By: Maria Consbruck, Reporter
OMAHA, Neb. – With the floral industry becoming more popular, local flower shops have seen an increase in sales.
The busiest times for flower shops are the Holidays, Valentine’s Day, and Mother’s Day. Christmas is the number one floral-buying holiday with about 30 percent of people purchasing flowers as gifts. While Valentine’s Day has a total of 28 percent of people buying flowers as gifts and Mother’s Day has a total of 24 percent of people buying flowers as gifts.
Preparations for these busy times can only help so much. Luckily for local flower shops, including Taylor’s Flower Shop, an excellent filing system and quality crew help everything run smoothly even when the pressure is high.
Kara Teri, co-owner of Taylor’s Flower Shop, said the COVID has played a role in the expansion of certain areas of their business.
“Additionally, flowers are used in a number of ways in our culture for celebrating and mourning, etc. and when folks couldn’t see each other, they were sending flowers in their absence, so it remained relatively busy for us,” Teri said.
Since the beginning of the epidemic, the online flower shop industry has grown by 8.5%.
Another local flower shop, Piccolo’s Florist, also experienced an increase of online orders likely due to a rise in third-party order gatherers. These third-party order gatherers will send orders to local flower shops who will prepare the arrangements for the people who order through these order gatherers.
While the flower shops aren’t experiencing a shortage of orders, they are finding other aspects of the business more challenging during the pandemic.
Stefanie Lux-Lorence, assistant general manager of Piccolo’s Florist, said that business rates during the pandemic haven’t changed much. However, getting the product has proven to be more difficult because of mother nature.
“All those fires this summer and unexpected rainstorms, some of those just decimated farms, so it’s been a plethora of things not just the pandemic,” Lux-Lorence said.
As a result of this, flower shops find themselves experiencing shortages when it comes to flowers. They either don’t have specific flowers or the flowers they do receive are not in the best shape. Teri said that they only want the best for their customers.
“When it comes to the quality piece, we just don’t like to send things out that aren’t good quality. We want things to last when it comes to our customers.”
If florists come across orders that involve these conditions, many shops have a policy that will allow the customers to still receive the order they want. Lux-Lorence said that they are very transparent with their customers if something like this happens.
“We give them a call to let them know and give them other options. And then we usually upgrade it for the inconvenience.”
Even with the presence of a multitude of struggles during COVID, local flower shops have managed to provide their customers with high quality flower arrangements, and both continue to grow and flourish.
