Most lists of what makes a good florist could just as easily describe a courier. Here is the one I actually work from.
Search for what makes a great florist and you will be handed a list that would suit a delivery company just as well: reliable, affordable, good with logistics. All true. All beside the point. None of it is the reason someone stands at their front door and has to sit down for a minute.
Dan and I started Fig & Bloom on a single idea: a florist should be a designer, not a dispatcher. A dispatcher takes the order, pulls the standard item and moves on. A designer asks who the flowers are for, what the moment actually is, and builds something that could only have been made this week, for this person. Both will get a box to a door on time. Only one of them was thinking about the person opening it.
The first thing the lists miss is taste, because taste is awkward to put in a job ad. It sounds like something you either have or you do not. It is not. Before flowers, I spent ten years in fashion — Decjuba, the Country Road Group, Witchery — and the job, under all of it, was deciding what went on the rack and what stayed off. You do that in front of people who tell you, in sales figures, when you are wrong. Taste is not an accident of personality. It is a muscle, and you train it by choosing, every single day.
The second thing they miss is that the real skill is subtraction. I have written before that I only ever use one foliage, and that is not a quirk — it is this whole idea in miniature. Anyone can add another stem. The harder, better decision is almost always the one to stop. A bouquet is not a collection of nice things gathered together. It is an edited object, and the editing is the part you are paying for.
Taste is not the flourish on top of the work. It is the work.
The third thing is nerve. A good designer has a point of view and is willing to use it, even when it means talking you out of the obvious thing. Someone rings wanting the safe option, and the kinder answer is often a question: what does this person actually love? That conversation is not upselling. It is the difference between sending a task and sending a thought.
And here is the part the lists could never measure, because it happens at the other end. The person opening the box knows the difference between chosen and ordered, even if they could not put it into words. The flowers that look gathered for them, in colours that are theirs, say someone stopped and thought. That feeling is the actual product. The stems are just how it travels.
So the real list is short. An eye you have trained. A point of view you are willing to stand behind. The discipline to leave things out. And enough care to design for one person and one moment rather than for the shelf. Everything else — the vans, the cold room, the website — is the price of entry. It is not the reason to choose anyone.
Designed to the week, never pulled off a shelf.
Our Bright & Colourful seasonal design — built fresh from what is best right now. From $100. See the seasonal design →
We are reliable, and we are fair on price. But that is the floor, not the reason. Choose the florist who will tell you the truth about what to send — and then design it like they meant it.
