The Essex Flower School

The Essex Flower School was my second business and a sister company to The Flower Arranger.

I launched this company after realising there was a real desire in Essex (and surrounding areas) to learn floristry in an updated way. Sure, you could take a college course but the courses felt very much like they hadn't been updated since the 80s and the techniques you were learning weren't necessarily still relevant to today's floristry industry.

What people wanted was changing, the ways in which we were working with materials and building floral designs were vastly different (there was a huge push for non-foam-based designs at this time to help the environment and cut down on waste) and even the types of flowers clients were requesting was changing (Again, due to environmental issues more and more clients were requesting locally grown flowers) and college courses weren't adapting to these new needs.

I am a natural-born teacher and love nothing more than sharing wisdom with others and helping people to learn something new and feel confident doing it so launching a flower school felt like a natural step for me and my career.

There was no flower school in Essex at this point, you had to travel to London or to Bristol to learn so I launched The Essex Flower School. We taught non-florists how to become florists on big chunky courses that included a ton of information but we also taught the public how to create a simple flower arrangement for their home, or how to design their own wedding bouquet. We also ran business courses for florists, ensuring they felt comfortable with the business side of things which was a huge hit. As the more florists, I spoke to the more I realised they all tended to be creatives, who loved the creative side of the business, actually making the flower arrangements but were much less comfortable with the business side of things, making a profit, marketing, managing staff etc.

Once again I took to social media to get our courses known about and more importantly booked. Facebook and Instagram were my main tools to make this happen and I used the same strategies I'd used for The Flower Arranger, tweaked to a new audience, to get new customers through the door.