By Rachel Evans Heath
Toward the end of my first year as a business owner I stumbled into one of the best things that has ever happened to my floral life: I found a floral community.
What is a floral community, you ask? Well for me it’s a group of floral designers who all live in the same general area. They network with each other, hire each other for freelance work, get together regularly, and best of all, offer an array of friendship opportunities with individuals who know exactly what you’re going through as you all navigate the floral-business world.
We call our group “Flower Power”, for lack of a better name. Literally. When naming the group they were struggling to think of something and jokingly offered Flower Power. And, of course, it stuck.
But I personally love the name. Because, despite its retro connotations, it’s empowering to be a part of a group like this!
So how did our amazing group come to be?
Well once upon a time, in February of 2016, a group of early floral business owners all happened to take a workshop at our Seattle Wholesale Growers Market, here in Washington State where they all lived. Afterward these ladies got to chatting, and realized they all had something in common: they were craving a floral network to be a part of.
So they organized their own. Maura of Casablanca Floral was one of those first talking about the group, and taking the initiative, she collected the emails and got the ball rolling. A few months later they invited Alicia and she joined in as well!
Three months later, while I was attending a separate Flirty Fleurs Arch and Chuppah Workshop, I asked another lady in attendance if she knew of any organized floral groups in the area. And guess what: SHE DID! She explained to me that she was part of a group that had just formed a few months prior, they met every month, had an email list, and a Facebook group.
Within a week I was emailing my hellos to a handful of designers and getting all the information for their next monthly meeting, (I had just missed the last meeting by 4 days! <sad face>).
But three weeks later I was excitedly attending my first meeting, and everyone was awesome! There were only about 8 of us there, and about 3 who couldn’t attend that night.
Their numbers were small, and had started even smaller, but it’s been almost two years now and we have upwards of 30 members on our email list.
These ladies, (so far we only have female members), have been a game changer for me. I’m a transplant to WA state, so networking was having a lot of shortcomings for me.
But networking aside, these ladies created a large community for me. We’re not just fellow flower power members. We’re friends!
We meet monthly at each other’s homes, which creates a greater sense of friendship and connection between us. We chat and share what’s going on in our individual businesses, what we hope to do better, what has worked well for us, our business goals, our love of flowers…. All the things we can’t connect on in quite the same way with our own families and friends. We often plan meetings with business or floral themes to help keep our businesses on track. We offer encouragement to one another. We hire one another.
We take the competition out of the Greater Seattle floral industry.
And it’s a wonderful way to live and do business. It certainly makes shopping at the market more fun—wondering who I might run into while picking up my flowers. Or when I lose a wedding bid to a fellow member, it stings a little less, knowing how hard a worker that friend is and that they also deserved it. It’s a little easier to turn that negative dismay into a positive encouragement for working harder and getting the next one.
I feel positivity is always more productive, more helpful, and healthier than negativity. And a floral community is an excellent way to generate those positive relationships within your local floral industry.
Whenever I start to feel dismayed our insecure about my own floral business, my Flower Power friends are always ready to cheer me on and inspire me to keep on working, dreaming and creating.
*Think you need floral community of your own? Keep an eye out next month for The Power of a Floral Community, Part 2: Finding and Creating your own Floral Community
