Are you wondering about how to sell gumpaste flowers online? It isn’t as difficult as you might think, other than the shipping part.
To sell gumpaste flowers online, you will need to be able to determine which flowers will ship well, which ones are relatively fast to make, and where you’ll sell them.
For gumpaste, the most important issue will be the packing and shipping, because there can be a high rate of damage if fragile cake flowers aren’t packed well.
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Basically, if you would feel okay if someone took your package and kicked it across the post office parking lot, you’ve packed it correctly. If you would worry about breakage, you need to go back and work on it.
How To Package Gumpaste To Ship
Gumpaste flowers have a lot in common with Gumpaste toppers as far as packaging and shipping goes.
- Make sure you use a lot of padding, including polyfil, mattress padding, and bubble wrap, the more the better.
- Put pieces of padding in between petals so that they don’t hit each other if they’re wired individually.
- Make sure that the flowers aren’t near the edge of the box, or put them in a smaller box inside of a larger outer box.
- Consider only shipping domestically to prevent issues with customs officers opening the boxes.
- You don’t want to hear any movement inside the box when you shake it. Those flowers should be packed firmly and securely!
How much to charge for gumpaste flowers.
The cost of gumpaste online varies a lot because there’s so much mass-market stuff out there.
The advantage that you would have if you do custom flowers is that you could make specific types that aren’t available from cake wholesalers.
You can also do colors that aren’t offered, but NEVER say that you can match exact colors!
Because computer monitors vary in their settings, the way that a color looks on one won’t look the same on another.
If you can’t guarantee to match an exact color, just don’t promise to!
When you’re looking into the pricing, make sure to compare your flowers to similar types. If you do custom flowers, look up custom flowers.
If you take mass-market premade flowers and color them, look into that.
If you’re reselling basic flowers, look those up. Don’t underprice your work by researching the wrong thing.
Handling customers who order gumpaste flowers.
The people who buy gumpaste flowers are generally brides or people who are making a single special occasion cake.
That translates to the majority of your customers NOT being repeat customers.
However, there will be times when decorators are your customers.
They’ll either need something really specific, or they just won’t be interested in making the flowers themselves.
Just remember that your prices shouldn’t change for one type of customer or the other.
If you do strike up a business relationship with a decorator who will order from you on a regular basis, you might be willing to give them a discount for volume sales.
But don’t hand out discounts until that volume of orders has come through.
This is one of those “This will be such good exposure” moments…Just because someone says they’ll be placing a lot of orders doesn’t mean they will.
You’ll also need to communicate more with people who order custom flowers.
If you prefer a less custom approach, you can always make flowers that are generally popular and offer them as-is with no custom colors.
The last piece of advice I have for selling gumpaste flowers online is to be aware of the weather.
If you’re shipping in the rainy season, or at the height of the summer, make sure to take the boxes into the post office so that they’re in a climate-controlled environment as much as they can be.
It’s also a good idea to send things with signature confirmation, because that offers proof of the boxes being received and they won’t be left on a porch somewhere.
Last tips for selling gumpaste flowers.
Because you’ll be shipping them, the types of flowers that work well for online sales tend to be ones that are more “dense” petal-wise.
You might need to adapt your methods to address the safest designs to ship.
For example, dogwoods have such a thin area where the petals attach to each other, you would want to do those as individually wired petals instead of a single piece.
You might want to make rose petals a little thicker than you would normally so that the petals are sturdier.
And flowers like callas need to be packed VERY carefully so that they don’t get crushed between layers of padding.
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