine's Day.

In fact, every year on the Chinese Valentine's Day, flower shops are at their peak of closing. Among them are newcomers who have just entered the industry for less than a year, as well as veterans who have been in the industry for many years.

For newcomers, after several months of "torture" from the end of the Chinese New Year to the Chinese Valentine's Day, they realize that this business is not as glamorous as it seems, and the off-season with few festivals after the Chinese Valentine's Day makes people daunted to face the operating data full of deficits.

In the eyes of veteran players, this flourishing industry has long been disrupted by years of price involution and the rampant "shovel sellers" who are trying to get their hands on something. If one wants to survive in this industry, perhaps only "all-rounders" who are proficient in marketing, photography, IP creation, art design, community operations, supply chain management, and plant cultivation have a glimmer of hope.

The data from flower-growing related companies on Qichacha is enough to prove how tragic the flower industry is, and that it is even becoming increasingly difficult to survive.

Data shows that there are about 34,000 flower-growing companies established between 1 and 3 years ago, of which 5,819 are still operating normally, with a survival rate of about one-fifth.

If the time is shortened to one year, only 2,172 of the 19,000 newly established companies are in operation, with a survival rate of nearly one in ten.

When the time was shortened again to three months, only 553 of the 6,152 newly established companies were in operation, with a survival rate of less than one-tenth.

It is so difficult for the upstream companies to survive, and the flower shops downstream are even more likely to die.

If you want to find a window to best observe the diversity of the world, the flower market is the best answer.

The businesses, shop owners, wholesalers, and florists who have gathered here with a yearning for beauty have, under the pressure of survival, launched a protracted battle. The only ones who can make them slow down their sickles a little may be the countless ordinary people who hesitate outside the flower market.

1. In the post-industrial era, flowers are sold at bargain prices

To some extent, the tragic situation of small coffee shops closing down one after another in the price war of capital is the norm in the flower industry year after year.

Under the siege of chain flower brands, fresh food e-commerce, and live-streaming e-commerce, even survival is a luxury for flower shops.

The first big mountain that faced the flower shop appeared in 2015.

This year, the flower industry welcomed a new player - Huadianshijian. It was this player that started the process of flower prices falling to rock-bottom prices.

Like many people, Zhu Yueyi, the founder of Huadianshijian, was attracted to flowers because of the great pressure from her high-intensity work. In order to comfort herself, she started buying flowers, one bouquet a week.

“The process of selecting, trimming and arranging flowers is so focused and creative that I feel deeply healed every time I finish it,” she said.

Later, buying a flower a week became Huadianshi’s main business. The “99 yuan flower package per month” campaign caused a sensation on social media once it was launched. At that time, when the “self-pleasure economy” was in its infancy, people urgently needed a symbol to show off and reward themselves.

It takes some time to quickly open up the situation. The "self-pleasure economy" is a driving force, but the more core reason lies in the low price. The reason why it can distribute goods at prices far below the market price is mainly because with the support of capital, it has realized the iteration of the supply chain model.

In the traditional flower supply chain, from flower farmers to flower shops, there are at least four or five links in between, and each link increases the price by 15% to 20%. It is discontinuous, labor-intensive, and has huge losses.

It took the time to sign cooperation agreements with large-scale planting bases, build its own automated flower processing plants, optimize cold chain transportation links, etc. It has its own factories in all the cities it covers, and has brought the flower industry from the agricultural age into the industrial age with large machines and assembly lines.

It seems that Huadianshiji is both popular and well-received. Although the "99 yuan monthly flower package business has pushed the supply chain to its limit", Zhu Yueyi's vision of "making buying flowers as cheap as buying bread" has almost been realized.

If we say that flower e-commerce represented by Huadianshijian broke the strong connection between buying flowers and festivals in traditional concepts and pulled flowers down from the altar of "luxury goods", then the subsequent entrants, with a brute force of "breaking ten skills with one force", forcibly put flowers and cabbages together.

In 2020, the second mountain that individual flower shops had to face fell to the ground, and the already meager profits were cut in half again. This year, Dingdong Maicai, Miss Fresh and Hema Fresh all started selling flowers one after another, and the fresh supply chain used to transport cabbage formed a dimensionality reduction attack on the flower industry.

The most intuitive manifestation is that it took some time to push the supply chain to its limit to sell 700 million flowers in 7 years, an average of 100 million per year, while Dingdong Maicai just sells flowers by the way, and sold 180 million in 2021.

Supported by sales volume, fresh food e-commerce has connected with a large number of flower bases.

