We made it, friends! Time to turn the page on a busy and beautiful 2024. It’s comical to think back to this time last year, when we had no idea what was in store for us. We knew it would be a hectic one at the farm, but definitely didn’t expect to throw a baby into the mix. 😅

Robbie takes a camera with him everywhere he goes, and some days it drives me crazy. He’s always snapping photos when I least expect it or when I’m trying to get stuff done. But finally sitting down to look through some of his shots, I’m so grateful he did. He captured a year I’ll cherish. One that demanded a lot, but taught us so much. The one we got to meet our daughter.

Once I got through the initial shock (and joy, too!) finding out I was pregnant, panic and overwhelm set in when I learned my due date was in September: the busiest possible time, smack in the middle of wedding season. Do we keep all of our weddings booked? Do we give refunds to the couples booked August-October? How do we tell them?

Luckily Kelly was already on board to help out, so we tackled a plan together pretty quickly. Though I definitely don’t recommend farming in summer heat during the third trimester and giving birth at the height of the season mid September (there were a lot of tears on my part, lol), we survived. Thrived at times, even.

Whenever things get challenging, we come back to why we started: that life is short, so best to go for it and make the most of our time here. Frankie’s arrival was a surprise, but it was an invitation to embrace the big picture and think about how to integrate all the things we knew we wanted at some point. Being a ‘yes’ for both parenting and running a business.

A lot of people have made comments throughout the season along the lines of “I don’t know how you guys are pulling this off” and aside from an amazing team and supportive family members, here’s my abbreviated answer:

It’s really messy (literally and figuratively!). We lived in total chaos for most of the year. 😆🫠 Our house was in disarray 24/7, we ordered a *lot* of take out, and I left wet clothes in the washing machine more times than I can count. We brought Frankie into our existing world instead of trying to pause everything or make it all perfect. We accepted it would be a crazy (temporary) season, gave ourselves some grace, and we let it be hard sometimes. Like a garden, a little unruliness can be grounds for growth, flexibility, and beauty.

This year also forced us to level up in a way we weren’t necessarily ready for: hiring and managing more employees and creating operating procedures and systems. While we’re still working through a lot of strategy and development (there’s a ton of planning and structure required for both the farm and the design studio!) we’ve made a massive amount of progress and I’m proud of that.

2024 By the Numbers

Ok now for the nitty gritty! Our revenue roughly broke down in the following categories:

Weddings & events: 72%

Subscriptions: 5.5%

Truck events: 8%

Retail: 3%

Workshops: 10%

Wholesale: 1.5%

Compared to what I projected:

Weddings & events: 59%

Subscriptions: 7%

Truck events: 7%

Retail: 4%

Workshops: 14%

Wholesale: 9%

Not wildly far off, though we expected to do more in wholesale and workshops at the start of the year and less in weddings and events. Those buckets started shifting and weddings grew, so it makes sense that we did less wholesale since we needed all of our own flowers and more for the event work, especially early on in the season. We also scratched three months of workshops we typically would do around Frankie’s arrival Aug-Oct. I’ll share a bit more about projections for 2025 in my next post.

We completed 36 weddings for the most wonderful couples. There was a lot of stunning color and a few beautiful neutral palettes, with scopes ranging from simple personal flowers to complex installations. We worked at familiar venues like Page Hill, Pepperrell Cove and Saltonstall Farm, and new-to-us venues including Langdon House, The Inn at Pleasant Lake, and Longlook Farm. While each design was unique, the most common request was a whimsical, colorful garden party vibe with seasonal flowers: right up our alley! We have continued to refine our organic, nature-inspired style and I look forward to doing so even more next year. Every season reinforces what we do well and who our ideal clients are and this one was no different.

We hired 2 employees and had 12 freelancers throughout the season. Bringing on Kelly and Caroline in a more formal capacity and having a rotating team to help with both the farm and design work was the best thing we could have done. While it was a lot of work to coordinate schedules, plan and create task lists, and delegate projects that are sometimes easier to knock out ourselves, it allowed us to be ready for Frankie’s arrival and be present in that moment we knew we’d never get back. I’m so grateful for this crew and all their hard work and dedication, and proud of the beautiful work they did for our customers.

