About The Floristry Collective

It all started with a rose. Or maybe it was the dead pack of pink ranunculus that came before, or the box of hydrangea that came in, moldy and covered in brown patches. The rose, though, was the tipping point: a Vendela cream rose that arrived dry, old, and unsuitable to sit with her equally-sad sister flowers as the only blooms in my bride’s bouquet for her wedding that weekend. Since my wholesaler only offers “future credits,” and didn’t have any stems to replace the ones I needed, I found myself driving 110 miles roundtrip to my next-closest wholesaler to find a replacement for what should have been a simple flower, for an easy, hand-spiraled globe bouquet that would have taken me 20 minutes or less to complete.

That rose was my final straw. With so many large events on the horizon, I realized that it was time to go straight to the farms and find a way to get fresh blooms in – lest I find myself staring at box upon box of 500 brown-speckled hydrangea for my May wedding, or damaged and droopy orchids for my June event.

The farms – perhaps not surprisingly – were all too happy to help. And as I shared my new pricing with my fellow florist friends (I’m looking at you, MJ!), I started receiving requests for wholesale orders from them. And so our small Collective was born.

This past weekend, I commented on a post a fellow florist shared, and invited her to reach out to me to discuss. Within 48 hours of that comment, I’ve received more than 50 inquiries from florists around the country (and internationally) who share my same frustrations. Some of you are frustrated with the quality of the flowers you receive, or the increased prices. Others of you lament the lack of variety in stems available for smaller purchase quantities – especially in a time when brides are scaling back wedding floral budgets.

And so, as I’ve been working on a separate, consumer e-Commerce venture with many of the same bones, I was made quickly aware that I could also help my fellow florists maximize their profit margins, receive fresher product, and increase the variety of beautiful blooms that they can offer to their event clients.

Because of the overwhelming response I’ve received, and since I am still a working florist with events coming up, I put up this website as a way to streamline the process of sharing our price list, making it easy for members to submit requests for quotes or place orders that can easily be passed along to farms.

Please pardon our dust as we work to gather and post product imagery for each of our blooms (we have to watch out for copyrighted photos – so we’ll be waiting on our farms to provide these!), expand our list, and tweak functionality to make this site as easy as possible for each of you to navigate.

As a member of the Collective, I would love to hear from you if you have ideas, questions, comments, or concerns – if there’s something you’d like me to source or if there are tools and functionalities you think you’d benefit from, individually or as a collective group, on the back end in the member’s only area. Share the site, share the price list, and spread the word with your florist friends: the more members we accumulate, the higher our order volume, and the greater our collective bargaining power. We just ask that you keep communication about anything in our member’s only area limited to fellow florists.

If you want to connect – reach out! I”m always happy to meet and talk to a new fellow florist or event pro!

All the Best,

Julie