How to start a flower wholesale business: stock, supply, buyers and cash

A flower wholesale business earns its money on turnover rather than on the markup of a single bouquet: it brings in cut flowers by the box, keeps them cold for two or three days and sells them on to florists, shops and studios, often on agreed credit terms. To start one, you need three flows working at the same time: goods from suppliers, money from customers, and accurate information about what is in the cold room and what is on its way. The third flow is the one that breaks first, even though it costs the least to set up.

How a flower wholesale business differs from a flower shop

A shop sells a bouquet to someone who may come in once. A wholesaler sells a hundred bunches of roses to people who will come back on Tuesday and again on Friday, and whether they come to you or to the wholesaler down the road depends on how easy you are to work with.

The conclusion is simple: wholesale is logistics and working capital first, flowers second. Knowing varieties and reading the season matter, but wholesalers rarely close because of poor taste. They close because a shipment arrived, customers took less than they said they would, and the boxes were already paid for. If you are moving into wholesale from your own shop, expect to change habits. A florist who buys from you every week values an accurate stock figure, their own price and an order packed by seven in the morning far more than a pretty display.

Where the stock comes from: four supply models

There are four ways to fill a wholesale cold room, and most wholesalers end up mixing them.

Reselling from a larger wholesaler or cash-and-carry. You buy from a big importer in your country or a neighbouring one and take the goods where they are hard to get. This needs the least capital, and the supplier carries the currency risk and the paperwork, but your margin is thin. Your advantage is being close to the customer, delivering and knowing people by name. It is a sensible way to learn what local florists actually buy.

Buying through a Dutch exporter. Royal FloraHolland and the Aalsmeer auction remain the centre of the European trade. Buying on the clock yourself means registering as a buyer and having someone on the spot to collect and ship, so most new wholesalers outside the Netherlands start with an exporter who buys at auction and directly from growers and delivers by refrigerated truck on fixed days.

Direct imports from Kenya, Ecuador or Colombia. The range is wider and the price per box lower, but expect prepayment, prices that move with air freight, and on South American farms often quotes in US dollars. Every consignment from outside the EU needs a phytosanitary certificate and passes plant-health checks at the border. How the origins compare on vase life and logistics is covered in our article on flowers from Holland, Ecuador and Kenya.

Local growers. Fresh goods and a short journey, especially for seasonal flowers, but a narrower range that depends on weather and season. A good complement to imports, rarely a replacement.

Before you choose, visit or call twenty to thirty shops and studios in your area. Ask three things: where they buy now, how often, and what annoys them. Answers like "nobody picks up the phone" or "by the time I get there the 60 cm roses are gone" are your future advantage, and they cost nothing to collect.

Warehouse and cold chain: premises, cold room, receiving

Cut flowers are stored at +2 to +8 °C. For a wholesaler that means a cold room big enough for a whole shipment, with spare capacity for the weeks before Valentine's Day, Mother's Day and Christmas. Tropical flowers such as anthurium and some orchids do not tolerate cold and need a separate warmer zone, usually around +12 to +15 °C; confirm the exact range for each product with your supplier.

What else the warehouse needs:

• A receiving and packing area. Cool, with water, a drain, tables and racking for boxes. This is where shipments are opened, flowers go into water and customer orders are put together.
• Access. The supplier's truck arrives at night or early in the morning, and customers drive in when you open. A unit on an industrial estate near a main road, with space to unload and park, works better than premises in the town centre with a narrow yard.
• Reliable power. A cold room that goes off for a few hours in summer turns a shipment into waste. Check the available electrical capacity and the option of a backup generator before you sign the lease.
• A refrigerated van. Without one, summer deliveries eat into freshness, and with it into repeat orders.

The cold chain starts before your door: flowers should reach you in a refrigerated truck, not in a vehicle where the temperature swings. Conditioning, water and stem preparation are covered in detail in our article on storing cut flowers.

Suppliers and a fixed delivery schedule

In wholesale, deliveries set the rhythm of the whole business. Say boxes arrive on Tuesday and Friday. Your customers learn to order for those days, you collect their orders in advance and only then place your own order with the supplier. A fixed schedule is worth more than a wide range: a shop that knows you will have fresh roses by eight on Friday morning plans its weekend around you.

Three things to agree with every supplier before the first consignment:

1. Payment terms. Suppliers usually want payment upfront or on short terms, while your regular customers want credit. The gap between those two dates is filled with your own money, and you need enough of it for two or three shipments ahead.
2. Quality claims. How to record damaged goods on arrival (photos, a written note, within how many hours) and how the supplier compensates: replacement, a credit on the next consignment or a refund.
3. How prices move. Imported flowers change price with the season, air freight and exchange rates, so a wholesaler's price list for some lines can change almost daily. For those items it is more honest to show "price on request" and confirm it with the order than to keep an outdated figure online.