We ran 50 subscriptions. Our largest cohort yet, a feat to pull off each time if I’m being honest. Especially the weeks we had multiple weddings and a newborn. 🤪While I loved seeing all those flowers each time and subscription sales give us a boost heading into winter when we need it most, efficiency was a struggle (mostly because of deliveries) and our profitability decreased in the weddings category since we ended up needing to buy flowers from other farms. I’m happy to support other local growers, but it definitely impacts the vertical integration we strive for. We’ve refined our subscription program a bit based on some learnings which I’m feeling good about (more on that later).

All in all, the business saw 108% year over year growth. Slightly more than the 100% I projected at the beginning of the year.

Other Wins

We were thrilled to see one of the weddings we contributed to named The Best of Seacoast Weddings 2024 in Seacoast Weddings Magazine. It was a special one, being the Hitched Heroes Weddings in which vendors donate services to a military couple each year, coordinated by Love Affair Suite.

Clover was featured in New Hampshire BRIDES magazine as one of their 12 “things we love” in their Spring/Summer 2024 issue: so much fun to see her in all her glory!

I was also humbled to be nominated for two awards in the Women’s Business League: Inspiring Innovator of the Year and the Customer Care Award. Both meant so much to me, since creativity and having a forward-thinking mindset are some of my core values, and we pride ourselves on providing exceptional service to our customers.

Through the support of our community, we were able to donate flowers and/or funds to eight different charitable organizations including a couple fun classes for both kids and adults. I look forward to more of this programming in 2025.

On a similar thread, I completed my certification in Therapeutic Horticulture from The University of North Carolina in December, an amazing program that I can’t wait to put to use. The intention of TH is to create a process that uses plants and nature-based activities to improve a person's emotional, psychological, and physical well-being. We dipped our toes in with art & flower camp for kids this year with Amy at Home Remedy Studio, and we have some exciting new projects on the horizon.

Challenges & Lessons Learned

The biggest financial hit this year was Tulipgate 2024, wherein 90% of our 4,000 fall-planted bulbs didn’t bloom. 🥴 We believe it was due to poor drainage where they were planted (in the ground, through a very wet winter) but it’s hard to know for sure. Either way this had a major impact on our Mother’s Day profit margins. We planted all of our tulips in raised beds this fall to ensure that doesn’t happen again. Oof!

As I mentioned, we quickly realized we needed some systems this year when we hired more help and found out the baby was coming. This was trial by doing and I learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t. I tend to operate in my own head even though I know better, and I’m reluctant to say it came to a tearful scene of Robbie forcing the spreadsheets out of my brain. I’m still not done with this project and have a lot to improve going forward, but getting many SOPs down on paper did help a ton. Don’t tell him I said that. 😉

Overall our biggest challenge was balancing the farm work with the event work and splitting our time between both. While weddings and events obviously have to get executed, when the farm isn’t prioritized we fall behind in seeding and planting schedules and thus have less of our own product to work with. Hiring Caroline who worked at the farm helped immensely to get back on track with production schedules and harvesting in time for a busy summer, but we never fully recovered from a late start in the spring and it impacted our profitability for sure. We also probably overbooked weddings, events and subscriptions (the year before, prior to finding out I was pregnant) and ran into some pricing issues not knowing how much labor we would need in the fall. Lesson learned there!

All that said, we’re currently facing perhaps our biggest hurdle yet, and while it’s still unfolding and there’s certainly more to come, it also could (and hopefully will) lead to something exciting. We just don’t know what it’ll look like yet. Isn’t that always how it goes?

In the next blog post, I’ll focus on our 2025 vision and goals, and we’ll be sharing our farm plan soon too. For now, time for a glass of champagne and some rest!

Cheers to a wonderful season, friends. Thanks for being here: we’re so grateful for our community. Wishing you a happy (and maybe a little messy) new year, full of flowers. We can’t wait to see what’s in store for 2025. 🎊✨