What's in the Cooler
A podcast about independent flower shops and the towns they belong to. Rachel spends a day in one shop, and the people who run it say how it works.
Hosted by Rachel, 22 years in floral software including at FTD, and Brooke, who builds the tools.
Your hosts
Rachel22 years in floral software, including at FTD.
BrookeBuilds the websites and the tools WholeCut hands to shops.
Between us we have spent a lot of hours in flower shops. A shop carries the funerals, the weddings and the hospital rooms of the town around it, and almost nobody outside the shop hears how that gets done. We go and listen.
The format
One shop, one day, and a recorder left running
Rachel drives to a flower shop and stays long enough to stop being a visitor. She is there for the morning delivery, for the cooler being opened, for the phone. Nobody performs for an hour that long. By the second one the shop has gone back to its own day.
Then the people who run it talk. How the shop started, who they buy from, which families have called them for years, what the last four years changed, and the thing about the place they carry around and do not usually say out loud. Rachel asks, and then gets out of the way.
Photographs come home with her. The bench, the cooler, the arrangement that went out that afternoon, the hands that made it.
Flowers still mean something. … That meaning is intact, and it belongs to the local florist who knows the family, the church, the funeral home, the school colors, the street that floods in spring.
An hour inside a working shop. The people who listen are the people who buy the flowers, and they leave caring where they came from.
Where the show starts
Three things we hear in almost every shop
Rachel opened with these three. Each one already has something on this site that answers part of it, so you do not have to wait for an episode to get started.
The order that comes in after 4pm
Somebody else took the order, set the price, chose the flowers, and passed you a fraction of what the customer paid. Your name is on the delivery.
Read my statement →Product photos that do not do the arrangement justice
The work looks beautiful standing in the cooler and flat on a phone screen. What needs help is the photograph, and the room behind it.
Open WholeCut Studio →A customer three blocks away who never knew the shop was there
They searched for a florist, an answer came back, and the shop down the street was not in it. That is a findability problem with a measurable fix.
Run the Visibility Check →None of those are design problems. These are some of the most talented people I know. They are business problems, and they are solvable. Rachel, co-host
Why we started it
The first order came through the shop's own website
One shop we work with took its first order through a website it owns. It printed straight onto the order form the shop has used for twenty years, so nothing about the way the work gets done had to change.
What changed is where the order came from and how much of it reached the shop. Nobody needed a new logo to get there. Somebody needed to look at the route an order takes and ask who is standing in it.
That is why we started the show. The answer was already inside the shop, and finding it took somebody being there.
What we brought to it
A site the shop owns and can be found in, a read of the wire statement in the shop's own numbers, and photographs good enough to post the same day.
One shop. Your own statement and your own search results will read differently, which is the point of running them.
Join us for a free class.
Bring your wire statement. We walk through what it is really costing you, and how local shops are getting found again. The next class is Wednesday, November 18.
A podcast about flower shops and the towns that still have one.