Employees at Mary M's Walnut House Flowers stay late into the night working into the night to finish preparing bouquets for the holiday. (Alaina Davis)
A dinging sound signals someone is leaving the store. The door opens and closes as an IU student walks out with a bouquet of red roses.
Diane Conder looks back down at the pile of roses in her lap. She cuts off the thorns first. She plucks a few petals off and puts them in a bag to sell later. She trims about 3 inches off the stem and adds them to the pile of medium-sized roses.
It takes Conder about 10 minutes to make a bouquet of flowers. She mixes in peach and magenta-colored roses, red carnations and solidagos from the buckets surrounding her.
Conder has been designing bouquets for over 20 years. As of Tuesday, she has put together about 75 for this year’s holiday. She’ll keep assembling bouquets through the end of Valentine’s Day.
The week of Valentine’s Day is the busiest time of year for flower shops. Mary M’s Walnut House Flowers makes more money in the two weeks around Valentine’s Day than in six months. Last year, employees were working until 1 a.m. Valentine’s Day morning to get everything ready. This year will be no different.
“Most generally, our hours are 8:30 to 5:30, six days a week; we were closed on Sundays,” Conder said. This time of the year is different. “We started putting bouquets and things together on Sunday of this week. So we'll work three to four days prior designing and getting bulk orders together.”
Conder said they start ordering ribbons for arrangements after Christmas, and order roses in January. Roses, as well as carnations, lilies and daisies, are shipped from Guatemala and Ecuador.
“We ordered 8,700 more flowers and roses for this time of season,” she said. “And I think our basic is maybe 2,500 a week of roses.”
Last year, Conder said the shop ran out of flowers completely. She hopes that will be the case again this year. On Valentine's Day, they bring in four extra employees to help in the store and four extra drivers to make deliveries. Conder is one of four designers. For the holiday, up to eight designers will be working to put bouquets and baskets together.
More from last year: Local flower shop blooms for Valentine's Day
Bloomin’ Tons Floral Co. struggles to get enough people to help prepare bouquets and make deliveries the week of Valentine’s Day. Sydney Harris has been working at her mom’s flower shop for about three years.
“It's just the two of us and we need people more with experience,” Harris said. “I have a friend coming in tomorrow to help us, but she won't be designing. She's going be doing delivery boxes and stuff like that. Just designing, you have to have some education on it, some knowledge on it. We can't just have someone random off the street plugging flowers and arrangements.”
Harris said they ship in flowers from the Netherlands, Mexico, Canada and Africa. They get roses from South America, ordering 900 of them alone as early as October.
“More of the older crowd likes red roses still,” Harris said. “More of the younger crowd likes the lavenders, hot pinks, pinks, yellows, even oranges.”
While they can order some extra last-minute shipments, it’s not always guaranteed the flowers will be in stock.
“None of it is like ordered off the whim. Everything has to be pre-ordered,” she said. “So the suppliers get in a certain amount of flowers, and they go through each flower shop to decide which one needs what. So everyone has to have a pre-book order in, because if somebody waited till the day, like the week of or the week before to try to get those flowers, there would be nothing for them to get.”
Because it’s only Harris and her mom designing arrangements, they don’t have as much time to do customized orders.
“If they pre-ordered, then, yeah, they can customize it as much they'd like,” she said. “But after that, after we cut off, hopefully we choose a favorite color that they like, and we can choose something out of that, but it's just going to be what we pick for them at that point.”
Harris said the store closes at 4 p.m. most days. This week, she and her mom kept working until as late as 8 p.m. to get orders ready. They normally get between eight to 20 orders on a day-to-day basis. For Valentine’s, they get over 100 orders, which they deliver to the areas of Bloomington, Ellettsville, Unionville and Martinsville.
“This year, we've started prepping our vases and stuff pre-watering them. It makes it a little bit easier,” she said. “We will have extra help on Valentine's Day delivering-wise. We'll have some family members that are going to come in and help deliver for us.”
