Valentine's Day Flowers

 

Valentine's Day is a holiday where you can openly express love to your beloved.  What a better way to do so than sending the unexpected gift of a beautiful flower arrangement? Every year lovers use flowers as the medium to convey their feelings for their Valentine. The most common flower sent on Valentine’s Day is of course, the red rose.  The red rose is symbolic of love and passion.  The red rose is by far the most in demand flower during this holiday season.  From a simple, single red rose stem to an artfully arranged dozen roses with lush greens in a vase they all will bring the feeling of love to the receiver. 

With evolving trends, more than a third of today’s rose sales are of other colors including mixed spring colored hues.  In fact, almost half of today’s valentine flower sales are mixed fresh cut arrangements; lilies, tulips, irises are increasing in popularity every year.  It is said that fresh cut flowers represent the genuine feelings of love towards the recipient.  Its no wonder that there is such envy of the recipient of an arrangement on Valentines Day!

 

Origin of Rose as a Valentine's Day Flower

 

According to popular legends red rose is considered to be a favorite flower of Venus - the Roman mythological Goddess of Love and Beauty. Hence the red Rose came to be associated with love and romance. Historians believe that the tradition of giving red rose on Valentine's Day became popular in the 1700s when Charles II of Sweden introduced the Persian custom of "the language of flowers" to Europe. Books giving details about meanings of particular flowers were published which demonstrated to people how entire conversations could be carried out using just the flowers. Poets and romantics at heart also eulogized red rose as a symbol of love, passion and beauty that helped to create strong association of rose with love and Valentine's Day

 

 Meaning of Different Colors of Roses

 

Rose of different colors symbolizes different emotions and feelings. One therefore needs to be careful while presenting a rose to loved one:

 

Red Roses - Love and passion 

White Roses - True love, purity of the mind and reverence 

Yellow Roses - Friendship, celebration and joy 

Pink Roses - Friendship or Sweetheart, admiration 

Peach Roses - Desire and excitement or appreciation 

Lilac Roses - Love at first sight and enchantment 

Coral Roses - Desire 

Orange Roses - Enthusiasm and desire 

Black Roses - Farewell or "It's Over" 

Bouquet of Red and Yellow Roses: Happiness and celebrations 

Bouquet of Red and White Roses: Bonding and harmony 

Bouquet of Yellow and Orange Roses: Passion

  

Arrangement of Valentine's Day Bouquet

Traditionally a bouquet of dozen red roses is considered to be ideal and most romantic Valentine's Day gift. However, you may try and be a little more creative. A bouquet can be made to look charmingly different by adding balloons, candy or small stuffed animals to it. Besides ribbons, hearts, and toys can also be used to spice up the arrangement. With the help of your local florist one can make a mixed flower bouquet by selecting flowers that convey the emotions of your heart. As Valentine's Day comes at the end of the winter season one can find a large number of spring flowers in their full bloom.

 

 Tips on Presenting Valentines Day Flower

Select the flower with love and use your own knowledge of the recipient’s tastes to do so. Your bouquet does not have to be enormous to show your love, only selected with the recipient in mind.  It is the feelings that are evoked when the bouquet is sent/received that matters most.  Thoughtful additions to the traditional bouquet are a personalized note or sentiment, a small indulgence of chocolates or a stuffed animal, or even an interesting vase that can be treasured and used again.  Do something unique in your own sweet way to make Valentine's Day more special for your beloved.

  

Women should not think that it is their sole right to receive flowers as surveys reveal that most men have the secret desire to be pampered with flowers by their sweethearts. It has been noticed that men like crisp colors like red, orange and yellow. A gift basket, balloons or blooming plant is also a great Valentine's Day Gift Idea for men.

Valentines Day Preparations

Havent posted in a while as I have been busy with my paying job ;)

We have all been working ourselves silly with panic over the impending Valentines Day.  We have been researching, creating mailers, working out our marketing plans, specials, etc.

For the moment things seem to be under control, we have done our flower pre-order, selected the items we will carry, ordered supplies, chocolates, teddy bears, balloons, etc.  We have several friends lined up to help over the weekend, the beer is on ice and the pizza place is on speed dial.

Now for the big question.......will I get flowers for Valentines Day?  

Thank you! & Uh-Oh....Christmas

Some of you may know that all of us involved in the shop have outside jobs.  Each of us has a full-time job that we try and manage as well as the shop.  We have Hubert there to manage the day-to-day activities but the "business" aspects are run by us in our "free"time.

The shop was my big idea.  So I gather everyones support for the idea, we come up with a name and money and I get myself assigned to a huge project in Brazil and leave town....7 times.  That pretty much sums it up.  I'm on my 7th trip in 4 months and have been gone for over a week this time.  It sounds like madness there and I cant even help.

