This week's email offered a choice: the beautiful truth or the ugly one. You chose this one. Here's the week we stopped selling flowers in Brisbane, told straight.
For four days this week, you couldn't buy flowers from us in Brisbane. We closed the Brisbane storefront on Wednesday and it stayed closed through Saturday. No weather event, no market failure, no supplier collapse. We didn't have the capacity to take on new work, and we'd rather sell nothing than sell something we can't deliver.
I'm usually on the other side of this business. My job is marketing: bringing customers through the door and convincing you we're worth trusting with the moments that matter to you. This week I put all of that down and spent four days on the phone instead. I'm writing this on Sunday, at the end of it, because I'd rather tell you exactly what it was like than quietly hope you didn't notice.
There's no fridge full of bouquets
Every arrangement we sell is made by a person, to order, close to the day it's delivered. There's no warehouse behind the website. No pre-built stock waiting to be picked and packed. When you order from us, you aren't buying something off a shelf. You're booking a maker's morning.
That's the whole point of us. It's also the fragile part, and this week dragged it into the light.
Why a staffing problem closes a storefront
It's the fair question, and I'd rather answer it than dodge it: how does a staffing issue take a whole city off sale for four days?
It's arithmetic. Our Brisbane studio went into the week well short of the experienced hands it runs on, with newer team members still building their speed. Orders, meanwhile, kept arriving at their usual rate. On Wednesday those two lines crossed: more work coming in than the people in the room could make to the standard you pay for.
At that point there are two options. Keep selling and hope. Or stop selling, and give every hour we had left to the orders already in the book. We stopped selling. The storefront went dark for four days, not because nobody was there, but because everything we had belonged to the people who had already trusted us.
That's the part I want on the record: closing was the decision that protected the most people. It just doesn't feel like it when you're the one who couldn't order.
Four days on the phone
The order book for those days held all the usual reasons people send flowers: birthdays, anniversaries, apologies, new babies, goodbyes. Nothing about them felt usual to the people who had placed them.
The studio never stopped. Every hand we had went into that book, and a great many of those orders were made and delivered on the day they were meant to be. That part doesn't show up anywhere, so let me say it: most of this week's Brisbane flowers arrived, and they arrived properly.
But not all of them, and that's the part that matters. There were more orders in the book than there were hands and hours to make them. So we triaged, all week: what could still be delivered on time, what could move a day without the moment moving with it, and what couldn't be done at all. That last group is where I spent my week.
I'll tell you what I learned about refunds, because I processed a lot of them. A refund puts the money back. That's all it does. It doesn't put the morning back. I could return every dollar within the hour and apologise like I meant it, which I did, and the person on the other end was still left standing in the gap where their gesture was supposed to be. The birthday still happened without the flowers. That's the part a refund can't reach, and it's the part I thought about at 2am.
So, plainly: to everyone whose order we couldn't honour, I'm sorry. Not sorry-for-any-inconvenience sorry. Properly sorry. We told you that you could rely on us. This week, for some of you, that wasn't true.
A refund puts the money back. It doesn't put the morning back.
The two kinds of phone call
Something else happened on those calls, and it's most of the reason I'm writing this.
A lot of people were extraordinarily good about it. Several run small businesses themselves and recognised the week we were having before I had finished the first sentence. One or two said things that genuinely carried me through the back half of it.
The other calls were harder. Some people couldn't accept that the answer was no. Not wouldn't: couldn't. I'd explain that we didn't have the hands to make their order, and it landed as an excuse rather than a fact, as though somewhere behind the website there was a shelf of finished arrangements we were choosing not to hand over.
There isn't. There never has been. Behind every order is a pair of hands, and when those hands are already committed to someone else's morning, that order can't also be made. Not at any price, and not for any amount of goodwill.
I understand the anger underneath it. You didn't order a lesson in how handmade works. You ordered flowers for someone you care about, and we didn't deliver them. You're entitled to be furious about that. I just want to say the thing underneath it out loud, because it's the truest thing about us: our product is people. That isn't a flaw in the model. It's the model.
What the week actually exposed
It would be easy to turn this into a story about being let down, and I'm not going to. Teams change. People move on for their own reasons, and nobody owes us forever.
What this week exposed wasn't any individual. It was a dependency. So much of what we promise rests on skilled, experienced, genuinely caring hands, and our model leaves very little slack when several pairs of them aren't in the room at once.
The same week showed me the other side of that. I watched our team make flowers all day and deliver bad news gently to strangers in between, saving every moment that could be saved. Nobody's job description covers that. Skill can be taught, and we teach it. That kind of care mostly can't, and it's the only thing I know of that makes a business like this possible.
If I ever needed a reminder of what to hire for, I've got one.
What I don't have yet
I don't have a tidy five-point plan, and I'm not going to invent one to give this post a stronger ending.
What I have is a set of questions we're now taking seriously. How do we build real depth across three studios, so one thin week in one city doesn't become four days off sale? How do we see it coming earlier, and tell you sooner? What does a genuine fallback look like for a product that can't be stockpiled, when the honest answer to "can you just make more" is no?
When we have answers worth your time, I'll publish them here, in the same plain terms as this.
For moment makers
We put three words under our name: for moment makers. A week like this one is where a line like that either means something or it doesn't.
The standard was never that nothing will go wrong. Flowers are a living product made by living people, and eventually something will. The standard is that trouble on our side must never quietly become a missed moment on yours, and that when we fall short of it, you hear it from us, in full, before you hear it anywhere else.
Brisbane is open again. If you were affected this week and something still isn't right, contact me directly and we'll make it as right as it can be made. And if you chose this truth over the beautiful one: thank you. It's the less enjoyable read. It's also the one that shows you who you're dealing with.
