The author
Jimenez Julien, the person behind StemCount
Publication director at MLJ, SASU, and the one who answers when you write to the address at the bottom of this page.
Why I built a quoting tool for florists
The first floral studio I worked with was not looking for software. She was looking for an explanation. Her studio had booked forty one weddings that year, the calendar was full from May through October, and after the last install she sat down with a bank statement and could not account for where the season had gone. Every wedding had been delivered on time. Several of them had been photographed and published. The money was simply not there.
We spent two evenings pulling apart nine of those proposals. It was not one large mistake. It was the same small mistake made forty one times: the price was set from a photograph and a feeling, and the flowers were bought eight months later at a number nobody had checked. On one arbor the gap between what she had quoted and what she had bought was four hundred and sixty dollars. On a set of twenty two guest tables it was smaller per table and much larger in total. Nothing was wrong with her design work or her craft. The arithmetic between the two was missing.
StemCount exists because that arithmetic is boring, repetitive, and exactly what software should carry. A design is a recipe. A recipe is a list of varieties and stem counts. A stem has a cost that changes with the market, and a studio has a labor model and a markup rule. Put those four facts in one place and the proposal, the order list and the margin report all fall out of the same data. That is the whole idea, and I have spent two years making it fast enough that a busy owner will actually use it in February when she is quoting between client calls.
What I have learned about this trade
Florists are among the most numerate business owners I have worked with, and they are consistently sold tools that assume the opposite. The women running these studios can tell you the shrink rate on a box of ranunculus and the drive time to a venue in traffic. What they do not have is an eight month memory of the price of every variety, or a spare hour at eleven at night to recount a proposal into a wholesale order.
I have also learned that the trade runs on substitution. A design is a shape, a palette and a texture, and the varieties that fill it are negotiable in ways an outsider never expects. Early versions of StemCount treated a recipe as a fixed list, and that was wrong. Recipes now carry acceptable alternates and a price for each, because that is how a designer protects a client's budget when peonies triple in June.
The third lesson was about the weekend. Wedding work does not spread out. Three installs land on the same Saturday and then nothing happens for five weeks. Any tool that thinks in months instead of weekends will be abandoned by August.
How I work with studios
I do not run this product from a distance. Every quarter I sit with six or seven studio owners on screen shares, watch them quote a real wedding in the software, and write down every place they hesitate. Those hesitations are the roadmap. The substitution model, the bunch rounding, the processing allowance and the printed timeline all came from watching someone stumble and asking why.
What I am accountable for
I am the publication director for this site and the product lead for StemCount. That means the accuracy of what you read here, the security of what you enter, and the reply you get when you write. If a number on this site cannot be defended, it does not belong on it. If something in the product costs you money, I want to hear about it directly rather than through a ticket queue.
Experience and expertise
- Publication director at MLJ, SASU, registered in Paris, building focused software for small operators in service trades.
- Two years of product work specific to wedding and event floristry, including pricing models, wholesale ordering and install logistics.
- Quarterly research sessions with studio owners in the United States booking between twelve and ninety weddings a year.
- Hands on work with wholesaler price sheet formats, bunch rounding conventions and processing loss allowances.
- Responsible for editorial standards, data protection practice and customer support on this product.
How this product is built and maintained
StemCount ships small changes weekly and larger changes on a monthly cycle, with every release tested against a library of real proposals contributed by studios who agreed to it. Pricing logic is covered by automated tests, because a rounding error in a stem count is a rounding error in someone's pay. Wholesaler import formats are checked every quarter against fresh exports.
On the editorial side, every claim on this site traces to a source we hold. Statistics come from anonymized, aggregated account data or from studies of studios who opted in, and they are refreshed when the underlying figures move. Testimonials are published with permission and with the studio named. We do not run advertising trackers, we do not sell customer data, and we do not publish a number we cannot show you the working for.
Published articles
Everything I have written for Stem & Ledger, the StemCount magazine on wedding floral costs, sourcing and delivery day logistics.
- How do I build a stem count recipe for a bridal bouquet before I quote the price?
- What is the real difference between a wholesale line, a local grower and a flower market?
- Which quoting mistakes cost wedding florists the most profit on a full service event?
- What licenses, sales tax rules and insurance do I need to run a wedding floral studio?
- How did one studio rebuild a two hundred guest wedding order after a shipment arrived short?
- Where are wedding flower costs and client expectations heading for the next booking season?
- What should be on my delivery day timeline for a ceremony and reception flip?
- What markup and labor rate do I need on stems and hard goods to hit a real margin?
- How does a summer install actually go when the venue has no cooler and no shade?
Contact the author
Write to jimenezjulien42@gmail.com with a question about pricing, a bug, a wholesaler format that does not import cleanly, or a proposal you want a second opinion on. You can also start with the request form on the home page if you would rather book a walkthrough.