From Colombian flower farms to Manhattan jewelers, Hallmark boardrooms to Houston florist shops sweating tariffs, the business of Mother’s Day is bigger, more complicated, and more emotionally loaded than almost anyone realizes
By the second week of April, the flower farms of the Bogotá Savanna — 8,600 feet above sea level in the Colombian highlands, where the temperature stays cool enough year-round to grow some of the finest cut flowers on earth — begin their most consequential sprint of the year. Workers move through greenhouses the length of football fields, trimming stems, grading petals, bundling roses into tight cylinders and loading them onto refrigerated trucks bound for El Dorado International Airport. Within hours, those flowers are in temperature-controlled cargo holds, Miami-bound, entering a supply chain so precisely engineered that a rose cut from a Colombian stem on a Monday morning can be arranged in a vase in suburban Ohio by Wednesday afternoon.
On the other end of that chain, in the Ohio suburb in question, a 35-year-old named — let’s say — Marcus is staring at his phone, scrolling through a floral delivery app at 11 p.m. the night before Mother’s Day, wondering whether the $79 bouquet will arrive in time and whether his mother will prefer roses or lilies. He’s also bought a card. He’s made a reservation at a brunch restaurant that normally costs $22 a head but is charging $68 for its Mother’s Day prix fixe. He’s ordered a personalized necklace from an Etsy seller in Vermont. All told, he’ll spend somewhere north of $250. He’ll feel, when it’s over, that he may have slightly undershot.
Marcus is not alone. He is, in fact, a nearly perfect statistical avatar of the American Mother’s Day consumer in 2025.
A Holiday That Prints Money
Mother’s Day is the third-largest retail holiday in the United States, trailing only Christmas and Back-to-School season, and it is by some measures the most commercially efficient of all: concentrated into a single weekend, powered by guilt that operates independently of disposable income, and protected from the consumer’s instinct to economize by the singular awkwardness of visibly spending less on one’s mother than one spent last year.
The National Retail Federation, which has tracked Mother’s Day spending for nearly two decades, estimates that American consumers will spend $34.1 billion on the holiday in 2025 — the second-highest figure ever recorded, trailing only the $35.7 billion peak of 2023. The average celebrant will spend $259.04, a figure that has more than doubled since the NRF began conducting its annual survey in the mid-2000s. When measured against Father’s Day — typically pegged at around $189 per celebrant — it is clear that the cultural premium attached to motherhood expresses itself directly in retail spending. Americans spend roughly 37% more on their mothers than on their fathers. The gap has been remarkably stable for years.
The categories of spending tell a story of their own. Jewelry leads at $6.8 billion in projected 2025 outlays — the eighth consecutive year it has topped the spending charts. Special outings (dinners, brunches, spa days, and concerts) rank second at $6.3 billion. Gift cards account for $3.5 billion; flowers, $3.2 billion; greeting cards, $1.1 billion. Electronics, personal care items, housewares, books, and clothing account for the remainder. The mix has shifted in meaningful ways over the past decade: jewelry and electronics have held up or grown even as purely token gifts like candy and housewares have faded. The directional message is that American consumers are spending more on Mother’s Day, spending on higher-priced categories, and trading up within those categories as retailers have learned to anchor the occasion to aspiration rather than obligation.
“Mother’s Day has become one of our most important selling periods, full stop,” said a senior merchant at one of America’s largest specialty jewelry chains, who asked not to be identified discussing internal strategy. “It’s not just about volume. It’s about the emotional register. People are buying for someone they love, they feel a certain amount of pressure to get it right, and they’re more willing than at almost any other point in the year to stretch their budget to do that.”
The Origin Story: A Founder Who Wanted Her Holiday Back
Understanding how Mother’s Day became a $34 billion industry requires a brief detour into one of American commercial history’s more ironic origin stories.
Anna Jarvis was a churchgoing, childless schoolteacher from Grafton, West Virginia. After the death of her mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis — a community activist who had organized women’s work clubs and cared for sick soldiers during the Civil War without regard for which side they fought on — in 1905, Anna Jarvis began a years-long campaign to establish a national holiday in honor of mothers. She wrote thousands of letters, lobbied governors, senators, and newspaper editors, and formed the Mother’s Day International Association to marshal her cause. In May 1908, she organized what is now considered the first official Mother’s Day service at a Methodist church in Grafton. She distributed white carnations to the attendees — chosen for their association with maternal purity and love.
By 1914, her campaign had succeeded beyond anyone’s reasonable expectation. President Woodrow Wilson signed a proclamation establishing the second Sunday of May as Mother’s Day, a national holiday. Anna Jarvis was 49 years old. She had no children. She had just created one of the most durable and commercially powerful retail occasions in American history.
She immediately began trying to destroy it.
Within a few years of Wilson’s proclamation, candy makers, florists, and greeting-card publishers had recognized the holiday’s commercial potential and moved aggressively to capitalize on it. Cards appeared on retail shelves in the early 1920s. Flower prices spiked around the second Sunday in May. Department stores ran Mother’s Day promotions. Jarvis was appalled. She had envisioned personal, handwritten letters and quiet church attendance. She had not envisioned a Wanamaker’s department store selling “Mother’s Day Salads.” According to one account, she ordered such a salad at a Philadelphia tearoom and promptly dumped it on the floor.
