We recently connected with Susan Armour and have shared our conversation below.

Susan , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. To kick things off, we’d love to hear about things you or your brand do that diverge from the industry standard.

When my son and I first had the idea to open an events design studio, we did a little research. We had heard over and over that it was hard to get enough customers because there was so much competiton. We did two things that we’re pretty sure others did not think of. Firstly, we analyzed the on-line presence of the other event florists. What would make a customer click on those ads, as opposed to the other 60+ listings? What were they saying to try to attract business? We noticed that the gist of everyone’s banner or tagline was some version of “our flowers are very beautiful.” We put ourselves in the place of the consumer, and realized that the only thing was as really driving them to a particular ad was the location of the studio. (Since all flowers are very beautiful!) And since you can only feature one location (for the most part), you were not going to get a big share of the business. So, we decided that the other idea we could present was affordability. No one has any idea how much wedding flowers cost, so what if we could use a banner on the top that said “Affordable?” And what if we display 40-50 sample photos with pricing when they clicked on our website? That was or 2nd idea to try to get on-line customers to contact us. We executed both of those ideas, and every year we have outperformed our on-line competion by at least 30% – in some cycles as much as 60%!

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

My son majored in Film in college, and I was always apprehensive about his ability to make a living with that type of degree. I knew he had to do something “artsy”, and after investigating several possibilites, we found that the combination of my marketing skills and his artistic flair would work well for a floral design studio. It took him several years to actually work in the business full-time, as he did try to pursue a career in film or television, but by the time he got married and had children, he was ready to commit full-time. Meanwhile, business was growing rapidly and we opened 2 more studios, and were able to service the entire Baltimore/Washington Metro area from these three locations. (Yep, I was a “helicopter mom” of the 1990’s for sure…) We now have 5 full-time designers and 3 part-timers, and we are very proud of the fact that if you are a full-time designer with us, you can have income between $80-100K per year – that is almost triple what the typical florists in this area make.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

When we first opened the business, neither one of us had ever designed flowers before. We began taking lessons at the local community college, and also private lessons from an area expert, but like any other skill, there is a big learning curve. So we got the idea to try to solicit some immediate business (while working out of our basement) by fessing up that we were new and offering what we thought was an irresistible deal – we advertised on Craigslist that we were a new floral studio, and that we would do your wedding at cost plus 10% for the first 5 responses. We immediately got about 15 responses, so we did the first 5 at the 10%, then offered the next 5 at 20%, then the next 5 at 30%. All took us up on the offer. Some of the weddings were very small, most were medium-sized, but there were 2 really large complicated ones, too! We were able to sort of “practice” on these customers without worrying that our work was not up to par because we gave a fantastic deal and were upfront about our experience level. We both had other jobs so we were able to survive this first 16-18 months. After we got through our first two years (without incident!), the online reviews started coming in, and then we had not only the strength of clever marketing but a dozen 5-star reviews, which really count a lot in our industry.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

The reason we are the top-ranked wedding florist on both of the largest lead-gathering platforms is because we have a good sysytem, which we consistently implement. In the very beginning, we read and sorted all the competitors’ on-line reviews, from lowest to highest, and studied which mistakes/misunderstandings appear most frequently. Then we made sure we were able to set expectations in our process to try to prevent similar mishaps at our studio. We do each quote on a spreadsheet with a photo, detailed description, price, and delivery time clearly stated. So, the common complaint of what the flowers actually looked like when they arrived (color and size were big complaints) is covered by the photo. Also we do not allow designers to work here that tend to run late. You can NOT deliver wedding flowers late to the venue. That complaint appeared frequently on line. Planners like to refer us because we are 100% reliable and transparent. Venues like to refer us because they see our beautiful work and we make sure we are respectful when we deliver.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.ScentsationalFlorals.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/scentsationalfloraldesigns?igsh=MXU0ZHR3dDM5eDFzNg%3D%3D&utm_source=qr
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ScentsationalFlorals?mibextid=LQQJ4d