Retailing: Say It With Profits

One proprietor in Manhattan sells Louis XV vases for $1,000, crystal chandeliers for $300 a pair and bronze sculptures for $1,200 apiece; another offers homemade relishes and jams, chi na eggs, wooden jigsaw puzzles and stuffed animals. Both are florists. The wide variety of their merchandise illustrates how the nation’s 22,000 retail florists are branching out. Last week the 11,600-member Florist Telegraph Delivery Association (which is changing its name to Florist Transworld Delivery to give itself a more international image) voted at its convention in San Francisco to permit its members to sell by wire just about anything they want to.

Cats & Dogs. The business of selling flowers in the U.S. now amounts to more than $800 million a year. Men still order more flowers than women, send so many on birthdays and anniversaries that many florists now keep card files, mail out reminders each year. The hardy rose remains the perennial bestseller; more than $30 million worth are sold each year. Flowers arranged and put in vases at the shop are growing rapidly in popularity—partly because overworked nurses no longer have time to arrange the floods of flowers that hospital patients receive each day. Though small arrangements sell best in most parts of the country, the current craze in Manhattan is for flowers made into replicas of animals; poodles are most popular, cats come next, and at election time elephants and donkeys take over. Florists are constantly going to new lengths in the dyeing of flowers to match the color of party dresses or room decors; in Atlanta, teen-agers have enigmatically made the black-dyed orchid a big selling item. The industry is also pushing the everyday use of flowers in homes and offices, trying to break people of the habit of waiting for an occasion. Most florists agree that two of the biggest economic threats in years have passed their peak: artificial flowers and the “Please Omit” directive that many families issue when making funeral arrangements. Florists still face mounting competition from big department stores and five and tens, especially in the rapidly expanding market for potted plants. Many of them meet the challenge by offering a wider range of accessories, diversifying into such gift items as statuary, ceramics, candy and perfume. In Dallas, Florist Harry Bullard stocks a large inventory of antiques, which he rents out for house and garden parties, often winds up selling. Pests & Pools. Easily the fastest-growing retailers in the florist industry are the owners of the nation’s 3,500 garden centers, which have upped their sales by more than 30% in the last seven years, today account for better than a third of total industry sales. Manhattan’s Goldfarb Flower Shops, Inc., the biggest U.S. florist (1964 sales: $10.8 million), earns only 8% of its income from its retail shops. Source of almost all the remainder: eight giant garden centers spotted along the East Coast from Maryland to Long Island, which park up to 1,000 cars each and sell everything from insecticides to swimming pools, all with a minimum of overhead.