She filed lawsuits against businesses using the term “Mother’s Day” in advertising. She issued denunciations of “the hordes of money schemers” who had, in her view, desecrated her holiday. She organized boycotts. She campaigned, in her later years, to have Mother’s Day officially rescinded — an effort that went nowhere, as one might expect of a campaign to abolish a holiday that was generating hundreds of millions of dollars in annual commerce.
Jarvis died in 1948 in a Pennsylvania sanatorium. She had spent the bulk of her inheritance on legal battles with the industry. There is a legend — neither fully confirmed nor fully debunked — that a portion of her medical bills were paid by the floral and greeting-card industries whose commercial ambitions she had spent decades trying to thwart. Whether apocryphal or true, it is too perfect a coda to resist: the woman who created Mother’s Day, sustained in her final years by the industry she could not destroy.
Today, the Methodist church in Grafton where Jarvis held her first Mother’s Day service is a National Historic Landmark. Each year, thousands of visitors come to pay their respects to the holiday’s origins. Many of them buy flowers on their way in.
The Florist’s Super Bowl
Bob Yedowitz has been running Emil Yedowitz Florist in Yonkers, New York, for decades. He knows the rhythm of the floral year the way farmers know the agrarian calendar: Valentine’s Day is the sprint, Christmas is the marathon, and Mother’s Day is the championship game.
“We have about 400 deliveries for Mother’s Day,” Yedowitz said in May 2025. “It’s our biggest day. You plan for it for months. Everything has to be right.”
This year, though, planning had an added complication. A 10% universal tariff on imported goods, enacted by the Trump administration in April 2025, had landed directly on his supply chain. Roughly 80% of cut flowers sold in the United States are imported — the majority from Colombia and Ecuador — and those imports now arrived at Miami International Airport with a tariff line item attached. Florists up and down the country were doing the same uncomfortable calculation: absorb the added cost and take a margin hit during one of the few weeks of the year when margins are supposed to be worth protecting, or pass it to customers and risk dampening demand at precisely the moment they could least afford to lose volume.
“We’re going to have to increase prices accordingly, just to maintain the same profit margin,” Yedowitz said. For now, he was holding his prices steady. He was not sure how long that would last.
His predicament was widely shared. A floral grower in the Pacific Northwest estimated that the tariff, when factored across a full year including accessory costs — vases from China, wrapping paper from China, floral foam from China — could add $40,000 to $50,000 to his annual operating costs. That, he noted, was enough to fund an entire additional employee’s salary.
The Society of American Florists told reporters that the industry was adapting — ordering further in advance, deepening relationships with growers, and exploring domestic sourcing where possible. Kim Tobman, CEO of the online florist Bouqs, shifted some sourcing for vases and accessories away from China and accepted tighter margins for the season. “This is like our Super Bowl,” Tobman told Bloomberg. “You don’t sit out the Super Bowl.”
The tariff situation illuminated how fragile the floral supply chain’s economics actually are. The industry operates on thin margins even in normal years. Flowers are perishable; unsold inventory cannot be returned or warehoused. A bad logistics day — a delayed cargo flight, a refrigeration failure — can render an entire shipment worthless. The industry has spent decades optimizing its supply chain to minimize waste and maximize freshness. The added variable of tariff costs, arriving with minimal notice, disrupted calculations that had been built up over years of operational learning.
The broader context of that supply chain is worth understanding in its full dimensions. Colombia is the world’s second-largest exporter of cut flowers, after the Netherlands, and the United States is its overwhelmingly dominant customer — absorbing roughly 75% of Colombian flower exports. Colombia’s flower industry employs over 200,000 people, the majority of them women, working on farms concentrated in the Bogotá Savanna. Ecuador, particularly strong in the luxury rose segment, exports over 100,000 boxes of flowers daily during peak holiday periods.
In a recent three-week Mother’s Day shipping season, the LATAM cargo group alone mobilized more than 24,000 tons of flowers from Colombia and Ecuador, operating more than 400 cargo flights and delivering some 552 million stems — a 93% increase compared to the volume moved during a typical three-week period. Miami International Airport served as the principal gateway, with 370 landings during the peak season alone. From Miami, the flowers dispersed through a network of wholesalers, regional distributors, and retail florists — from FTD and 1-800-Flowers serving national delivery customers online to independent shops like Yedowitz’s serving local walk-in and delivery demand.
The Netherlands, which might seem an unlikely participant in the American Mother’s Day supply chain, is in fact its invisible backbone. Dutch flower auctions — particularly the massive complex at Aalsmeer near Amsterdam, one of the largest commercial buildings in the world by footprint — serve as the global clearinghouse for cut flowers, matching supply from producers across Africa, Asia, and South America with demand from European retail markets. The Dutch model keeps the global floral market liquid and prices competitive. Without it, the logistics of getting a Colombian rose to a New York florist in 48 hours would be dramatically more complicated.
