Business is blooming
The wholesalers can wipe their brows, and it’s time for the retailers to go into high gear.
Jon Weiland of Pacific Wholesale Florists calls it “the annual shoving a golf ball through a garden hose.”
This past week has been enormously busy for flower wholesalers getting ready for Valentine’s Day on Monday. At Pacific, 4,000 square feet of cooler space was filled with foliage and flowers, most of which went out to retailers on Wednesday and Thursday.
Florists usually place pre-orders for Valentine’s Day by mid-January, Weiland said, but adjust their requests closer to the holiday.
“Everyone plays it close and keeps reordering,” he said, explaining that because flowers are perishable, retailers try not to order too many.
What’s tough about Valentine’s Day is keeping everything fresh, said Jim Alice of Liberty Park Florist and Greenhouse. “That’s why you see such a price difference,” he said.
Unlike a commodity like candy, florist Howard Hughes explained, flowers can’t be bought well in advance. “For a florist, we can’t start stockpiling the product two weeks ahead of time,” said Hughes, who owns Hughes Florist and Greenhouses in Post Falls. “It’s all got to be done fresh.”
The amount of planning necessary to pull this off is considerable. The week’s schedule for Liberty floral designers was mapped out, detailing their work hours and when their lunch breaks and phone duty would fall.
The store keeps a tally of each arrangement type ordered, and by Friday, more than 150 orders of a dozen red roses were placed.
Since foliage stays fresh longer than flowers, rows upon rows of “greened” vases were in Liberty’s cooler, prepared earlier this week and ready to be filled.
Asked if she keeps track of how many arrangements she does, Debbie Stanea, floor manager at Liberty, said: “No, we don’t really want to know how many. We wouldn’t come back to work.”
Although she said it half-laughingly, this sentiment of floral saturation is pervasive among wholesalers and retailers.
Rick Magers, a sales associate at Pacific, said he tries to block the pre-Valentine’s experiences from his mind. “You don’t sleep that whole week because you’re having nightmares about orders,” said Magers, who has been in the business for decades. “You might as well get up and go to work and put in the orders you’re dreaming about.”
Hughes Florist and Greenhouse plays both the wholesaler and retail parts. “It’s a considerable lack of sleep is what it ends up being,” Hughes said. “We’re going seven to 10 days as hard as we can … It’s such a blur.”
Still, the satisfaction is worth it, said Liberty co-owner Kellee Alice, who called coordinating the deliveries a science.
“Anybody who gets flowers is happy and excited to get them,” she said. “You’re making someone’s day; that makes me happy.”
A lot is at stake for a holiday like this, both for wholesalers and retailers, Weiland said. “With any luck and a lot of organization, it all works out.”