This post is both a HUGE thank you to my partners (specifically John) as they have been doing way more than their fair share while I have been out of town.  Up to this point we have been sharing the delivery responsibilities during the day and in the afternoons and then the weekends we are all there hanging out and trying to learn.

This past week or so has been hell there.  Orders are increasing, the phones are messed up, and I havent even been able to call home, let alone support anyone on any finance or system related issues (I do the books and manage the website.)  All of this is good but we are really feeling the pressure now.

Christmas is here and I know we have no idea what were in for.  I know that we are still churning out quality work (our designer is the BEST) and we continue to spend as many free minutes with Hubert to learn technique and design.  We are improving and Reese even made her first bouquet too! (See photo above but please dont look to closely as John spelled her name wrong on the price tag! LOL)

I will be back in the US tomorrow morning so I'll be back to the foral madness and there to give my partners a well deserved break.  Thank you John, Sid & Catherine (Reese & Shelby too) for helping to make this business a success!!!!

Power to the flower!

Nicole

Open House

We held our first Open House last weekend and it was fantastic!



There was an event being held on the Square in Carrollton (Christmas on the Square) which is a big kid driven event. We set up a booth/table on the square and in preparation I bought a bunch of inexpensive toy/novelty items hoping that the kids would drive the parents to us.



All in all we had great traffic, John's sister manned the booth for most of the day and the rest of us rotated in and out of the shop. We had a drawing for several items that people had to go to our shop to sign up for. So essentially we baited the kids with toys, bribed the parents with the free drawing and got lots of people into our shop.



Of the traffic we had we had a remarkable amount of people make comments like "when did you open?" "I never knew there was a flower shop here!", "You have some really cute things" and so on. Of the comments, the most shocking is the "When did you guys open up?".... the shop has been here in this building for 10 years and across the street for 4 before that! It was unbelieveable!



We knew the shop needed a sign (which it didnt have when we bought it) so this was great validation that it was money well spent... OBVIOUSLY.



We made a few dollars (as much as you can selling $1 items to kids) but the feedback and the traffic was well worth all of our effort AND the GIANT fight that John and I got into on Friday night. (Sorry to air the dirty laundry dear but this is a blog and remember how cute I am so you can forgive me.)



We had reached our personal limits over the past few weeks, with the pressure reaching epic proportions on Friday night. Each of us involved with the shop have worked our butts off doing prep work and marketing, etc. to the point of exhaustion. In the end we hope it really paid off.



The highlight of the day was when we were approached by a photographer for the local section of the Dallas Morning News (Neigbors Go) to take a photo of our booth and all of us in it. Keep your fingers crossed, if it gets published this Friday it could mean great publicity for our shop!!!



Thats all for now...



Power to the Flower



Nicole

Since I was a little girl....

I mention in our About Us page about my always wanting to have a flower shop since I was younger.

Interestingly enough my parents just shipped me some old photos this week. Going through the boxes I found these old pictures of me...










At first glance I thought how telling this was about my desire to be a florist. However, after some thinking (and some Chardonnay) I thought there might be other reasons for me to be picking dandelions. Maybe I have missed my calling completely and I should have been a landscaper? Perhaps a chemist who develops the weed stuff you put on your lawn even!



We can all acknowledge, based on my outfit, that I wasnt destined for fashion design (Who wears red and white striped hats with a yellow sweater? I'm not even going to mention the socks.).



Then.... I stumbled upon this photo.





So it is clear to me that in some ways I havent missed my calling too much. I do love flowers but even more I LOVE to eat. While I have never eaten a dandelion head (unless you count accidentally inhaling those white seed things that you blow when they turn all puffy), I have enjoyed many a dandelion salad with vinagarette dressing. If that dandelion head was covered in carmel and nuts .. forget it! It would be a completely different picture and they probably wouldnt have had the time to snap the pic before I was standing there with an empty stem, smiling.

At any rate, I thought these were cute and funny and had to share them with you all.

Power to the Flower,

Nicole

Before & After Photos

Here they are... the Before (Andre's Florist), pink walls, green and white striped wallpaper, white and pink and green shelving, etc., etc., etc.

And the almost After (Blooms on the Square).


Tan walls, reddish wall, far lest dust, dirt and grime. We've pushed back the counter to allow for more retail space, and at this point had begun to decorate for Christmas.

Were working every spare minute to update, refresh, prune and weed out the old stuff.

We have our first open house this weekend so were looking forward to the feedback!




Hope you enjoy!

Nicole

Marketing the Shop

Need I say more?


And by the way .. it worked. We got some foot traffic :)


Flower On!


Nicole