For local florists, Mother’s Day is existentially important. Industry data suggest that the fortnight around the holiday accounts for 15 to 20% of annual revenue for many independent floral retailers — a concentration that means a bad Mother’s Day, from weather, a logistics failure, a competitor undercutting on price, or a sudden tariff, can materially damage a small business’s full-year results. It also means that every operational and creative decision made in the preceding months is, in some sense, a bet on Mother’s Day.
“You can’t hedge against Mother’s Day,” said one New England florist who has operated her shop for 22 years. “You just have to be ready.”
Table for Four, Mother’s Day, 7:30
Every year, the National Restaurant Association releases a data point that briefly surprises people who hear it for the first time and seems entirely obvious upon reflection: Mother’s Day is the single busiest dining-out day of the calendar year. Not Valentine’s Day, with its romantic dinner pressure. Not Thanksgiving, with its scale. Mother’s Day — a Sunday in May when families across the country decide that the best way to celebrate the woman who fed everyone for decades is to take her somewhere she doesn’t have to cook.
The numbers are staggering. Data from Toast, the restaurant management platform, show that steak orders surge 88% on Mother’s Day relative to a typical Sunday, and seafood orders rise 83%. Wine sales jump 50%. Brunch tickets are priced, on average, 32% higher than on a comparable non-holiday Sunday. The National Restaurant Association estimates that 43% of American consumers plan to eat out or order food online on Mother’s Day — a proportion that, when applied to the adult population, generates a single-day hospitality revenue figure that dwarfs almost anything else on the calendar.
“Mother’s Day isn’t just another day on the calendar — it’s the mother of all dining days for the hospitality industry,” as OpenTable’s restaurant solutions team put it in a 2025 industry brief, deploying the pun with the confidence of people who have the data to back it up.
Of all the restaurant transactions that take place on Mother’s Day, 45% occur during the brunch period — between roughly 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. This has made brunch the defining meal of the holiday and, increasingly, the occasion for restaurants to develop dedicated brunch experiences that command premium pricing. A basic Sunday brunch at a mid-tier American restaurant might run $25 to $35 a head. A Mother’s Day brunch at the same establishment, with a fixed menu, mimosa package, and a small floral centerpiece on each table, might run $65 to $95 per person. The math is straightforward, and restaurant operators have become very good at it.
OpenTable data from 2024 showed a 29% year-over-year increase in “Experience” dining on Mother’s Day — tasting menus, chef’s table bookings, curated pairing dinners — indicating that the trend toward premium, structured dining is accelerating. More than half of mothers surveyed by OpenTable said a chef’s tasting menu was a must-have for the ideal Mother’s Day celebration. Twenty-nine percent of families admitted to booking within 24 hours of the holiday — a phenomenon familiar to any restaurant owner who has fielded increasingly desperate calls on Saturday evening.
The restaurant dimension of Mother’s Day has its own logistics challenge. Staffing up for a day that is ten times normal volume without compromising service quality requires months of planning, significant coordination with suppliers to ensure menu items are available at scale, and a workforce strategy that typically involves bringing in seasonal staff and asking full-timers to work unusually long shifts. Many restaurants offer fixed menus on Mother’s Day specifically to manage kitchen throughput — it is easier to execute 200 covers of a five-item menu than 200 covers of a full à la carte menu with 30 options.
For the broader hospitality sector, Mother’s Day is a meaningful revenue moment in a calendar that is otherwise dominated by December. SpotOn, a restaurant point-of-sale company, reported that total Mother’s Day sales on its platform had increased 75% since 2021, with a 78% increase in individual transactions over the same period. For restaurants that had navigated the pandemic years and subsequent inflationary pressures, Mother’s Day was the reliable bright spot — the day when consumers reliably upgraded their spending and when even struggling restaurants could post their best single-day numbers of the year.
The Hallmark of the Occasion: Greeting Cards and the Industry’s Improbable Resilience
In an era when Americans communicate primarily through text messages, voice memos, social media posts, and video calls, the greeting card industry has confounded the pessimists who predicted its extinction. Mother’s Day is a significant reason why.
Americans purchase approximately 6.5 billion greeting cards annually, and Mother’s Day is the second-largest single occasion for card-giving, behind only Christmas. An estimated 113 million cards are sold for Mother’s Day each year in the United States — more than Valentine’s Day cards for fathers, and more than Valentine’s Day generates in some estimates. The holiday’s dominance in the card category is particularly notable in the Hispanic community, for whom Mother’s Day is consistently the most prominent card-giving occasion of the year.
The market is dominated, with impressive stubbornness, by two companies: Hallmark and American Greetings, which together account for roughly 80% of the U.S. greeting card market. Hallmark’s annual revenue stands at approximately $5 billion, a figure that makes the Kansas City-based company one of the largest private enterprises in the United States by revenue. American Greetings, headquartered in Westlake, Ohio, generates approximately $1.6 billion in annual sales. Both companies have navigated the digital transition by investing in personalization, premium card formats, and omnichannel distribution — ensuring that cards are available at every possible point of purchase, from specialty stationery shops to gas stations.
