Blossoming Success: Inside the Flower Clique Team
With Vonda out of town this week, Lori grabbed two of her favorite coworkers and hit record. Kami Martin, Flower Clique's Director of Membership, and Audrey Kristoff, Product Manager, joined her to answer the question they hear constantly from shops that aren't yet members: "What exactly is Flower Clique?" Shops get bits and pieces, but rarely the whole story — so this episode tells it, straight from the people who do the work every day.
What "merchandising" actually means
The first question Lori always gets: "Can I get rid of my website platform so you can run my site instead?" The answer, Kami explains, is no — you still need your platform, whether that's Flower Shop Network, Teleflora, FloraNext, or another host. What Flower Clique fills is the gap between the website the platform hosts and what actually happens in your store: how designs get produced, what they really cost, and whether they're profitable.
That's where merchandising comes in. As Audrey puts it, it's a real retail term — setting up a shop so it's aesthetically pleasing, with featured and seasonal items front and center. Kami does the same thing for your website: the designs you want to sell go on the homepage, made to look like things you'd actually produce, without pages and pages of overwhelming inventory that sends you running to the wholesaler multiple times a day.
Why pay for a platform and merchandising?
Playing devil's advocate, Lori asked the question every shop owner is thinking: I already pay for a website — why pay Flower Clique too? Kami's answer usually starts with the shop's own site pulled up in front of her. Are you actually profitable on that $39 arrangement, or the $49 one next to it? When nobody steps in, platforms often upload arrangements that aren't priced right, so the shop stays busy making designs all day long without making money on them.
Fix that, and the membership pays for itself: average order value goes up on every web order — and on phone orders too, because the customer calling in is very often looking at your website while they talk to you.
The bouquet ecosystem
Audrey manages the Flower Clique bouquet system — exclusive pre-made bouquets shipped directly from the farm in Bogotá, featuring premium flowers like Mayra roses, Free Spirits, pincushion protea, snapdragons, and stock. Those same bouquets are what Vonda uses to create the designs photographed for member websites, refreshed seasonally so everything stays current. Order the bouquets, and everything you need to make the designs on your website arrives in the box — recipes included, so you don't need to be an AIFD designer to execute them.
Don't want the bouquets? About half of members use the order form as a shopping list for their local wholesaler instead — it spells out exactly which flowers will be on their website through the season. Either way, the inventory is simplified, and the efficiency really shows at holidays, when a designer can grab one bouquet and have everything needed for the arrangement in hand.
The guiding filter for all of it is what the team calls the three Ps: every design should be pretty, profitable, and pleasing to the customer. If it can't check all three boxes, it shouldn't be on your website.
Getting to know Kami and Audrey
The back half of the episode is pure fun. Audrey confessed she's secretly nervous meeting new people (Kami flatly refused to believe it), and Kami admitted she is terrible at teaching her triplet daughters to drive. Book talk ranged from Chasing Francis to Francine Rivers' Mark of the Lion trilogy to Kristin Hannah, and in an eerie coincidence, Audrey and Kami independently cast Mandy Moore to play Kami in a movie — while Kami picked Meg Ryan, circa Sleepless in Seattle, for Lori.
Advice for anyone starting out
The closing question — what's your one piece of advice for someone new to the flower industry — drew three answers worth writing down. Kami: get your free Google listing first, and don't build a website from scratch when platforms have already invented the wheel. Audrey: lean on the floral community, because flower people are among the most generous, open-hearted folks you'll meet, and they genuinely want to help you succeed. Lori: social media is your biggest form of advertising and it's completely free — it levels the playing field between the million-dollar shop and the brand-new self-starter, but only if you show up consistently. Because as Kami summed it up, people buy who you are, not just what you make.
Key takeaways
- Your website platform and Flower Clique do different jobs — the platform hosts, merchandising makes sure what's on the site is profitable and producible.
- Audit your own homepage: if you can't say whether each arrangement is profitable, you may be busy without making money.
- Simplified inventory — whether via bouquets or an ordering guide for your wholesaler — pays off most at holiday crunch time.
- Every design should pass the three Ps: pretty, profitable, and pleasing to the customer.
- New to the industry? Claim your Google listing, use an existing platform, plug into the floral community, and post consistently on social media.