Venus et Fleur aims to win Valentine’s Day with new $5,000 arrangement and splashier offerings
Valentine’s Day is the equivalent of the Super Bowl for luxury floral brand Venus et Fleur. However, this year, the company is changing its strategy for the holiday in hopes that sales will blossom even more.
Venus et Fleur, now in its tenth year, has traditionally focused on floral arrangements priced at $299 and under. Last Mother’s Day, though, the company received more requests from customers wanting to buy flowers at higher price points. Now, to meet that demand at its biggest time of the year, Venus et Fleur is offering two new, intricate and expensive arrangements for Valentine’s Day: the Grand Venus ($1,699; limited to 150 units) and the Grandiose Le Plein ($4,999; limited to 20 units). The brand is also bringing in new styles of flowers like calla lilies as part of its ongoing effort to diversify beyond roses and freshen up its assortment.
By adding more products at higher price points, Venus et Fleur is bucking a common retail trend. Many of today’s headlines focus on companies cutting costs or focusing on value to woo budget-conscious consumers. But Venus et Fleur — like other high-end companies — is leaning into its status as a luxury brand and trying to find new ways to attract its core audience. For Venus et Fleur, that means offering a wider variety of flower types and larger arrangements that can act as “grand gestures” on par with other luxury products.
In the past, if customers wanted big-ticket items, they’d typically give Venus et Fleur a budget, and the brand would compile multiple arrangements. For instance, a customer might call and request enough flowers to fill a space for $10,000, co-founder Seema Bansal Chadha told Modern Retail. Venus et Fleur wanted to start building different assortments for those customers, she said, so it began looking for creative ways to go well beyond the $299 price point.
For Valentine’s Day, the brand wanted to “create something that’s really out of the ordinary,” said Sylvette Sein, Venus et Fleur’s CMO. “The luxury space does this very frequently with products,” she added. In fact, Venus et Fleur now has a new VIP program, which comes with a dedicated concierge service. “We can really customize and build anything [customers] desire,” Chadha said.
Venus et Fleur’s key demographic, luxury shoppers, has largely managed to weather inflation and other economic woes. Gartner’s 2024 Consumer Omnibus Survey found that 50% of U.S. consumers reported shopping from luxury brands with some frequency. Only 15% said they had decreased their discretionary spending.
Still, brands and retailers across all price points are staying cautious and deciding to “narrowly cater to their target audience,” Melissa Minkow, director of retail strategy at digital consultancy firm CI&T, told Modern Retail. For a high-end floral brand like Venus et Fleur, going smaller or cutting prices “wouldn’t make sense,” Minkow added. “It isn’t the best play, and it’s not aligned with who they are as a brand.”
Venus et Fleur launched in 2015 to try and “reimagine the floral industry,” Chadha said. The brand’s staple product is a hat box of preserved roses, which can last for a year or longer. Customers today come to Venus et Fleur for a variety of occasions, including birthdays, housewarmings and gender reveals. The brand has nine retail stores in the United States but primarily makes its sales through its direct-to-consumer website.
Its first decade in business, Venus et Fleur focused on customer acquisition; now, it’s focused more on customer retention, in part by bringing in different types of flowers. Last Mother’s Day, Venus et Fleur upped its number of hydrangeas, and during the summer, it introduced peonies. Customers who had bought from the brand before were responsible for 75% of peony sales. Meanwhile, hydrangeas accounted for 12% of sales in the last year, up from 2% a year prior.
Chadha told Modern Retail that she’s spending the next year and a half focusing on flower types that “have yet to be preserved or are innately really challenging to preserve.” Venus et Fleur’s hydrangeas start at $499, while its mixed florals (including roses, orchids and dahlias) start at $299. Elsewhere, at competitors like 1-800 Flowers and Terrain, preserved floral bouquets sell for under $200.
Outside of product expansion, Venus et Fleur is relying on experiential marketing to compete with other high-end floral companies. For Valentine’s Day, the brand is renting a flatbed truck and driving a 10-foot-tall version of the Grandiose Le Plein around New York City. It’s also holding a pop-up shop, where it will hand out Sweethearts-branded candies. On Feb. 7 and 8, customers visited select Venus et Fleur stores across four states — New York, New Jersey, California and Texas — to enjoy complimentary champagne and chocolate bonbons.
This type of marketing makes sense considering Venus et Fleur’s luxury audience, said Brad Jashinsky, director analyst at Gartner. “If you’re trying to get the attention of a higher-net-worth individual, yes, you can reach some of those customers through Facebook ads or Instagram,” he said. “But I do think luxury brands tend to cut through the noise more through offline activations and influencer partnerships … to stand out.”