The physical greeting card has proven more durable than the digital era’s prophets of disruption expected, for a reason that the industry’s own research consistently confirms: a physical card is a tangible artifact of an occasion. It can be kept, displayed, re-read, and passed along. A text message cannot be placed on a refrigerator. An email cannot be discovered in a drawer 20 years later and used to reconstruct the texture of a relationship. For occasions with high emotional stakes — and few occasions have higher emotional stakes than Mother’s Day — the physical card retains a significance that no digital format has successfully replicated.
The personalization segment is where the industry’s growth is concentrated. Custom-printed cards, available through platforms like Shutterfly, Zazzle, and Minted, allow consumers to incorporate photographs, personal messages, and bespoke design elements that off-the-shelf cards cannot provide. Micro- and nano-publishers — there are approximately 3,500 small independent card makers in the United States — have carved out meaningful niches in the artisanal end of the market, selling through Etsy, independent boutiques, and specialty gift shops at price points two to three times those of mass-market cards. The Greeting Card Association estimates the total U.S. retail market for greeting cards at $7 billion.
What the industry has learned, somewhat to its own surprise, is that the advent of digital communication has not reduced the emotional appetite for physical expressions of sentiment — it may have increased it. In a world saturated with ephemeral digital content, a card that someone took the time to select, write in, stamp, and mail represents a meaningful investment of attention. On Mother’s Day, when the stakes of appearing to have made minimal effort are particularly high, that investment is one that tens of millions of Americans remain willing to make.
Jewelers: Where Emotion Meets Aspiration
Of all the industries that benefit from Mother’s Day, none has done more to engineer its own position at the top of the spending hierarchy than jewelry.
In 2025, Americans are projected to spend $6.8 billion on jewelry for Mother’s Day — a figure that has grown substantially over the past decade as major jewelry retailers have invested heavily in positioning the holiday as an occasion for meaningful, lasting gifts rather than mere tokens of affection. The shift has been deliberate. In the early 2010s, flowers and cards dominated the Mother’s Day gift hierarchy. Jewelry was a significant but secondary category. Today it is the single largest spending category — and it has held that distinction for eight consecutive years.
The companies that sell that $6.8 billion worth of jewelry range across the full spectrum of the market. At the mass-market end, Signet Jewelers — the largest specialty jewelry retailer in the world, operating under the Kay Jewelers, Zales, and Jared banners — runs aggressive Mother’s Day promotions anchored around accessible price points: charm bracelets in the $50-to-$150 range, birthstone pendants, engraved lockets. At the luxury end, Tiffany & Co. and Cartier emphasize the longevity and permanence of fine jewelry — the idea that a piece bought on Mother’s Day in 2025 will still be meaningful in 2045. In the middle, companies like Pandora — the Danish jewelry brand whose customizable charm bracelets have made it one of the world’s most recognizable jewelry brands — have built a category specifically calibrated to the emotional logic of Mother’s Day gifting.
Pandora’s charm bracelet, in particular, is a product of genius for the Mother’s Day occasion: it is a physical object that accumulates meaning over time, that can be added to with each subsequent celebration, and that creates a gifting framework — “buy her a new charm for the bracelet you gave her last year” — that generates repeat purchase cycles. The company’s digital marketing around Mother’s Day is among the most sophisticated in the industry, leveraging Instagram and TikTok to reach younger gift-buyers who are purchasing for their own mothers rather than shopping for themselves.
Companies such as Pandora, Kendra Scott, Swarovski, and Cartier have built strong emotional connections with female buyers through storytelling, personalization options, and targeted marketing campaigns — campaigns that peak sharply around Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day. The personalization trend within jewelry — engraving, birthstones, custom design — has been particularly powerful for the Mother’s Day market, because it allows a mass-produced item to carry the emotional weight of something bespoke. A generic gold pendant is a gift; a gold pendant engraved with a child’s birthdate is a keepsake.
The jewelry industry has also benefited from the broader cultural shift toward experiences-as-identity. A piece of jewelry is, in the taxonomy of consumer goods, both an object and an experience — it is worn, it prompts stories, it connects the wearer to the memory of the occasion on which it was received. For a generation of consumers who have been told by every self-help book and lifestyle brand that experiences are more valuable than things, jewelry occupies a rare and commercially advantageous position: it is a thing that functions as an experience.
The Digital Transformation of Mother’s Day Shopping
No aspect of the Mother’s Day business has changed more dramatically over the past decade than the way consumers discover, research, and purchase their gifts. The shift from in-store to digital has transformed competitive dynamics across every category — benefiting large platforms, challenging independent retailers, and creating entirely new marketing ecosystems built around the holiday.
In 2025, more than 35% of Mother’s Day gifts in the United States are purchased online, up from around 25% five years ago, according to NRF data. The shift is not uniform: younger consumers — Millennials and Gen Z — are more likely to shop digitally, more likely to discover gifts through social media, and more likely to use platforms like TikTok and Instagram as their primary research channel. Search interest around Mother’s Day jumped 586% quarter-over-quarter in 2025, illustrating the sheer scale of the digital discovery activity that now precedes the holiday’s commercial peak.
