Introduction to the floral software Stem Counter

Things were looking up. Bianca was a proud momma of an infant just a few months old and she was weeks away from her biggest wedding season ever. Bianca’s wedding floral company in Australia had just secured a contract with an island resort to be their exclusive florist. That’s when two of her employees quit. In a matter of days, she moved from having the time to invest in accurate proposals and actually managing the shop – to personally being involved in everything from design to tear-down and feeling like all her work was coming apart. Then the quotes from her exclusive contract started piling up. She literally had 40 quotes on backorder – just staring at her like a post-party kitchen in the house of a dog-tired mom with a bad case of OCD. Bianca would wake up in the morning and just start to cry. She was so discouraged that she would sit at home and binge watch movies to avoid coming to grips with the time-consuming proposals. Finally, her sister and business partner Alex determined that something had to change. Alex came across several florist softwares but none of them saved enough time to be worth the investment. None, that is, until she came across the florist app Stemcounter. After a couple months of using the software, here’s the email I received from Bianca:

Bianca is an INCREDIBLE florist and still needed a little extra help to run her business efficiently. You’re probably not in the exact same boat as Bianca. However, if you’re a professional florist, you can relate to being up way past bed time putting together a wholesaler order and wondering why nobody had created a system that works how florists do.

In fact, that’s exactly why Stemcounter.com was created. Before we started our wedding florals company, my wife was a year into being the lead designer at a shop when ownership changed. She would come home in tears after dealing with new under-prepared management who thought owning a flower shop would be a breeze. So we started our St. Louis wedding florals company: Twisted Willow Design. We were growing but we had issues keeping up with the brides that wanted proposals. We normally told them to give us a week to get their proposal back. Around day 6 of one particular client, Rachael had just finished up spending an hour and a half on her proposal. Right as she was about to email the bride, we received an email saying that she had gone with someone else. Including consultation, Rachael had just spent 2.5 hours of her time…for nothing. Zilch. Nada. That was the moment we first knew that there had to be a better way to accurately and beautifully create wedding flower proposals. 

At that point, I created an extremely well-formatted excel sheet for my wife to cost out designs. That was still taking way more time than we had in a day and we still had to stem count AGAIN when creating our shopping list and designer sheets. So, we created Stemcounter.com. Since then, we’ve seen our on-the-spot booking rate increase dramatically, we’ve tripled our average wedding size from $1,500 to $4,500, and we literally have our stem count done in the consultation. We’ve grown enough that we bought our own floral shop (you might have seen us on House Hunters!) and just a couple days ago booked our first $10,000+ wedding! (woot woot!) Obviously it takes more than a software to grow your business (it definitely doesn’t wash buckets for us), but having a software freed up our time from the nagging stuff that can totally be automated and allowed us to focus on the big stuff that’s required to function as a professional florist.

So, what exactly is Stemcounter.com? It’s a floral design software created specifically for professional florists that allows you to do stem counts extremely fast, accurately price out your weddings, book more brides, and even finally delegate some critical tasks to employees. No more worries that someone is going to do the math wrong on your wholesaler order or book a wedding with a -17% profit margin.

It’s humbling to hear that we’re the highest rated floral software online but we love making florists lives easier because we’re florists ourselves. Here are some of the ways that stem counter will make your weddings / events easier:

1. Automated stem counting with your own floral library.
2. Create your entire proposal (WITH stem count) from a single screen. You see your tools. Your clients only see a beautiful finished proposal.
3. Mobile-friendly proposal for your clients to see a beautiful proposal and full-resolution photos from their desktop, iPad, or mobile phone.
4. Clients can view, sign, and pay from the same screen.
5. Quickbooks Integration to keep your accountant happier than a trip to a tax loophole conference.
6. Add multiple photos on every line item.
7. Multiple recipes on each item for King Tables or triplets.
8. Drag and Drop photos from Pinterest.
9. Have all of your weddings and events organized in a single place.
10. Combine multiple event shopping lists together in seconds