marketing, advertising, discountsWe have a small floral business that we’re just starting (back) up in a new city. A successful local bridal event company wants to add us to their vendor list, and has asked whether we can provide their clients a discount. We’ve never done a discount before, so our question is, should we do it to get clients, and more importantly, what would a reasonable discount be? We’ve been talking about 10%…
Note that you can flip things around and go for a premium.
Most if not all of the clients they’ll be providing you are clients you’d never have gotten without them. And cost - however trivial the expense compared to the venue itself - will indeed come into play when you pick your florist for your wedding unless you’re basically flush with money. So arguably, if you’re generating a profit on the extra transactions, why not?
One possibility is that it may be that you don’t want the extra business at a discount. If you’re operating at full or near-full capacity, the extra business would mean hiring more staff (or some staff to begin with) and you may or may not want to cope with that. Here, yeah… makes no sense.
With that being said, note that you could flip this around by creating a wedding brochure. That is, create a dozen or so wedding bouquet compositions, get them photographed by a professional, and have a print designer create a fancy brochure. Slap a premium price on each one (it’s a nice composition after all). Then offer a 10% discount on those compositions and as well as on a select few flowers types to decorate the venue. This’ll keep your costs predictable (flowers and selling) while still providing a good deal - just not on the whole store with random arbitrary orders flying in.
(Rinse and repeat for funerals and other appropriate events of course.)
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