The rise of social commerce — the ability to purchase directly from content seen on Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest, without being redirected to a separate e-commerce site — has created new dynamics in Mother’s Day marketing. Small brands and independent makers who would previously have struggled to compete with large retailers for shelf space or advertising reach can now reach millions of potential gift-buyers through a single viral post or a well-placed influencer collaboration. Micro-influencers — those with 10,000 to 100,000 followers in a specific niche — have proven particularly effective for Mother’s Day campaigns because their audiences trust their recommendations and are aligned with specific product categories.
Millennials and Gen Z are more likely to turn to social media and influencers when searching for the perfect Mother’s Day gift, highlighting the growing importance of social commerce, user-generated content, and influencer partnerships in driving purchase decisions.
The timing of digital Mother’s Day activity has also shifted. The majority of Mother’s Day purchases happen just one to two weeks before the holiday, making real-time digital marketing execution essential for brands hoping to capture late-deciding shoppers. This creates a concentrated advertising auction in the days immediately before the holiday, with brands bidding aggressively for keyword placement on Google and product visibility on Amazon and Instagram. The cost-per-click for Mother’s Day-related search terms rises sharply in the final ten days before the holiday, rewarding brands that have the budget to participate and punishing those that run out of advertising spend before the peak.
Amazon has become, for many categories, the dominant channel for Mother’s Day gift purchases — not because it offers the most curated experience, but because it offers the most convenient one. Consumers who know what they want but don’t know where to get it, or who are shopping under time pressure, default to Amazon’s combination of broad selection, competitive pricing, and reliable delivery. The company’s Prime membership program, with its guaranteed delivery windows, is particularly valuable for Mother’s Day last-minute shoppers, who are often willing to pay a premium for certainty.
For independent retailers — florists, jewelers, specialty gift shops — the digital shift has presented both a threat and an opportunity. The threat is obvious: they cannot match Amazon’s selection, price, or delivery infrastructure. The opportunity is less discussed but equally real: they can offer something Amazon cannot, which is genuine expertise, personalized service, and the kind of emotional resonance that comes from buying from a real human being who understands the occasion and the product. Retailers who have invested in their own e-commerce presence, in local search optimization, and in the kind of storytelling-driven social media content that connects their products to the emotional logic of Mother’s Day have found it possible to compete effectively against the platforms — not by trying to out-Amazon Amazon, but by offering something Amazon structurally cannot.
Around the World: A Holiday of Many Calendars
What makes Mother’s Day uniquely interesting as a global commercial phenomenon — and uniquely challenging for companies that operate across markets — is that it is not one holiday but many, celebrated on different dates and in different registers across more than 100 countries.
In the United Kingdom, Mothering Sunday falls on the fourth Sunday of Lent, a date determined by the ecclesiastical calendar and thus variable from year to year — in 2025, it fell on March 30th. Its origins predate the American commercialized holiday by centuries: in the medieval period, servants and apprentices were given a day of leave to return to their home parish church — their “mother church” — and by extension to visit their families. The secular, commercialized version of the occasion that British consumers experience today is a relatively recent overlay on those ancient roots.
UK consumer spending for Mother’s Day is expected to hit £2.4 billion in 2025, a 5% rise on 2024. The average British consumer is planning to spend £125.30 on their mother — £17.43 more than last year. As in the United States, the trend is toward premiumization: more consumers are buying fine jewellery, high-end beauty products, and curated experience gifts rather than the perennial chocolates-and-flowers combination. Barclays spending data showed florists recording a 553.2% increase in transactions on the Friday before Mothering Sunday compared to the average day in 2025 — a figure that even exceeded Valentine’s Day florist volumes by 14.5%.
The British consumer’s relationship to the occasion has its own psychological texture. A YouGov survey found that while 43% of Britons describe Mother’s Day as a “proper” holiday, 52% believe they celebrate it at least partly because of pressure exerted by commercial entities. This self-awareness about commercial pressure does not, evidently, translate into resistance to it. The same survey found that British Mother’s Day spending has grown in most years, regardless of consumers’ stated skepticism about the holiday’s commercial nature. The guilt mechanism operates independently of one’s views about it.
Mexico offers a radically different version of the holiday. Día de las Madres is celebrated on May 10th each year — a fixed date, regardless of what day of the week it falls on, a rigidity that underscores the holiday’s cultural primacy over mere calendrical convenience. The celebration was first organized in Mexico City by newspaper founder Rafael Alducin in 1922. Over the subsequent century, it has become one of Mexico’s most significant social occasions. Schools devote weeks to preparation: children rehearse songs, dances, and plays that they perform for their mothers. Families hire mariachi bands to serenade mothers at dawn with “Las Mañanitas” — a traditional Mexican birthday song that has been fully co-opted for Mother’s Day use. Special masses are held. One Mexican mother described the occasion plainly: “The mother here is a very important figure. The country stops when it’s Mother’s Day here.”
