Hi flower lovers, Alexa here ready to talk about today's episode about donating flowers after our events. So we do this like beautiful event and we come back at the end of the night and we clean everything up a lot of our event clients wedding clients. They’re sourcing floral designs from us but are renting items from us as well. Like candles for their tablescapes, arches, and different things. So we come back to pick up all those items and clean up all the floral. And whatever flowers don't get taken home, we actually donate for you. ,It's a super cool way to get back to the community. Plus, it's a great way for your flowers to not end up in the trash. The flowers typically still look good with life in them still.

I pride myself in like sourcing the freshest flowers I can get my hands on. And so your flowers should be enjoyed longer than your wedding, right? Your six hour event, there's still life in them. They look gorgeous. Somebody should enjoy them. So I started implementing donating flowers last season and it has been like the coolest thing ever I just decided you know instead of having all these beautiful flowers at the end of the event just kind of wilt away, like they should be loved by somebody else. And so I pitched it to a bride or two and they loved the idea and I haven't had anyone give any pushback about it. People are like so excited about it and it just like is a feel good for everyone. A feel good for my client and feel good for me so that these flowers have a place to go.

And so what I did is I just kind of like called around my local community and called some like hospice and retirement facilities and they were thrilled. They're like, yeah, bring them by. Like whenever you have stuff, just bring them by, easy peasy. And so that's how that started. And it's again, been a really cool thing. Um, this year I'm actually expanding out into other communities that can receive flowers. Uh, I feel like COVID really messed up the whole flower delivering to hospital situation. I don't know if you guys knew this, but during COVID, um, hospitals were not accepting flowers. It's just like, was another entry point for germs, I think. Um, so they were not accepting flowers for like employees that were there or patients or anybody. Um, and so now with COVID, you know, having, um, hopefully is a thing of the past, you know, it's, um, thankfully died down quite a bit. Now this is going into 2023 wedding season. Hospitals are actually accepting flowers and it's so refreshing and so exciting. So I actually have some hospitals on my list as well to donate to like the cancer treatments centers and also like other like long-term patients that are there. Like their volunteer team will just disperse the arrangements to whoever could receive some flower goodness. And that is just so cool. When I made the phone calls, the lead coordinator for the volunteers were just so thrilled and so grateful.

So I'm super stoked to implement that this wedding season as well and just gift flowers as much as possible after our events and just spread the love of flowers through the flowers themselves. I do want to mention that as a floral designer, my experience of doing this for a whole wedding season is you need to plan for your donation before you start your design. So what I mean by that is um I would design flowers straight into a vessel and then we want to donate them after well I now need to redesign those flowers into something else to gift because I don't want to gift away like my nice rental items I don't want to gift away my like beautiful compote vases right ? And so I had to adjust with a few extra steps in my designing to make it easy to donate the flowers themselves.

So for example, let's talk about flowers in a compote. I now line the compote with a Lomi liner. for the non-florist listening it's just like a plastic liner it can look bowl shaved it could look you know um more buckety shaped they have different sizes different uh like designs of them but it's just like a plastic like water tight uh bowl i'm gonna say a bowl because it's it's uh it's like an insert right so you could like insert that into the vase before you get started on the design so i actually started doing that for all of my like compo and pedestal and different base base arrangements that are not clear so you can't see through it and then for designs going in clear glass so if you can imagine flowers in a clear glass vase you can see through it we're not gonna like put a mechanic in there just so we can donate your flowers because we pride ourselves on having good strong solid mechanics um we actually will have a plan to deconstruct those flowers and put them in like wraps so we'll have like wrapped arrangements And we're pretty quick at it, so it does take some labor, which I'm willing to pay for. I'm willing to put my own time towards it and pay freelancers to create the new design from that. Because like donating the flowers is so special to me that I'm willing to do that and all the costs associated are on me. So the client doesn't pay for anything. I am covering the cost for everything. I just feel like it's so important in a way that I can use my business to give back to my community that it's like no problem at all. Like I'm so happy to do it.

So for a typical like design week, let's say the wedding is on Saturday, we go execute the wedding on Saturday and then our strike crew goes back at the end of the night to clean up. They bring everything back at the studio at like 1 in the morning on Sunday morning because it's just a super late night with travel and everything. and they're gonna throw all the designs in the walk-in cooler because at this point the walk-in was housing the wedding designs before the wedding it's empty now so there's plenty of space they'll throw everything in there and then I try really hard not to work on Sundays I worked a lot of Sundays last season and this year I have so many new beautiful boundaries put into place so that I have designated work and alone and like personal time As a small business owner, I know it's so easy for us to just work, work, work, work, work. And putting these boundaries in place has been so good for my mental health. So Sundays are my day off, and then I will go to the studio on Monday, and that's when we'll take care of the previous wedding or events. So there's always like things to be cleaned, buckets to be washed, candles to be cleaned, the containers to be cleaned, but then also this is a great time to go and donate to the hospitals and hospices. So they'll get their flowers that Monday morning and then the rest of Monday is spent prepping for the following week's events.

So there you have it. That's what I found that works for me and my business. Again, it's been a super cool experience giving back to my community. If you guys have any questions about donating flowers, or want to talk about any communities here that could enjoy flowers, please reach out!