Episode 167: All The Details with Corrine Heck, PFCI
With Vonda away, Lori and Ellie sit down with Corrine Heck, founder and CEO of Details Flowers Software — a woman who took 22 trips in 2022 to meet florists face to face, and whose path from beachside wedding florist to software CEO is one of the more unlikely stories in the industry. If the word "software" makes you break out in hives, this conversation is the antidote.
From hundreds of weddings to a million-dollar pitch
Corrine worked for a florist, then a Miami import company, before opening a beachside boutique in Central Florida in 2002 and designing hundreds and hundreds of weddings over 16 years. Ordering precisely — knowing her margins on every event — was how she stayed profitable, and she pushed Excel as far as it could go before hitting the wall: spreadsheets don't talk to each other, and every time she shared hers with other florists, they broke her calculations. High-end Orlando wedding planners kept telling her to sell her system to other florists. So she did it the hard way: introduced herself around UCF and Stetson as "a florist and a software developer," worked the Orlando entrepreneurship scene, won the region's biggest venture pitch competition — usually as the only woman in a room full of auto-industry and medical-device founders — and launched Details in 2015. She even threw away the first version of the software when an outsourced build came back looking "like DOS": florists sell beauty, so the tool had to be visual and even a little gamified. Today Details serves more than 800 customers.
What Details actually does for a shop
Lori role-plays a nervous shop owner booking the 15-minute discovery call, and Corrine walks through it. Details organizes every event so the whole team can jump in and see where things stand — filter clients by event, venue, or product; pull color tools that match flowers to a bridesmaid dress shade; and hand a freelancer a recipe sheet that tells them exactly what goes into four bridesmaids bouquets. It tracks every contract change and even records the IP address where a client signed, sends payments and payment reminders so you're not the bill collector, and syncs supplier pricing so that when the market moves after you've quoted an event, one click shows what to adjust to keep your margin. Guest count changes? Update the number and the entire order recalculates. As Ellie puts it, Details is a productivity hack: sure, you can keep it all in your head — but what if you freed that time to level up the business?
Not just for wedding shops
Retail shops without an events calendar can use Details too. Plan a holiday backwards: pick the ten designs you want to promote, enter quantities, and it calculates exactly what to order — down to bunch counts — and what your profit will be. Or start from the profit you want and work back to markup and buy-in. Sympathy work may be the best fit of all: with a recipe catalog on screen, a grieving family can choose a casket spray and two urn designs in minutes, keeping the consultation streamlined and professional so the florist can focus on caring for the family instead of itemizing a spreadsheet. Suppliers like Jet Fresh are integrated for direct ordering, and because real florists enter real events, Details can surface genuine trend data — like which flowers will be most requested in October.
Real humans, and a flower lab at Stetson
Details is deliberately not a faceless company: calls get answered by the first or second ring, onboarding takes about two weeks of hand-holding (including business decisions many florists have never formalized, like terms and tax rates), and Details University master classes keep customers growing. Corrine's newest venture is a branded business lab at Stetson University's sales program — alongside NASCAR's lab — where the flower-filled room instantly became the students' favorite hangout. Fittingly, DeLand is where much of Florida's greenery ships from. And the name? Her first "Details" business card was printed in hopes of reaching Matt Damon — and Ben and J.Lo's wedding — through her photographer husband. Find the team at SAF events, NextGen, AIFD in Chicago, and even a floral event in Greece; reach them at hello@detailsflowers.com or schedule a 15-minute discovery call. Rapid-fire bonus: Corrine's a matcha-latte drinker whose pet peeve is lateness, and she once dreamed of being a marine biologist — same as Ellie.
Key takeaways
- Profitability on weddings and events starts with knowing exact costs and margins per recipe — a system, not a memory.
- Software pays for itself in freed-up time: recipes for freelancers, automatic reorder math when guest counts change, and payment reminders you don't have to send.
- Retail-only shops can plan holidays backwards from a target profit and use recipe catalogs to make sympathy consultations gentle and fast.
- Document everything: solid contract terms, tracked signatures, and change histories protect your business.
- Support and onboarding matter as much as features — expect about two weeks to get fully acclimated with a real human helping.
Sponsored by:
Flower Clique
Flower Clique Prep School
Real Life Retail Florist