Take Hema Fresh for example. It has 14 flower bases in Hema, Yunnan Province, and plans to expand to nearly 30 in the short to medium term. The direct purchase model from the bases can effectively help control costs and stabilize the supply of flowers. The roses sold at 19.9 yuan per bunch on Hema Fresh all year round are a reflection of this control.

In the chaos, the only ones who can compete with fresh food e-commerce are the flower growers and first-hand distributors in the live broadcast room.

These players, who should have been on the same front as the flower shops, turned around and dealt a "fatal blow" to the downstream players with the support of the modern logistics system, becoming the third most difficult mountain to climb for the flower shops.

Backed by the most suitable land for growing flowers in the world, flower farmers and first-hand distributors shouted a slogan that made downstream players tremble, "We are the origin of flowers, you can buy a box for 39 yuan." The camera turned and the flowers packed in yellow-brown cardboard boxes piled up into a small hill.

In 2022, the number of anchors from the flower and gardening industry, with Yunnan and Kunming as the main production areas, in Douyin's live broadcast rooms increased nearly 6 times.

From Huadianshi’s “making buying flowers like buying bread”, to fresh food e-commerce’s “making buying flowers like buying vegetables”, to the “39 yuan a box” in the live broadcast room, which is even cheaper than some leafy vegetables, in this colorful price war, three mountains have fallen on the heads of flower shops one after another. In order to survive, many players choose to become “shovel sellers”.

2. Only “shovel sellers” can survive

If you search for flower shops on Xiaohongshu, you will find a very interesting group.

They pretended to be flower shop owners who had failed in their business, old hands who had been in the business for many years, or flower arrangement students who had been deceived. They gave posts titles such as "Confessions of a Flower Shop Owner", "Sisters, listen to my advice, don't open a flower shop easily", "Don't go to flower arrangement school", etc., to share their success stories or lessons learned from bitter experiences with others.

However, after clicking into the text, you will find that after a seemingly sincere but meaningless review and suggestions, the focus finally falls on "learning flower arrangement". He also sincerely invites you to chat with him privately to help you avoid some flower arrangement schools.

In fact, these accounts pretending to be experienced people are all "shills" of flower arrangement schools. The message revealed behind the various marketing methods is that in this prosperous "besieged city", only "shovel sellers" can survive.

Objectively speaking, the level of flower arrangement is indeed one of the key factors that determine whether a flower shop can survive. At a time when flower prices are dropping day by day and profits are getting thinner and thinner, the only way for most flower shops to survive is to impress customers with aesthetics and sell the design skills of florists.

According to another logic, as online e-commerce becomes more and more developed, the cost of flowers decreases, and consumers who want to please themselves can also take classes in flower art schools and complete the loop of emotional value by making their own flower art works.

The fact that you can open a flower shop or enjoy yourself has increased the cost-effectiveness of flower arrangement courses. In the external promotional tweets of flower arrangement schools, there is often a separate column at the end of the article to list the flower shops of students, which subtly conveys the idea that learning flower arrangement is not only consumption, but also an investment.

However, the moments when flower shops close are not recorded as carefully as their opening.

The death of a flower shop is often quieter than the withering of a flower. It is even difficult to notice the day when the owner stopped sharing today's floral works on WeChat Moments. Only when a certain festival comes and customers click on his profile picture again, they will find that the flower shop has been closed for a long time.

For the owner of the flower shop who watched it die, the process was much more painful. Beneath the quiet appearance, love and ideals were rotting.

Like Zhu Yueyi, Julia also chose to resign because she was drained of energy by life in a big company, hoping to find comfort in a sea of ​​flowers.

So, she first chose to become an apprentice in a florist shop. Later, because she felt that she could not learn any "dry goods", she paid thousands of yuan of her own money to go to a flower art school to study flower arrangement design and other skills full-time.

However, when the flower shop really opened, the boxes of flowers became the main axis of her life. Going to the wholesale flower market at three or four in the morning became the norm. Every day, she was trapped in mechanical and repetitive labor such as pricking, packaging, and delivery. Her fingers were pierced by flower thorns countless times. She went from being afraid to being numb to the caterpillars hidden in the stamens. Her originally slender fingers became rough, covered with wounds and dirt...

Julia slowly realized the other meaning of what her flower arrangement teacher said: "Flower arrangement is the profession closest to the soul." It is close to beauty, but even closer to pain.

However, hard work does not always guarantee reward.

On May 20th of a certain year, Julia prepared enough goods and decided to go all out. To her surprise, only two people placed orders with her that day, and no one came into the store to buy anything. The total sales amount was even less than 520 yuan.

Later she found out that two streets away, there was a flower wholesaler holding a promotional event, with flowers costing 1 yuan each and a bouquet of 33 roses for 99 yuan.

