Your Brand Goes Beyond Pretty Flowers and Logos

When you first started your flower business, did you make sure that you had a business name, Instagram handle and a cute logo OR did you create a ‘brand’? I will admit, my floristry business beginnings had me focussed so much on the name and the logo, purely so I could make my invoices look professional and I could feel like a ‘real life florist’.

If this story feels familiar to you, you are not alone. The concept of branding is often misunderstood to be just the visual components: Logo, colours, font and symbols. So, for the next month in Wildflower Academy, we’re going to be deep-diving into the importance of branding.

For week one, I'm taking you back to basics. Defining what a brand means, what it's worth and why it's the most integral thing to you and your customers. We workshop how you can build a strong, cohesive brand by exploring the Vision, Values, Voice and Visuals that make up your brand identity.

A lot of us get confused about what a brand is. We often think it's just the logo, visuals and the pretty fonts and colours. I did too at the start. 

Building your brands vision is the foundation, and a cornerstone to its success. It's the reason why everything else comes together and the reason why your customers will resonate with you. It helps direct the future of your business and every decision that is made thereafter.  

If you have read the book ‘Start with Why’ by Simon Sinek, you will know he speaks about how the vision all comes down to you, which is the coolest, most interesting part of your entire brand. If you want to stand out, if you want a really simple and easy trick on how to stand out from any other florist in the world, country or your area, the easiest way to do this is to inject yourself into your brand. I don't mean just talking on camera or just showing your face. I mean injecting everything about you. 

A common misconception in floristry world is that your flowers and the visuals in your branding (font and the colours etc), need to be so unique to stand out from the others.  Many florists get caught up in this belief and think “I need to go buy weirder flowers. I need to make my colour combos more interesting. I need to put so many different varieties of flowers in there.”

If you want to set yourself apart, you don't need to have the weirdest flowers in the world for absolutely no reason at all. Unless the brief calls for that of course. What you need to do is inject yourself into your brand so that you can set yourself apart. By talking to your story, beliefs, values, history, mission and what it is that you want your business and your brand to bring to the table.

Think about:

Why did you become a florist?

What are you doing here?

What do flowers mean to you?

How did you become a florist? 

Where did you become a florist?

What is it that you want to bring to the world in your business, that you don't think other people are doing?

What is it that flowers deliver for you?

What are you solving for people?

Who are your ideal clients?

If you haven't figured out your ideal client yet, jump into the Wildflower Academy membership and watch the ideal client workshop. Spoiler: It’s not just somebody who wants to spend money with you. I promise you, it's so much more than that)

What is it that you really value?

For me, I value sustainability. I think it's important to look after the earth where our flowers are growing from. I think as a business, it's my responsibility to do my part. But some people have different values to that and that is good and okay.

What are your core beliefs that you carry into your business?

One thing for me is that I believe that everyone deserves to get paid fairly, accurately and treated really well. I believe that my freelancers are equal to. Their time and their skills are so valuable to me, more valuable than money. But I know other people don't believe in that.

I also strongly believe that floral design is an art form.

I believe that you're allowed to love your job and you should love your job or find a career that makes you really happy and fulfilled. These are things that I hold so deeply in my, in my heart, like, that I can't even change my belief around it. 

What type of flowers do you love? What type of flowers do you hate?

What colours do you think go well together? 

What do you think about weddings?

What do you think about retail flowers?

And to dive deeper, what's your biggest guilty pleasure? What is something that makes you happy? What is something that you're not passionate about? That's important too. These are all things that are important for you to know and write down and have an understanding of. That's going to help you create a really strong identity in the vision of your brand.

And all of these things are important for you to share with the world and are a combination of elements that are going to make your business and your brand stand out from the rest.

You could go and get the boldest logo in the world or make the quirkiest floral arrangement ever. Your vision is what's most integral.

Got a cute logo but no clue otherwise? Let's change that. We’ve just kicked off our branding module inside Wildflower Academy which we will be deep-diving for the next four weeks. Jump on into the Wildflower Academy membership and you'll get access to this module straight away and to 100s of other classes. Plus, our really beautiful, supportive floral community, which has new posts every single day of florists asking questions, sharing wins, sharing fails, sharing tips, tricks, resources, everything. 

I'll see you in there!