This journey is not just about growing flowers & food, but it’s also about growing a business.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to quit my day job. I have a full time job that keeps me plenty busy, but I am lucky to be able to take time off from that job during the summer months, which conveniently happens to be the same time that flowers are in full bloom in the garden – which works really well since I love to play in the garden!

Even though I will not use this job to support my family, I still want to do it justice. My dad always said, if there was something worth doing – do it well, do it right!

I started the blog as a way to journal about the process, meet new people, but most importantly to keep my friends and family up-to-date on the progress of the dream of “Jade’s roadside stand”, selling flowers to support my flower habit! My mom was so excited when she seen my blog, I was touched by her pride & excitement about the blog it made even more sense to keep it up.

I’m a creative person by nature. I also happen to sew & paper craft and really enjoy making things for people. Adding this hobby of a flower ranch adds to my ability to be creative outdoors, allowing my hobbies to be year round. My sewing projects never really brought in any money, a bit here and there, a bit to get me excited about trying new things and making things for friends and family, but nothing earth shattering!

I’m not expecting my garden to be any different, but there is a certain notch I’d like to get to; in order to get there, I will need to spend a little money on marketing and branding.

My brand…..After some research and poking around I discovered a site that made it easy to come up with my logo – (the turquoise square with the white shape with J & J in the middle). It was made with the help of Canva a website WordPress suggested. I didn’t need anything complicated, and kind of had an idea of what I wanted. Just like WordPress, they have a lot of templates and ideas that you can use for inspiration. I’m hoping that my logo will be easily recognizable anytime anyone sees it! Did I mention it was free to use?

Marketing….This gets a little tricky because my garden isn’t going to be huge. I don’t want 500+ people stopping by the house looking for cheap flowers, but I also would like to sell SOME flowers and perhaps make some new friends in the process! Digitally this is where Facebook, Instagram, and WordPress come in, as well as buying a little snippit of internet corner with the doublejflowerranch.com domain name. All three platforms are free – but there is always an option to boost my posts, and promote my business for a fee.

However, this might seem odd to a lot of people, not everyone accesses their world digitally! In the olden days 😉 – people had business cards & telephones! So, I also designed business cards with Vistaprint. I will not be buying them until I have seedlings successfully growing….so it might be a few weeks before I purchase them.

Branding….This is the process of putting my marketing tools and my “look” together. The logo on the business card matches with the Instagram, Facebook and WordPress logo. After I’ve done more reading and looking around I think that it would be a really nice touch to have labels to put on the flower bouquets that I will be selling. Vistaprints prices for their labels are horrendous! I found StickerMule, their prices are way better, and their customer service was amazing. I’m looking forward to receiving our samples in the mail by early February. I’m also not making a big commitment on those until I reach a certain point in this journey.

There’s so much MORE I could do….bags, signs for my yard, t-shirts, paint my truck, flyers, radio ads, the list goes on and on! I don’t need to go all out, but I do need to go out – this is definitely worth doing, for the love of growing – that Joe & I enjoy sharing so much – so we will do it right and do it well to honor both of our dads!