Brazil is among the most commercially significant Mother’s Day markets outside North America and Europe. The holiday — Dia das Mães — is celebrated on the second Sunday in May. It is the second-most important retail date in the Brazilian calendar, behind only Christmas, and generates billions of reals in consumer spending. In 2025, data from a survey conducted by Globo with the PiniOn institute found that 82% of Brazilians intended to celebrate the date — compared to 77% in 2024 — and 71% planned to give gifts, a significant jump from 58% the prior year. Brazilian retailers have invested heavily in digital marketing and e-commerce infrastructure for the holiday, recognizing that younger urban consumers are increasingly comfortable purchasing gifts online.
Japan’s version of Mother’s Day — Haha no Hi — falls on the second Sunday in May and mirrors its American counterpart in its basic structure: flowers (preferably red carnations, which symbolize maternal love and sacrifice), handmade gifts from children, and often a home-cooked meal. Japanese children commonly draw pictures of their mothers in school and gift them, sometimes entering the drawings into contests. The holiday carries a particular weight in Japanese culture, where filial piety is deeply embedded in the social code. The gift is not incidental to the meaning of the occasion — it is the primary medium through which meaning is communicated.
France celebrates La Fête des Mères on the last Sunday of May — or the first Sunday of June when that date conflicts with Pentecost. Though Mother’s Day did not become an official holiday in France until 1950, it was originally promoted by Napoleon. The French celebration centers on the family dinner: a large meal at which the mother is the honored guest, with children reciting poems or presenting handmade gifts. In France, 76% of Mother’s Day shoppers buy via mobile devices, with an average online order around €50. Social media and influencer recommendations are increasingly guiding gift choices, mirroring trends in the United States and United Kingdom.
Thailand celebrates Mother’s Day on August 12th — the birthday of Queen Sirikit, the Queen Mother — giving the occasion a monarchist and civic dimension entirely absent from its Western equivalents. Jasmine flowers, chosen for their white color and associations with purity, are the traditional gift. School ceremonies include formal presentations to mothers and photographs of the Queen. The commercial dimension is real but secondary to the civic one.
For globally operating retailers, logistics companies, and consumer brands, this fragmentation of dates is both a challenge and an opportunity. A single global spike in demand on the second Sunday in May would be operationally devastating; the actual staggering of peaks — UK and Ireland in March, US and much of the rest of the world in May, France in late May or early June, Thailand in August — allows supply chains and marketing teams to sequence their efforts rather than concentrating them impossibly. Maersk, the Danish shipping giant, notes in its own analysis that the staggered floral calendar creates multiple manageable peaks for the global flower supply chain rather than a single overwhelming one.
The Wellness Economy’s Biggest Weekend
The rise of the wellness industry has created a new and rapidly growing dimension of Mother’s Day spending that did not exist in meaningful form even a decade ago. Spa days, massages, facials, fitness classes, meditation retreats, and “wellbeing experiences” have become among the fastest-growing Mother’s Day gift categories — reflecting a broader cultural shift in what it means to give someone a meaningful gift.
The logic is straightforward: spa and wellness experiences allow the giver to demonstrate care for the recipient’s wellbeing, not merely their possession of objects. In an era when many consumers feel ambivalent about accumulating material things — and when the average American household is already reasonably well-stocked with jewelry, clothing, and housewares — a gift of personal restoration carries a different kind of weight.
The numbers in the underlying wellness industry are substantial. In 2024, U.S. spa industry revenues climbed to $22.5 billion, a 5.8% year-over-year increase. There were 21,980 spa locations operating in the United States — a figure that has grown steadily for years. The average revenue per spa visit in 2024 stood at $120.30. Over the Mother’s Day weekend, bookings spike dramatically: many spas are fully booked weeks in advance, and premium packages — facials, massages, afternoon tea pairings, signature treatments — sell out earlier than standard services.
Data from a recent UK retail survey shows that over 40% of Mother’s Day gift spending in 2024 was on experiences, such as afternoon tea, spa days, and short breaks. In the United States, the NRF’s data shows that special outings — a category that encompasses restaurant dining, spa visits, concert tickets, and similar experiences — accounted for $6.3 billion in projected 2025 Mother’s Day spending, making it the second-largest single spending category after jewelry and ahead of flowers.
The wellness gift category has benefited from the broader premiumization trend in Mother’s Day spending. A spa day at a mid-range facility might cost $150 to $300; a full-day retreat at a luxury spa in a major city can run $500 or more. Gift cards to spa chains — which allow the recipient to choose their own treatment and schedule — have become one of the standard vehicles for this category of Mother’s Day spending. The gift card format is particularly efficient from a retail perspective: it transfers the inventory risk to the consumer, generates revenue at the point of purchase rather than at redemption, and creates a pool of unredeemed balances that effectively constitute interest-free short-term financing for the business.
The Guilt Engine and Its Mechanics
The durability of Mother’s Day spending — its resilience across economic cycles, its consistent growth over nearly two decades of NRF survey data — is ultimately rooted in a psychological dynamic that every retailer in the Mother’s Day ecosystem understands implicitly, even if few discuss it directly.
Mother’s Day is the most emotionally coercive commercial holiday in the American calendar. The constituency of people who have living mothers and who are aware that their mothers are aware of when Mother’s Day falls is close to universal. The emotional stakes of appearing to have forgotten, or to have made less effort than in prior years, are significant enough that most consumers will spend more than they perhaps intended, and decline to economize in ways that might be visible to the person being honored.
