We were lucky to catch up with Megan Rubin recently and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Megan, thanks for joining us today. Let’s talk about keeping costs under control when growing. How have you managed to keep costs from getting out of control?
Marble + Pine officially launched in 2015. Over the past 7 years, our gross revenue has increased over 1000%. Business has grown almost 350% since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, with 15% growth over the past year.
When our revenue increases, either our project count has increased or the value of our events has increased. In either scenario, this means we take on more costs with hard goods and disposable good products.
We could have up to 4 events in a weekend, which means increased numbers of vases, stands, candleholders, work space area and additional disposable goods all being used at the same time. Since they are all being used at once, we have needed to grow our inventory substantially over the past 2 years.
So, how do we do our best to cut costs and waste? If you’ve ever looked into the amount of waste the flower industry produces, it’s quite a lot.
Before we really started to feel the weight of inflation, we were ordering our flowers from a wholesaler in California. Mind you, we are a Florida-based business. The cost of shipping increased so significantly, we were unable to receive the amount of product to fulfill our clients visual needs. Instead of increasing our budget to cover increased flower and shipping costs, we found and established a relationship with a local wholesaler. We were then able to give an additional 25% of product back to the customer, not changing our costs on the backend.
Our hard good costs are nothing we have control over. We use our re-sale certificate to buy wholesale only. We typically buy our recurring disposable goods wholesale and in bulk.
Continuing to do all of these things doesn’t mean we aren’t feeling the effects of increased product costs because we are. In order to maintain a consistent visual aesthetic for our clients, we have increased our booking minimum to $1,000 over 2022. This became our point to where we felt we needed to be to deliver the same product to our clients without significantly changing our overall company feel.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
In 2014, after having my first child, I reached out to a few local wedding planners looking to volunteer or assist with events. I knew I wanted to be in the wedding industry, and at that time, I thought I wanted to be in planning. So when one planner reached out and allowed me to work with her and her team, I jumped at the chance.
She was branching into the floral side of the business, so some days I would assist in creating arrangements. That’s when I knew what I wanted to do. I worked with her until I discovered I was pregnant with my second child. Early in my pregnancy, I started my own exclusively floral design business. After owning my own floral business for about two years and being a full-time stay-at-home mom, life became busy, to say the least.
My family needed me at home while my husband worked full-time and went to school full-time to finish his degree. Once he was done with school in 2018, I reached out to a local florist, Marble + Pine, for a freelancing opportunity. I freelanced with M+P for a year before being offered a design position. After designing for two years, I was offered an opportunity I couldn’t resist. I was asked if I would be interested in purchasing the business — I said yes.
In December 2021, I became the new owner of Marble + Pine!
Marble + Pine is a design studio in Northern Florida that creates one-of-a-kind floral designs for events. We primarily design for weddings but would love to include corporate events in our portfolio in the future.
We’re known for keeping our floral designs organic and free-flowing. We believe it’s important to stay true to how nature presents itself, carefree and beautiful.
I’m most proud of the design and freelancing team we’ve built. Our team is dependable, fun, incredibly kind, and so talented! Marble + Pine would not be where it is now if not for its people, which is what sets us apart in Jacksonville. We’re one of the few floral companies with multiple designers and event managers, allowing us to create more events with a greater variety of styles.
What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?
For me there are two main feelings of reward. The first rewarding aspect of our work is to see the final product. The design goes from an inspirational vision onto paper and then created into life. The second feeling of reward is seeing a client’s reaction to the final product. There is so much communication and time that goes into each client’s event. When they trust us to understand and execute their vision, it’s an overwhelming feeling to see their reaction.
Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.
Our workload! I do believe most people think we simply play with flowers all day. In all actuality, handling flowers is a small portion of the work. On average we book clients about a year out. We are strictly in communication for 9 of those 12 months fine-tuning their vision. The last three months are focused on sourcing hard goods and perishable product. Since perishable products have a short shelf life, we typically only have flowers on hand for 5 days. Once we receive our living product we have a strict timeline to create the design; therefore, depending on the size of our event, we can work up to 80 hours during those short 5 days. Once the event ends, it doesn’t mean we are finished with the event! We still have on average 8 hours of clean up—cleaning buckets and hard goods.
In conclusion, this job requires an enormous amount of manual labor running with high intensity on a strict timeline. I absolutely love it, but I don’t think people realize the work that goes into it!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.marbleandpine.com
- Instagram: @marbleandpine
- Facebook: @marbleandpine
Image Credits
Nicole Villar Emily Mathewson Photography MYCKENZIE RUSSELL Photography Dana Cubbage Weddings She Exposure