She had heard of this flower wholesaler. His flower processing workshop claimed that "if it doesn't make money, there will be no rent." The turnover during festivals can reach over one million, and he also holds flower arrangement training classes on weekdays.

Faced with the betrayal from upstream, Julia had no choice but to secretly decide not to purchase from this wholesaler in the future.

After the epidemic, Julia closed the flower shop as she had lost most of her start-up capital. She still loves flowers and would buy a bunch when she passes by the flower shop, but she still feels tired when she thinks of the days when she was surrounded by flowers.

On TikTok, someone summarized the secrets of the flower industry like this: "Wholesalers want to do training, trainers want to be flower shops, and flower shops want to be wholesalers."

It is indeed true. In the cycle of looking at the mountain above, everyone is looking for the sweeter piece of cake, but the reality is that the flower industry is like a pyramid standing in the desert. Only tourists can feel and appreciate it, and the people in it are just brick and stone porters. There is no romance at all.

3. Unless you are superman, don’t open a flower shop

Generally speaking, the customers of a flower shop can be divided into three categories: individual customers, corporate customers, and garden projects. Each of these three customer groups has its own advantages and disadvantages, and the corresponding skills are also different, but it is not easy to form a closed loop.

As mentioned earlier, with flowers nowadays becoming extremely cheap, flower shops can only rely on aesthetics and design to impress customers, and then establish emotional connections and manage private domain traffic.

However, a cruel reality is that unless you are talented, or have been exposed to flower arrangement since childhood, the flower arrangement skills you learn quickly in a flower arrangement school in half a month or even a month are not enough to impress consumers.

Indeed, flower arrangement is essentially an art about space, layers, and colors, which also includes philosophical insights into nature and life.

But in today's world where short videos are popular and people are pursuing quick and easy information expression, it may be difficult for flower shops to accumulate enough customers to appreciate the artistic conception behind the flowers.

Another paradox is that when flowers are given as gifts, buyers tend to be conservative when choosing bouquets, seeking to “avoid mistakes”, which in turn makes it difficult for differentiated products to reach people who truly possess aesthetic abilities.

Therefore, many "guides to opening a flower shop" today will mention building a personal IP and expanding customer base through online traffic.

However, as the platform's traffic dividend recedes, even MCN agencies are worried about how to obtain traffic. If a flower shop wants to stand out on the Internet on its own, the energy it puts in video shooting, editing, and copywriting is several times more than that of opening an ordinary flower shop.

To take a step back, even in terms of aesthetics, flower chain brands with capital support can more easily recruit outstanding florists and take more exquisite photos.

For example, Eric Chauvin, the artistic director of the flower brand The Fauves, is one of the most sought-after floral designers in the world, the royal florist of the Monaco royal family, and has collaborated with the Dior fashion show.

There is some similarity between the two types of businesses: enterprise and greening engineering, that is, in addition to product quality, information acquisition and personal connections are also equally important.

Alice is the owner of a flower shop that only does floral installations and garden designs. The average customer spending is around 100,000 or 200,000 yuan, which is almost the annual revenue of many small flower shops.

The main reason why she was able to gain a foothold in these two fields is her background in civil engineering and the personal connections she had accumulated while working in a design institute.

Unlike the traditional sale of bouquets of flowers, companies often have requirements for the survival rate of plants. In order to ensure water supply and light, Alice even needs to open architectural design software such as CAD and personally design the underground water and electricity pipelines, and intervene in the project at the construction site stage to prevent early omissions from leading to a decline in reputation and damage to profits.

Even though the professional barriers are so high, Alice still feels anxious.

As the real estate market recedes and the number of new stores decreases, Alice, like all flower shops, is trying to find new customers. In addition to negotiating collaborations from all over the world, she also started shooting videos and live streaming for the garden created by the studio.

Finally, if you still want to open a flower shop and hope to make a living from it, perhaps you should understand that the development of the flower industry is essentially a process in which the emotional value carried by flowers continues to decay. Therefore, if you want to raise the average customer spending, the key actually lies beyond flowers.

To put it simply, don't think of yourself as a flower shop, but rather as a place that provides services like a beauty salon. The key is to make consumers feel physically and mentally happy.

For example, we can expand some flower arrangement classes, provide some light meals, focus on social interaction, or develop some health care and spiritual projects, using flower arrangement culture as a guide to enrich the daily schedule.

Perhaps in the eyes of many people, such "unconventional ways" deviate from the original intention of the flower shop, but the reality is that when a flower shop becomes a livelihood and the operator needs to rely on it to support his own life, there is no other way except to bow to reality.

Fortunately, love and ideals will not fade when combined with reality.

Author: Bai Jiajia

Source: Caijing Wuji