What do you do in winter? Embracing the season as a season-led florist
We get asked a lot about what we do in the winter months. How can you be a season-led florist when there aren’t any locally grown flowers to work with?
The answer feels fairly obvious to us: we embrace winter and the lack of flowers, and we work less. But this is so at odds with the way people normally view work and life that for many winter without flowers seems like an insurmountable challenge. So we thought it was time to explore this in more detail and challenge the ‘conventional’ view of working at the same pace throughout the year, and importing flowers to allow this.
Overwintering: Slowing Down with the Seasons
Winter is a time of slowing down for all organisms. Plants and animals adapt to the colder temperatures, lower light levels, and reduced food supply through dormancy, hibernation, hoarding or migration. Historically, humans have done the same—harvesting and preserving food in the summer to last through the colder months and reducing their activity in line with their agrarian living.
As people now predominantly no longer work on the land and with today’s world of global supply chains, the norm has become working at the same pace all year round with the expectation that we can access anything, anytime, from anywhere, regardless of season. Businesses are measured by spreadsheets and monthly revenue targets, with success measured by a steady growth curve moth by month.
Only, seasonality is cyclical, not linear.
So rather than try and shoehorn our business model into this linear model of continuous activity, we choose to embrace the seasonality and view things more holistically.
A Holistic Business Model
Floristry has traditionally always been a seasonal business. Even with imports, demand for flowers ebb and flow through the year, with the summer months the busiest due to summer weddings and events. The festive period has also always been busy for florists, but in general the winter months are naturally quieter. This is the reason why Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day have become such important commercial dates for the floristry industry—they have enabled crucial revenue during otherwise slower months.
But for those of us committed to working seasonally and sustainably, instead of viewing the winter months as a challenging time in which we ‘can’t’ work according to our values, we simply accept the lack of flowers and slow down in work.
To allow for this, instead of looking at revenue month to month, we set annual revenue targets. Greater revenue is generated during the busier months of the flower season and the pre-Christmas rush, and this surplus is used to tide us over the quieter months of winter.
A winter clean is the new spring clean
While winter might be lean in terms of flowers, it is the perfect time to rest and reflect on your business. Once you have cleaned up the studio from the inevitable pre-Christmas chaos (tidy studio, tidy mind…), take the lull in work to do a winter clean of your business. Revisit your website, refresh your branding, update your portfolio with images from the previous season, do your accounts, and take the time to properly analyse your business. What worked last year? What didn’t? What can you do differently? Where do you want to focus your energy in the coming year? What do you want to get rid of to make space for new, more brand aligned work?
Spring and summer you will love winter you for sorting all the housekeeping out before you hit the high season and have no time to sit down and issue invoices, let alone do all the back end admin.
The subtle art of saying no
Whilst the volume of floristry work naturally reduces in the winter months, there are still customers who want flowers, and we understand that it can feel daunting to say no to what a potential client may view as a perfectly reasonable request. But in our experience, when you take the time to explain why you work seasonally and sustainably, and offer an in-season alternative, most clients understand. More often than not, people simply haven’t considered the fact that flowers aren’t naturally growing during the winter, and when you explain it, they ‘get it’. And if they don’t, to be honest, they probably weren’t ‘your client’ in the first place.
And it doesn’t have to be a ‘hard no’ to a request for flowers. There are always flowers to work with. They just might look different to what people have been conditioned to expect from floristry.
Seek out the treasured stems of winter
So what does season led floristry look like in the winter?
Winter weddings can be filled with evergreens and an abundance of candles, or terracotta pots filled with snow drops or early spring bulbs. Bridal bouquets can be single ingredient bouquets of pure white cyclamen, filled with winter foliage or designs using dried ingredients.
Funeral work is in many ways more meaningful when plants in root are included among foliage, as these can be planted by the family afterwards as a memento.
And a small posy of snowdrops or iris reticulata or an armful of fragrant winter honeysuckle, early blossom, and catkins provide beautiful, if more unexpected (which in our opinion makes them more notable) gift bouquets. As does a gift card with the promise of an abundance of flowers when the season restarts—The anticipation of waiting for something special makes it even sweeter when it finally arrives. Something we all seem to have forgotten in our world of instant gratification.
Embracing the season
The beauty of working as a season-led florist is in embracing the rhythm of the seasons and connecting to nature. Winter doesn’t have to be seen as a "gap" to fill with imported flowers—it offers a time for you to connect more deeply with the season and to offer your clients something truly unique.
By accepting the natural slow-down, and adjusting your business to reflect the seasonal shift in work, you create space to allow everything you do to be intentional—whether that’s resting, refining your craft, or doing the important behind-the-scenes work that will set you up for a successful year ahead.
So, embrace the stillness that comes with the quieter months, look at your business model through a more holistic lens and find the beauty in the rare, treasured stems that the season offers.