We ended up selling $10,948 in Poinsettias which was pretty good. Not nearly as good as last years' $15,000 but it could have been worse.
And of course the profit margin wasn't as good. We will probably make just under $4,000 profit from the fundraiser. Good thing we have a Longaberger Basket Bingo in January that we are doing for the first time at our school. We should be able to make up the difference and then some.
Hopefully this will help anyone else who is considering a Poinsettia sale and is looking for information.
Wow! Thank you so much for checking! I just now saw your reply. I had been checking back everyday to see if there were any replies to my original post and after awhile figured no one else was going to add anything.
I thought I would share some information though about what we ended up doing...
We went with the grower that had the prices I originally quoted.
We ended up selling the 6" plants for $9.00 instead of $8.00 (our profit margin was 50% instead of 60%). The 8" we ended up selling for $17 instead of $15 (our profit margin was only 30% instead of 45%).
The final numbers are not in yet. So far we are only at $9,000 which is way lower than the $15,000 we did last year. Once the final numbers are in I will update this thread so anyone looking for this kind of information might be able to find it.
I have not been through a Poinsettia sale with our PTO, but I have done this with my community civic league. We purchased our flowers through our local SAMS CLUB. The club offered 3-4 different delivery dates and if I remember correctly they also offered 2 different sizes of plants. This is about the time of year that we started the sale process with SAMS CLUB, so it may be worth a call to your local store to see if they participate and if so what the prices are.
Our plants had foil on them and they came boxed - this made pick up very easy. The plants looked great and we had lots of positive feedback. One of our big purchasers was a local factory - they purchased a poinsettia for every worker!
If your PTO isn't a member of SAMS CLUB you may want to consider it - especially if you order your poinsettias through them. A business membership is just $35/year and it includes a couple of cards including one that can be used by anyone in your group as long as they are using a "company" check. They can also document your non-profit status and allow you to make purchases without paying sales tax.
One of our PTO's largest fundraisers every year is the Poinsettia sale. And this year we are running into some problems. First of all, the grower we used last year is no longer in business. And the prices of the other growers we've contacted are much higher. Last year we purchase 6" plants for $3.10 and 8" plants for $8.10. We sold them for $8.00 and $15.00. We sold over $14,000 in poinsettias and made almost 50% profit. This year the growers want $4.35 for the 6" and $11.50 for the 8". And those prices don't inlcude foil around the bottom. That's another .25 to .35 cents each. And the other grower delivered the plants in boxes, which meant they could be stacked on top of each other. That was a really good thing with over 1200 plants.
So, I was hoping others who are also doing Poinsettia sales this year could give me an idea of how much they are paying, what they are getting for their money and how much they are selling them for.
We will obviously have to charge more this year. But that means we won't sell as many. And even if we charge more, I doubt we would charge so much more that we would make the same profit margin.
Any help you can give us would be greatly appreciated.
