Flowers Florist Link
Flower & Florist Information Directory

The purpose of this site is to inform you about your choices for buying and caring for flowers because knowing about the floral industry will help you to make informed decisions about buying flowers and dealing with florists. This will allow you to get the right flowers for the right occasion at a good price.

People have been cultivating and selling flowers for a long time. Recent advances in both agricultural and communications technology have resulted in many new choices for consumers.

While more choices for consumers is generally a positive thing, it can also result in confusion and controversy.

Most of the confusion and controversy results in competition within the floral community.

The main players in the floral industry are:

• Growers
• Floral Supply manufacturers
• Florists
• Delivery services
• Wire Services
• Marketing media

Each of these businesses plays a vital role in the floral industry and each plays a role in the price and quality of the flowers you buy.

Unless you are willing and able to deliver the flowers yourself you are going to be using a delivery service. Almost all local florists have delivery vans and are very reliable at making deliveries in their area. Growers and many online providers use Fed Ex, UPS or DHL to deliver flowers.

Growing flowers is advanced agriculture and requires a staggering variety equipment and supplies. Everything from fertilizer to ribbon falls into this category. Likewise, a great deal of specialized equipment and supplies are needed by a floral shop. Unless you plan to grow flowers or learn to arrange flowers, you probably will never buy directly from this type of business.

The floral business is very competitive so flowers are marketed heavily in all local and national media. This includes, television, radio, magazines, newspapers, direct mail, billboards and increasingly, the Internet.

"Ornamental and Floral" is the general term for any farmer who is growing flowers or other ornamental plants as a crop. Often, growers produce vegetables as well as flowers at different times of year. Growing flowers is an important international agricultural business. Growing flowers has much in common with growing a crop like strawberries since both are highly perishable and must be properly stored and shipped.

You can often save money and get better flowers by buying directly from the grower.

The floral industry is a complex business. The complexity begins with the fact that growing flowers is a type of farming and flowers are difficult to grow, handle and ship.

The largest wire services are FTD and Teleflora. They have been around for almost 100 years and have over 30,000 florists in their networks. In recent years they have focused more and more on using the Internet for their marketing and business infrastructure.

For most consumers, wire services are the best way to order flowers. They are very reliable and in independent tests, flowers ordered through wire services were of the highest quality. Local florists are going to make sure that wire service orders are correctly filled. The reason? Florists with too many complaints are dropped from the wire service's network. This is a disaster for most local florists, so they avoid it at all costs.

Florists are the traditional link the public has with the floral business. Most local florists are small businesses with well under $1 million per year in sales. They care for and store flowers, take orders, make floral arrangements, make deliveries and all the hundreds of other tasks required to run a business.

In addition to having a large variety of technical and business skills, a successful florist must also be highly artistic.

When buying directly from a local florist you have 3 options:

• Buy flowers by visiting a florist's shop
• Buy flowers by phoning the florist's shop
• Buy flowers by visiting the florist's web site