Consumer research bears this out in granular detail. A YouGov poll found that while a majority of British consumers report feeling commercial pressure to celebrate Mother’s Day, they celebrate it anyway. NRF data shows that 84% of American adults plan to celebrate Mother’s Day — a participation rate that has been stable for years and that is higher than participation rates for Easter, Valentine’s Day, or Father’s Day. One consumer research firm observed that Mother’s Day gifting demand is “fuelled by people’s guilt about forgetting the day” — an assessment that is unflattering but probably accurate.
Retailers have learned, over decades, how to position their products against this psychological backdrop. The key is not to create the guilt — it exists independently — but to offer a resolution to it. “Don’t forget Mom” is the implicit message of every Mother’s Day marketing campaign, from the most sentimental Hallmark commercial to the most targeted Facebook ad. The resolution on offer is always the same: purchase something, and the guilt is discharged. The transaction is the absolution.
This mechanism has made Mother’s Day unusually resistant to the economizing impulses that affect other consumer categories during periods of economic stress. During the inflationary period of 2022 and 2023, when consumers were visibly cutting back on discretionary spending across categories ranging from dining out to clothing, Mother’s Day spending grew — setting a record of $35.7 billion in 2023 and remaining near-record levels in subsequent years. The explanation is not mysterious: you can skip a restaurant dinner, cancel a vacation, or defer a clothing purchase. It is much harder to downgrade your Mother’s Day gift without a conversation you don’t want to have.
The Personalization Premium
Across every category of Mother’s Day spending — flowers, jewelry, cards, clothing, beauty products — the single most powerful commercial trend of the past five years has been the shift toward personalization. Consumers are willing to pay meaningfully more for a gift that appears to have been chosen specifically for the recipient, rather than selected from a generic assortment.
The numbers on this preference are consistent across markets. In the United Kingdom, 53% of Mother’s Day shoppers plan to purchase personalized gifts. In the United States, NRF data and third-party surveys consistently show that uniqueness and personalization rank among the top considerations in Mother’s Day gift selection. In 2025, a considerable share of respondents stated that finding a unique or different gift was the most important shopping consideration.
The commercial logic of personalization is straightforward: a personalized product is harder to price-compare, because there is no identical item available from a competitor. A customized necklace with a child’s birthdate engraved on it is not interchangeable with a similar necklace from a different jeweler — it is, by definition, unique. This uniqueness justifies a price premium and simultaneously reduces the consumer’s incentive to shop around. For retailers and brands, personalization is therefore not merely a way to create better products — it is a way to escape the price-comparison dynamic that e-commerce has otherwise imposed on almost every retail category.
Technology has dramatically expanded the personalization options available to Mother’s Day shoppers. 3D printing allows jewelers to offer custom designs that would previously have required expensive handcrafting. Digital printing has made it possible to produce fully customized greeting cards, photo books, and framed prints at scale and at accessible price points. AI-powered recommendation engines are increasingly being used by platforms like Etsy, Amazon, and specialty retailers to suggest personalized Mother’s Day gifts based on past purchase behavior, browsing history, and demographic data. For 2026, retailers are already identifying opportunities to leverage AI for personalized gift recommendations — a race to make the gift-selection process feel more personal even as it becomes more algorithmically mediated.
The Economics of the Industry That Started It All
Anna Jarvis’s battle against the greeting-card and floral industries was, in retrospect, a battle she could not have won — not because she was wrong about the commercialization, but because the commercial logic of the holiday she created was too powerful to resist. The question, a century on, is what that industry actually looks like.
The U.S. retail market for greeting cards is estimated at $7 billion annually, dominated by Hallmark and American Greetings. Those two companies have maintained their dominance by investing in the full vertical: design, printing, distribution, and retail floor space. Hallmark alone operates roughly 2,100 company-owned stores and licenses its brand to thousands of additional retail locations. Its flagship product, the Mother’s Day card, is available in hundreds of distinct designs, segmented by relationship (card from son, card from daughter, card from grandchild, card from husband), sentiment register (humorous, sentimental, spiritual), and format (standard, oversized, musical, photo-insert). The category management involved in maintaining that assortment — predicting which designs will sell, in which quantities, at which retail locations — is a formidable analytical undertaking.
The independent card-maker segment, which accounts for the remaining 20% or so of the market, has proven surprisingly resilient in the digital era. There are approximately 3,500 small independent greeting-card publishers in the United States, many of them operating through Etsy and independent boutiques. Their products tend to be more distinctive, more expensive, and more explicitly positioned as gifts-in-themselves rather than mere carriers of a message. A handmade or artisanal card from an independent designer, priced at $8 to $15, represents a different kind of emotional signal than a $4.99 card from a supermarket spinner — and for a segment of the Mother’s Day market that prioritizes authenticity and uniqueness, that signal is worth paying for.
