Because we can, and because something very lovely happened on Tuesday that made me remember why we make flowers in the first place. Not sure how long we'll be able to keep it up once wedding season starts, but a little free flower here, a little free flower there can't hurt.
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I'm excited about this!!
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And for the florists, a valentines day wrap-up:
The Mott Street project successfully concluded, we loaded out everything yesterday. Unscathed for the most part. What a lot of hauling this job includes. Sometimes I think I should be a professional mover. Would probably be more lucrative.
I think we made a lot of people happy with flowers this week. We sold almost every last stem which is nice. Only one man was cranky; upon seeing his bouquet for pickup, he said "Wow, I thought for $50 it would be bigger." [That's what she said?] Several of our deliveries got lost on a truck with a driver who stopped answering the phone around 3pm. At 5:30 the phone started ring ringing with sweet guys just wondering "Where their girlfriends flowers were..." About two hours later we had remade 5 deliveries and sent them in a car service with Liza our devoted helper. The delivery guy never called back until the next morning - he had "lost his phone." I'm assuming the other 18 made it to where they were supposed to go. I'm afraid our delivery man doubled up his truck with another florists overflow orders. What a shit show of a day for delivering stuff in Manhattan...
LESSONS FOR NEXT YEAR:
NO DELIVERIES; We sort of learned this last year but failed to remember that once the arrangement leaves the studio you have no control over what happens to it - and we are responsible for it arriving on time with care. Impossible with our fragile compositions...
ONLY ONE WAY TO ORDER; Over the phone. We got confused a bit between call-in orders, emailed orders, bigcartel orders...streamlining a process like this is so necessary.
NO TULIPS; I love them, but folks still think they are pedestrian. We always seems to have tulips left over.
SMARTER TIMING; We ended up throwing out around 150 stems of anemones because they progressed too quickly - anemones should have come in on Monday for use on Tuesday, especially in a space without a cooler to keep them tight. I won't sell an anemone that is dusting black.
KNOW WHEN TO CALL IT; at the end of Tuesday we knew we were really out of flowers, down to the dregs, but guys kept coming in begging us to make something. We cranked out a few less than perfect arrangements to make them happy. Next year we'll call it off earlier because it makes me sad to think that someone might have received an arrangement that wasn't photo-shoot quality.
I think that's it. Did I get flowers? No. I did get a real nice dinner made for me without lifting a finger, a martini and a chance to sleep till 7:30 Wednesday. Drinking coffee in my chair by the window, walking the dogs like a normal brooklyn thirty-something. Manhattan looming rather epically across the river.