How Edwin Veneracion Make Money From Dendrobium Orchids — The orchids business is just like any other business. There are big winners as well as big losers. There were prominent players in the orchid business but who have closed shop for one reason or another. But there are also very successful orchid projects that prospered and continue to prosper by adopting creative business strategies.
One such orchid project is Golden Blooms which Edwin Veneracion and his wife Gina set up in Barangay Maguinao, San Rafael, Bulacan in 1998. They started their project with just 3,000 dendrobium seedlings and three employees. Today, they have more than 600,000 dendrobium plants and a lesser number of vandas, cattleyas and oncidiums. The original three employees have increased to 50 and the are occupied by the project has expanded to five hectares. The business is a highly profitable operation.Edwin revealed that right from the start, the business was profitable. They easily sold all the 3,000 orchids that they grew to flowering size at P40 each. They plowed back their income as they kept expanding, eventually buying two hectares adjacent to their original two hectares, and another hectare along the highway not far from their original site.
There are several kinds of orchids but they chose dendrobiums as their main product for a number of good reason. For one, dendrobiums are the orchid for the masses. It is the major kind of orchid for cut flower production. It also attains flowering size earlier than the other orchid generation. For instance, after just 10 months from planting their four-inch seedlings that they import from Thailand, the plants would already be in bloom and are ready for sale.
The Veneracions have adopted strategies that make their operations simple and without much hassle. To make their marketing much easier, they just have to produce healthy and floriferous orchids that they offer at lower prices than the big competitors. That way, the big-volume buyers will always go back to them to buy on a regular basis.
That strategy really works very well. Their flowering orchids in Size 4 pots with usually 4 to 5 stems with flower spikes are prices mostly at P50 to P60 per pot. Only a few are priced at P70 per pot. These are the few newer varieties. As proof that this strategy works, there are no less than 100 regular buyers as far as General Santos City and Zamboanga City in Mindanao and as far as Laoag City ang Tuguegarao City in the north. And there are more from Metro Manila and nearby provinces.
Many of the regular buyers are traders and nursery and plant shop owners who find profitable to buy and resell the orchids from the Veneracion. To make dure that the regular buyers keep going back, the Veneracion have to have enough supplies of flowering orchids. That is why they have to import their seedlings from Bangkok regularly. They import 30,000 to 35,000 every month sometimes even more. And the four-inch seedlings are ready for sale in 10 months or less.
Even if they only sell their flowering dendrobiums in Size 4 pots with four or five flowering stems at P50 to P60 per pot, Edwin and Gina Veneracion certainly earn a fortune in growing beautiful dendrobiums orchids especially now that their buyers are growing.