2020, what a wild ride it was! In true 2020 fashion I spent my new years in bed with my laptop recapping our numbers for the year. Honestly not that different than my usual homebody new years! Here’s a peek at some of the highs of our year:
A Few Successes From 2020
The Farmer’s Market: From Jan-April we typically have an indoor farmers market once a month. Shut down kicked in right as the March market was coming and of course it was cancelled. Then the city market crew worked quickly to come up with a curbside market model which was amazing! The April curbside market was a whirlwind to participate and help with, but the community really showed up to support! May finished off with a curbside market every week and the first weekend in May was our highest market sales EVER!
In early June we moved to the outside market and I honestly had no idea what to expect. Would people be comfortable coming? Would customers follow the mask mandate? Turns out, they showed up and it was so great feeling a little bit of normalcy! Pretty much every week our sales were up from 2019 and I couldn’t be more thankful. If you shopped with us this season, thank you so much!
I added in a line of natural products, launched Pollen and Pastry at Home, and grew more flowers and that definitely helped raise our sales.
We use Square to track everything we sell at the farmer’s market and I’m so glad we do because it allows me to pull reports and track things so much better. Give me all the numbers! When I ran the numbers to see that our overall market sales were over two times the 2019 numbers, I was seriously wowed!
Weddings: If you looked at our sales numbers for 2020, I certainly wouldn’t call this year a success if you compared it to previous years. But I’m honestly really proud of what we were able to accomplish despite the challenges. With all the changes, every wedding felt like about twice the usual work, but we got it done! And we served 35 couples still, WHAT! I had no idea it ended up being that many until I ran the numbers!
I give most of the credit to our amazing couples this year. Being a business owner in 2020 was a struggle, but I can’t imagine planning a wedding in a year where everything was unknown and constantly changing. To the couples who still got married this year and had us create something for them, big or small, thank you! To the couples who postponed to 2021, thank you! And even to those couples who decided to cancel our services, I still thank you and hope you were still able to marry your love this year!
Everyday Sales: Prior to 2020, we were almost exclusively a wedding and event company. We did some everyday orders in the bakery, but not a ton. Well cue spring 2020 and all the weddings are postponed or cancelled. Time to pivot! The website was already set up with a good portion of our products and I started working from home with my day job, so starting to deliver locally became a lot easier. We kicked it off with Mother’s Day offerings and I was seriously floored with the number of orders we got! Boy did we learn a lot from that adventure!
More and more of our cut flowers became ready to harvest throughout the summer and it was so great to harvest those and share our 100% locally grown arrangements with the community!
Looking at the numbers in our website analytics we had a 1,278% increase in sales from last year with our website orders, WHAT! It’s been so fun delivering desserts and flowers all across town and seeing the excitement on everyone’s face when they open the door to a surprise. Definitely something I want to continue doing. While most celebrations were cancelled this year, it was so fun being able to still help people celebrate at home and send something special to loved ones they couldn’t see in person!
Looking ahead to 2021
I am a glass half full kind of person, so I tend to not dwell on the negatives for long. This post focuses on the successes of the year, but it certainly wasn’t all peaches and cream. I can honestly say that I am thankful for this year though. It taught me the importance of slowing down and forced me to have a work-life balance like I never have before. I realized the joy I have in serving more than just our wedding customers. The Bloomington/Normal community truly showed up for us this year and I couldn’t be more thankful. Because of you, I was able to keep two awesome ladies employed at least at some level this year which I was definitely concerned about earlier this year. Brooke and Jenna, thank you for sticking with me! You are seriously the best.
A GIANT thank you to anyone who shopped with us this year. I hope we were able to bring a small amount of joy in a challenging year. Here’s to 2021!
-Candice
PS- Go check out the Creative Template Shop for awesome year in review graphic templates!