Keep at least two suppliers for your key lines. If one lets you down the week before Valentine's Day, without a second one you let down all your customers at once. How to find and vet suppliers is covered in our guide to flower suppliers.

Trade customers: agreements, personal prices and credit

A wholesaler's customers are not all alike, and treating them the same way does not work.

This is why personal prices exist. A wholesaler usually has an open price for occasional buyers and one to three discount levels for regular customers, based on volume, how long they have bought from you and their payment terms. When a florist asks why a colleague pays less for the same rose, the honest answer is that the colleague has a different agreement, and that is normal.

Give credit only to customers who have already bought from you on prepayment for a few months, and set a limit. A customer who goes over the limit gets the next order after paying, without exceptions and without drama. Check balances daily rather than once a month: a debt that has grown for two weeks can still be settled with a phone call; after a quarter it often cannot.

The view from the other side of the counter, what a shop expects from a wholesaler and how it chooses where to buy, is in our article on buying wholesale flowers.

Pre-orders for a shipment date

Pre-orders are the main tool a wholesaler has for reducing risk. If you collect orders before you order from the supplier, part of each box is already sold while it is still in Aalsmeer or Nairobi, and you order the confirmed pre-orders plus a sensible margin for open sale.

Three rules make pre-orders work. First, a cut-off: for example, orders close two days before the shipment arrives, and anything later goes into open sale. Second, a pre-order is recorded against the item immediately, not on a scrap of paper; otherwise the last box of white roses gets promised to two customers and one of them goes elsewhere. Third, orders from stock and orders from an incoming shipment are kept apart. A florist collecting chrysanthemums from stock today and waiting for Friday's roses gets two separate orders with their own dates; otherwise half the order sits on a shelf until Friday.

With ten customers you can run this on a spreadsheet and a messaging app. With fifty, it is easier when customers can see for themselves what is coming and when. On a wholesale website built on Petala, goods in transit carry their arrival date and can be reserved in advance, the cart splits the order into a delivery from stock and one from the incoming shipment, each with its own date, and stock is held for the customer for 30 minutes while they check out. How such a site works for trade customers, and how to move them onto it, is explained in our article on the B2B portal for flower wholesalers.

The numbers: one week of a flower wholesaler

The figures below are an example for your own calculation, not a market benchmark. Put in your own purchases, markup and waste.

Say the business receives two shipments a week worth €8,000 at full landed cost, that is including transport to your warehouse and packaging. Most of it sells at a 35% markup, some older stock is sold at cost so it does not go in the bin, and 7% of purchases is still written off.

Out of that €1,820 you still pay warehouse rent, electricity for the cold room, wages, the van and fuel. Each percentage point of waste costs €80 a week here, and every five points of markup are worth about €340. A wholesaler that clears each shipment in 2–4 days usually wastes less than a shop with a display, but one unsold shipment before a holiday can wipe out a month's profit.

The second line missing from the table is money held by customers. If half your revenue comes in on seven-day credit, around €4,900 is always sitting with them, while the next shipment has to be paid now. That is why a flower wholesale business needs working capital for two or three shipments, not one, and why that sum should be worked out before you size the cold room.

Stock, debts and customer self-service

The first month of a new wholesaler often looks like this. From six on Friday morning the phone does not stop, customers ask what you have in 60 cm roses, someone runs into the cold room to count and calls back, and the price list sent as a photo on Thursday is already wrong. A month later come the arguments about balances: the customer has one spreadsheet, the bookkeeper another.

What to put in place before you pass twenty customers:

1. One source of truth. Products, contract prices, stock and balances live in one system, not in three spreadsheets kept by three people.
2. Goods received against the supplier invoice on the day of delivery. Until a shipment is booked in, you cannot sell it honestly: the system and the cold room disagree.
3. Write-offs with a reason. Supplier defect, overblown, broken while packing. After a month you can see which supplier and which line cause the losses.
4. Customer self-service. Stock, personal price, balance and order history that customers can see themselves remove half of the morning calls.

The last point is what a wholesale website with a customer account is for. On Petala, the catalogue comes from the Petala CRM or from your own CRM or accounting system via Excel/CSV and API, with prices and stock taken from that system. A trade customer who logs in sees their contract price, and their account shows the balance, the next shipment, goods in transit and order history with one-click reorder. Orders arrive with a manager in the CRM with every line and price. You can see the buyer's side on the demo website, and purchasing, warehouse, write-offs and cash in the CRM for flower wholesalers.

Launch plan for a flower wholesale business

The order matters more than the dates: each step rests on the one before.

On VAT, the Netherlands applies its reduced rate (9%) to flowers and plants and Germany its reduced rate (7%) to cut flowers and plants; elsewhere, check your national rate with an accountant. If you import from outside the EU, sort out the phytosanitary certificates, customs clearance and the EORI number your business needs before the first consignment, not after the first inspection. If you also sell potted plants, they need a plant passport when they move within the EU. Details are in our article on the plant passport and flower documents.