Employee Care and Website Tips for Valentine's Day: It's not too late to get ready!
It's the calm before the storm — that last week before the Valentine's flowers start arriving — and Vonda and Lori narrow the to-do list down to two things that matter most: getting your website genuinely ready, and getting your team's heads ready for the customers who won't be at their best. For the website half, they bring in the resident expert: Kami Martin, director of Flower Clique's One Clique program.
Give your Valentine's category "the skinny"
Some shops' Valentine's categories carry 40 or 50 choices — Lori recently talked to a shop with 700 active images on its site. Kami's prescription is four to five rows of products, period. Cover the essentials — dozen roses, double dozen, a non-traditional color, and a spread of price points — and you're done. Far from scaring customers away, less choice measurably increases your conversion rate (the percentage of visitors who actually buy), because shoppers scrolling through endless options hit decision fatigue and leave. It boosts design-room productivity, too: a standard and a premium version of the same design, placed a few rows apart, gives customers two price points from the same flowers. And don't shut off everything but Valentine's: Kami keeps five or six crossover categories live — birthday, anniversary, get well, new baby, plants — stocked with the same designs the shop is already churning out, so the February 10th birthday person can still get flowers. Non-traditional sells, by the way: a peachy-coral design was a top seller last Valentine's, and a deep purple led at Christmas.
Price it like the holiday it is
Put your eyes on every single product you feature and confirm it's profitable — customers also use your website as a menu when they phone in. A $39 design that loses money just makes you busy, not profitable. For roses, use your platform's date-based upcharge if it has one: a $99 dozen ordered today for delivery February 12–14 should ring up at the holiday price (say, $115), and platforms like Teleflora show the switch right on the delivery calendar so customers see why. If your platform can't do that, do what some shops are doing and mark prices up now — this is the year everyone's pushing early orders anyway.
Open Sunday, say it everywhere, and work your homepage
Valentine's Day falls on a Sunday, and most platforms will not automatically open your website for February 14 delivery — you have to request it. Update your Google My Business hours with a special exception for the day, and shout it on social media. Then incentivize the behavior you want: pop-ups offering a free small box of chocolates for deliveries February 10–13, promo codes for curbside pickup (one shop is renting a canopy tent for a drive-up pickup lane), and "everyone is ordering early this year" posts featuring your made-up designs and teddy bears.
Finally, treat your homepage as your best salesperson — analytics say it's always the number one seller. Put products above the fold, feature exactly what you want to move (including those specialty containers you invested in), and if you're heavy on something on the 12th, put it on the homepage and it will sell. Mark depleted items sold out rather than inactive — a sold-out badge inside the category creates urgency — but pull sold-out items off the homepage itself and replace them with something buyable.
Don't let a stranger ruin your day
Picking up the thread from last week's conversation with Jerome Raska about keeping morale up, Lori digs into what happens to employees after a nasty customer interaction. The grateful customers of early pandemic days are giving way to COVID-fatigued, snarky, demanding ones — and science says every blow-up you absorb triggers adrenaline and cortisol, the fight-or-flight chemicals experts believe take a toll on blood pressure and health over time. Her mindset shifts: treat the angry stranger like a friend having a bad day, and you'll walk away knowing you did all you could. Remember your own worst moments — Lori tells on herself about a middle-school basketball tournament tirade her daughter caught on video — and let that humble you into grace. Most of all, don't take it personally: they were that way before you entered their life, and you're just a brief detour in it.
For owners and managers, the job is protecting your team's mental health: hold a pep-rally staff meeting before the holiday, tell employees to bring bad interactions straight to you — then release them, so one snarky caller doesn't poison the whole shop's energy for the day. Lori even suggests playing this episode's last fifteen minutes for your staff. Her closing quote, worth a Post-it by the register, is Eleanor Roosevelt's: no one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
Key takeaways
- Skinny your Valentine's category to four or five rows with varied colors and price points — fewer choices convert better and design faster.
- Review every featured product's price for holiday profitability, and use date-based upcharges so early orders pay Valentine's prices.
- Manually open your website (and Google listing) for Sunday, February 14 delivery — platforms won't do it for you.
- Feature what you want to sell on your homepage, and swap sold-out items off it to keep every visible product buyable.
- Incentivize early orders and curbside pickup with chocolates, promo codes, and constant social posts.
- Hold a pre-holiday staff meeting about mental health: expect snarky customers, don't take it personally, and give your team a way to hand the bad ones to you.
Sponsored by:
Flower Clique
Flower Clique Prep School
Real Life Retail Florist