Today, as I always say, I’m going to give you my perspective and a little bit of the experience that I’ve undertaken in my years in home staging about a specific topic.
You can thread from that what works for you, what agrees with you and what strikes a chord in your business and then make decisions about how you want to move forward from there.
Today, I want to talk to you about faux or real when it comes to flowers and plants.
In my home, to be honest with you, I only allow real, living plants and flowers and tree and nature.
But, in home staging, it is a little different. The community is a little divided on it, whether to use faux or whether to use fresh.
There are obvious difficulties when it comes to using fresh flowers, especially if it’s a vacant property. I’ll give you a bit of an insight as to what we do here and you can take from that what you need for your business.
In all vacant properties, unless they’re in the prestige price bracket, we often use faux plants and faux flowers.
Purely for the reason that rarely does someone have the budget and is able to afford us continually going back to the property every week or every two weeks to refresh the flowers, to water the plants and make sure that everything’s in working order.
The reason that that is important is there is never a time when walking into a property to a dead plant or to smelling, moulding flower water is okay.
It actually is a bigger distraction than having a faux plant or faux flowers in the property.
Obviously, there are some markets where that just doesn’t work. There are some markets, even when it’s a vacant property, that we invest in having real and authentic plants and real and authentic flowers in there.
We come up with a pricing system and a process that allows for us to go in and interchange the plants and interchange the flowers during the time on market.
If you have a property that is occupied, you can actually negotiate with the owner if they’re there and if they’re happy to, around the concept of them topping up the flowers and them taking care of the plants.
But again, this takes some negotiation and it takes a little bit of work.
What I will say, though, is if you choose to use faux plants or flowers, you really need to make sure you maintain them well.
There’s nothing worse than dirty, dusty, musty smelling fake arrangements, fake plants or fake flowers. It’s essential that when you’re storing these items, if you choose to use them, in your warehouse, that they’re always bagged up so they don’t become a dust collection.
What you can do if you do find that happening is actually use feather dusters on them or, even in some cases, I have vacuumed our plants.
Another great tip is that you actually have a roster and a process where all of the fake plants and all of the fake flowers get cleaned. This can make a massive difference to how long they last and how good they look.
My biggest advice if you need to use fake plants or flowers is to invest in really good quality plants and flowers.
It will cost you quite a substantial amount, but there are some amazing products on the market internationally for this. There’s amazing freestyle arrangements that you can make and there’s also some amazing premades. You even have some really cool things like premade terrariums and all sorts of things.
My big tip is choose the price point of the property. The client and the type of installation, whether it be an occupied or a partial, before we make the decision about whether you’re going to use real or whether you’re going to use faux foliage.
There’s my take, guys. One thing is for sure, either way, you need to make sure that the faux flowers and foliage that you use is perfectly targeted for the property, for your brand and also for who you are selling to.
Choose wisely.
