What shapes the future of the Seasonal Flower Industry?

I heard the word "closing" but not the rest of the sentence, and it took me a few minutes to realise that my friend wasn't talking about shutting up for the season. She was stepping away from her flower business for good after many years.

A seasoned grower with a sound strategy, beautiful crops, and a business she'd built deliberately around her family and her farm. She was the kind of grower other people learned from - committed, invested, clear about what she was doing and why. She was also at the forefront of local collaboration, exactly the kind of person this industry needs more of.

And then her business no longer worked for her as she wished.

She's not alone. In the weeks since that conversation, I've heard the same story from more growers than I'd expected - each with their own very good personal reasons, each making a completely understandable decision, and each one a small loss for an industry that is in its formative years.

The question that's been nagging at me since is a harder one than I'm used to asking.

What shapes an industry? How do you take a collection of individual small businesses, each built around one person's passion and circumstances, and create an industry that people can rely on.

That's not a criticism of anyone. It's an honest question that reflects where we are now. 

The seasonal flower industry in New Zealand and Australia has been built almost entirely on individual dreams and enterprise. That's genuinely impressive - and it's also, if we're being straight with each other, a vulnerability we need to talk about.

It's also worth being honest about who has built this industry.

The vast majority of seasonal flower growers in NZ and Australia are women - often with young families, other careers running alongside, or at a point in their lives where growing flowers is the thing they've finally made space for. That shapes everything about how these businesses are designed. They're built to flex around full lives, not in spite of them. And that's both the industry's greatest strength and its fragility - because when life shifts, a business designed around one phase of life doesn't always have the structure to survive the next.

The reality of small-scale flower growing is not easy.

The margins are small. The work is physically demanding. Most growers operate alone, often bootstrap everything, and have limited capacity to invest in the business skills or systems that would make their enterprises more resilient. Quite naturally, the love goes on growing. The pricing strategy, the financial planning, the systems that would allow someone else to step in when life gets complicated - those things tend to come second, or barely at all.

Geography adds a layer of difficulty that Northern Hemisphere growers simply don't face. Smaller rural communities that are often long distances from urban populations without a farmers' market culture that underpins the Slow Flowers movement in the US or Flowers from the Farm in the UK. We can learn from what's been built elsewhere, but we can't import those models. We need to build our own version for our own context.

The vulnerability of individual flower businesses is a signal about what the industry hasn't yet built - a collective approach and a clear industry identity, so that the loss of local flowers isn't determined by individual businesses closing.

The problem isn't what most people assume.

We don't have a demand problem. Consumers want locally grown flowers and flower buyers are looking out for them. The local flower movement is gaining momentum, and the shift toward sustainable floristry is creating a whole category of florists actively looking for what artisan growers produce.

What we don't have is the supply to meet that demand reliably - enough businesses with the resilience to outlast one person's circumstances, and the collective systems that would make seasonal flower farming viable at the scale the market is ready for

Other sectors have recognised this and started building deliberately. The "Where's the Food" movement in New Zealand local food is a good example - small producers who have started to build the infrastructure they need to sustain themselves. The Future Farmers pathway programme on Victoria's Mornington Peninsula is another - an investment in training, mentoring and succession that treats small scale farming as something worth sustaining as a sector, not just hoping individual passion holds it together.

These regenerative farmers are thinking beyond the individual farm to the health of the whole system. The seasonal flower industry in NZ and Australia isn't thinking that way yet, we're still mostly thinking farm by farm.

Earlier this year I wrote about 10x thinking for flower businesses - the idea that the biggest gains don't come from working harder at what you're already doing, but from fundamentally different thinking.

What if we applied 10x thinking not just to individual businesses but to the industry itself?

What would it look like if seasonal, locally grown flowers became the expected standard rather than the exception? What would make it easy for flower buyers across NZ and AU to source locally as their default? What shared identity would help customers understand and choose local flowers before they even arrive at the market stall?

These are bigger questions than most of us are used to asking. They require collective effort rather than individual effort, and systemic thinking rather than farm-by-farm thinking. These are questions that we can't keep ignoring if we want the seasonal flower industry to thrive.

The FBA has been working alongside seasonal flower growers in New Zealand and Australia for nearly six years. We've seen people build businesses that work well - and we've seen people walk away when they couldn't quite get there. We understand both, and appreciate the enormous effort and learning curve people climb in building their businesses.

What we've also seen clearly is the potential. The market is real, consumer demand is growing, and we're part of a global movement. The question we're now asking is what do New Zealand and Australian flower growers need to meet that challenge - and whether the FBA can play a useful role in that.

We believe it's possible to create a seasonal flower industry that thrives in New Zealand and Australia, yet it  won't happen through individual effort alone. It's going to take flower farmers willing to think collectively, to invest in something bigger than their own patch, and to see their business contributing to an industry worth building.

Just imagine what becomes possible if we pour some of the passion that has built hundreds of individual flower businesses into building the industry itself.

This blog post is intended to prompt a bigger conversation about the true state of the seasonal flower industry, what small scale flower farmers in NZ and AU actually need to thrive, what genuine industry partnerships look like in practice, and what a regenerative local flower industry could actually become.

Figuring out what growers actually need to build and sustain thriving businesses is exactly what the FBA exists for. Talking to flower farmers - and to people who have left flower growing entirely - we know that the shape of the seasonal flower industry in future is a question that needs an answer urgently.

If you're a seasonal flower grower in NZ or Australia, what do you think the industry most needs right now?

• Where do you see the potential, and what's getting in the way of it?

• What do you as an individual business owner need to sustain your own future and be invested in the wider industry?

We don’t expect there’s a simple or single answer to these questions. Yet, bringing your personal perspective on this question will contribute a fragment to building a more sustainable future.

These are questions we'd genuinely like to hear your answer to.

Leave a comment below or email us Floral Business Activator

Written by: Julie Treanor - Owner of The Pickery and co-creator of The Floral Business Activator who cannot shake off the feeling that the seasonal flower industry is destined for greater things!

Follow Julie on Instagram @thepickery