The floral industry’s economics are perhaps the most complex in the Mother’s Day ecosystem, because they involve a global supply chain, a perishable product, and a consumer base that is both price-sensitive (at the low end) and remarkably price-insensitive (at the high end). The floral industry commands close to $34.3 billion in yearly global revenue. Mother’s Day is, for florists, both a lifeline and a logistical nightmare — a period when sales volumes can run ten to fifteen times their normal daily levels, when ordering must be done weeks in advance on the basis of demand forecasts rather than confirmed orders, and when any shortfall in supply or surge in cost can materially damage a business’s full-year economics.
The tariff pressures of 2025 added a new dimension of risk to an industry already operating under significant constraint. At the hub level — Miami International Airport, where roughly 370 cargo flights landed during the recent Mother’s Day season — a 10% tariff on imported flowers represented a meaningful additional cost that the supply chain had to absorb, pass on, or navigate around. Large national retailers like FTD and 1-800-Flowers had more leverage to negotiate with suppliers and more flexibility to restructure their cost base than small independent florists. For the independents, the tariff represented an additional squeeze on margins that were already under pressure from e-commerce competition and rising labor costs.
What the Data Say About the Future
Every indicator in the Mother’s Day commercial ecosystem points toward continued growth, across virtually every category and geography.
In the United States, the structural drivers are favorable. The population of adults who have living mothers is large and relatively stable. The cultural premium attached to maternal relationships has, if anything, intensified in an era of geographic dispersal and reduced face-to-face family time: the annual ritual of demonstrating care on Mother’s Day carries more weight when families are spread across cities and time zones and see each other less than prior generations did. The trend toward experiential gifting — restaurant meals, spa days, concerts, short trips — aligns with the preferences of younger consumers and creates gifting opportunities in categories that are structurally growing.
The premiumization trend shows no sign of reversing. Consumers are spending more per person on Mother’s Day than at any point in the survey’s history, and the mix is shifting toward higher-priced categories and more expensive options within each category. Jewelry, the most expensive single category, has held the top spending position for eight consecutive years. Experiential outings have grown sharply. The cheap-and-cheerful end of the market — chocolates, small plants, token housewares — has lost share to more meaningful and more expensive alternatives.
Internationally, the growth story is even more compelling. Mother’s Day — as a concept, as a commercial occasion, as a framework for expressing filial love through consumption — continues to expand into new markets. In Brazil, gift-giving intentions jumped 13 percentage points between 2024 and 2025. In India, where the Western Mother’s Day is layered over an existing culture of elaborate maternal veneration through festivals like Durga Puja, urban consumers are increasingly participating in the commercial holiday. In China, where the holiday has no deep cultural roots, it has nonetheless gained traction in urban centers, driven partly by e-commerce platforms that have found Mother’s Day a useful occasion around which to build promotional campaigns.
The digital infrastructure of Mother’s Day commerce will only deepen. AI-powered gift recommendations, social commerce integrations, same-day delivery networks, and personalization engines are all improving rapidly — each iteration making it easier for consumers to discover, evaluate, and purchase the gifts that express what they cannot always articulate. The business of translating maternal affection into commercial transactions is, in other words, becoming more sophisticated each year, even as the underlying emotion it trades upon has not changed at all.
The Founder’s Verdict
Anna Jarvis died in 1948 without children, without the holiday she had spent decades trying to reclaim, and without much of the money she had inherited. She had wanted a day of quiet personal reflection — handwritten letters, church attendance, the white carnation worn as a simple emblem of a relationship.
What she got, instead, was one of the most effective commercial mechanisms in retail history: a holiday with a near-universal constituency, an emotional compliance mechanism that operates independently of economic conditions, a global supply chain of extraordinary sophistication, and an annual spending total that exceeds the GDP of many nations.
The florists of the Bogotá Savanna did not ask for any of this. The Hallmark boardroom in Kansas City did not conjure it from nothing. The restaurateurs offering prix fixe Mother’s Day brunches at $68 a head did not create the emotion that drives it. They found the emotion — one of the oldest and most powerful in the human catalog — and they built, around it, a distribution network of remarkable efficiency.
Whether that constitutes a betrayal of Anna Jarvis’s vision or merely the inevitable evolution of a fundamentally sound idea is a question that each of the estimated 84% of Americans who will celebrate Mother’s Day this year can answer for themselves. They will answer it, in all likelihood, somewhere between $50 and $350 poorer than they were before, with a bouquet of Colombian roses in their hands that left the farm less than 72 hours ago, at a brunch where the mimosas are included in the prix fixe, having slipped a personalized card into the pocket of a mother who will keep it, probably, for longer than either of them expects.
Anna Jarvis would have found it excessive. She also, in the most literal possible sense, made it happen.
Mother’s Day is observed on the second Sunday of May in the United States, Canada, Australia, and more than 70 other countries. The United Kingdom and Ireland celebrate Mothering Sunday on the fourth Sunday of Lent. Mexico’s Día de las Madres falls each year on May 10th. France’s La Fête des Mères is celebrated on the last Sunday of May. Thailand marks the occasion on August 12th. Brazil, the world’s third-largest Mother’s Day market, celebrates on the second Sunday in May. In more than 100 countries in total, some version of the holiday is now observed — and in all of them, someone is doing the math on how much they’re going to spend.