What I did know from day one was what I didn't want. Everyone was sending what I call roundy moundy arrangements. You know the ones - those super tight, club looking bouquets that look slightly manufactured, because they kind of are. I wanted a bouquet that looks like you wandered out to the most beautiful garden with clippers and came back with something a little wild, with your favorite focal flowers, some amazing bits and bobs, and lush greenery. Way more wild child than prim and proper. More Carey than Charlotte if you will.
And from there, something pretty amazing happened. Other florists started telling me their customers were calling and asking for "a Farmgirl-style bouquet." Which was surreal to hear, because I'd spent years assuming everyone could see the seams. Apparently while I was busy cataloguing everything wrong with my work, it had quietly become a thing people asked for by name. And that was pretty cool.
The other thing I've always been particular about — okay, my team might say obsessive about — is color. Bridge colors, specifically the in-between shades that carry your eye from one flower to the next, so the whole arrangement reads as one idea instead of a Crayola box that exploded. Anyone can put pretty flowers next to each other. Getting them to work together is the harder part.
Then we started shipping nationwide, and I had to reinvent the whole thing again, not because the aesthetic didn’t work, but because the engineering didn’t. How do you send a wild, garden-y design across the country in a cardboard box and have it show up looking like it just left the design table? Most companies solve that with lots of plastic. I couldn't bring myself to do it. So we engineered the designs around greenery instead — it protects the flowers in transit, and it's part of the look rather than packaging that sits in landfills for decades.
Through every version — the learning years, the reinvention, all of it — the brief never changed: make the bouquet I'd actually want to receive. And the one I want to send to all of my people. Beautiful. A little wild. The kind of thing that makes you feel something when you open the box.
Fifteen years in, that's still what I'm designing for.
