A Big Deal Flower Workshop

For someone who really scrounges for things to entertain you with, I can’t believe I’ve forgotten to tell you about the flower workshop I went to in May. Mayesh is the country’s largest flower wholesaler that you’ve never heard of. They connect florists with flower farmers all over the world. You email Mayesh what you need for a wedding and they’ll harass all the right farmers and have your blooms shipped to town the week of the wedding. Mayesh has beautiful flowers – many of which are still being bred in laboratories when they let a few out to select famous floral designers as a teaser preview of what’s to come someday (for brides with hefty budgets and light sensibilities.). I adore the Mayesh blooms …. but I’m too small-scale to order from them. Their minimum order requirements are twice what I need for a wedding. So I can only dream about having such a selection ready at my fingertips. 

Each year Mayesh chooses a floral designer from somewhere in this country to be the Design Star of the year. That person becomes the face of Mayesh for twelve months and hosts industry workshops and stars in a collection of design tutorial videos. Each Design Star has their own unique qualification, be it that they’re really great with color palettes or ceremony arches or flower selection or something noteworthy that other florists could learn from.

This year’s Design Star is a fella by the name of Shean Strong. He’s a sassy and relatable fella who was chosen for his overall style of floral designs. He’s very good at arranging blooms the way nature would have them growing, should such a regionally clashing selection choose to grow together in the same patch. My point is, he just makes some really beautiful things with flowers and Mayesh predicted his magnetic personality would mesh beautifully with teaching in the spotlight. In an act unlike me, I accepted the invitation, forked over the cash and lined up our Abingdon, VA trip to end with the start of Shean’s Nashville workshop.

Brett and I set out from The Martha and drove four hours to Nashville. Brett had never been to Nashville and was excited to have some time to explore the historical and spicy things that I would not be interested in. We got to town around 3:00 and met Mattie at her house. She lives in a studio garage apartment and was letting us lay out our air mattress across a quarter of her space.  I took a shower, Brett wandered off for some coffee, and at 4:30 Brett drove me over to the workshop venue. I sat in the car with him, waiting for 5:00 when the workshop started. We noticed that no one was coming or going from the building and that’s when I checked my invitation and realized the workshop started at 4:00. There are many things I won’t do, and entering a quiet conference-y atmosphere as an invited industry professional less than ten minutes before the start time, is one of them. 

“Get me out of here Brett! I’m not going in late.”

“What?”

“I’d rather not go than be late! Being late is humiliating.”

“But you came here for this!”

“I know!” We both stared at each other. Brett would normally take on a parental role and force me out of the car and towards furthering my education, but he was tempted by us dancing off to explore Nashville. I saw him weighing our options.

“Lu, are you going to be mad that you didn’t go?”

“Maybe. But I’m used to disappointment!”

“You should go.”

“But this is just a few hours of talking and introductions. The workshop really starts tomorrow.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, tonight was just about getting to know each other and hearing the plans for tomorrow.”

“We could go get hot chicken!” Brett exclaimed. I peered into the glass building and saw thirty seated people staring the same direction. Maybe I could slip in the back.

“Maybe I could slip in the back.”

“You sure can. You should! You came here for this.”

“But Brett it’s humiliating.”

“No it’s not. Just go… are you sure? We could explore.”

We tormented ourselves and finally I jumped out of the car and shamefully walked along the windows in front of the class around to the door in the back of the space. I tried to ooze in subtly but a workshop coordinator bounded over and said, “You must be Laura!” and then she handed me things and then brought me over to a place to put down those things and then told me to find a seat, which was harder than you’d expect because everyone else was there already and seats on the fringes are always occupied. I had to make someone clear her belongings and snacks off of a chair before I could sit my butt down out of everyone’s view.

But that’s where the icky things end because I was immediately engrossed in Shean’s musings about the flower industry and how he goes about demanding money for his time. Shean is funny and confident and prior to becoming the 2019 Design Star, he was just a florist from Atlanta, so he still has a sense of the realities of scheming for weddings, which is not always what the shiny Mayesh promotional videos acknowledge. Two hours passed and in that time I was given lots of juicy business ideas to consider, from pricing to proposals to communicating with brides. I had signed up for the workshop because it focused on large-scale installations which I find intimidating and often try to talk brides out of simply so I don’t have to panic about them for months until the day, but the two hours just hearing about how Shean runs his business was worth every penny and mile it took to get there.

Brett picked me up at 7:30 and I sheepishly admitted that I was glad I went. Brett beamed at me. We drove a few blocks over and met Mattie for supper and to make things better, one of my brides from this past Spring joined us to. This bride is a friend of Mattie’s and when she said she was getting married in Charleston, Mattie sent her my way for flowers. She and her Mom and I met for coffee and some wedding planning and the rest is a beautiful love story. So Emily joined us for supper too and we laughed and told stories and ate pizza together.

The next morning, Brett and I set out early for breakfast before he dropped me off. I had an icky “first day of school” feeling in my belly. Overnight I had become intimidated thinking about doing good work at the workshop today. I’m not a real florist. I just fuss over things until they look right. After every wedding I say, “Fooled ‘em again.” What if everyone at the workshop can tell I’m a fraud?

Brett pushed me out of the car and he headed out for a day of exploring. I oozed into the classroom and sat in the back row and waited for things to start. Folks trickled in and chit-chatted and Shean was in the corner talking to the coordinators. 

Shean started the day by making us go around and introduce ourselves; who are we, where do we work, how long have you been working with flowers, and “something fun” about yourself. In the moment, I silently cursed Shean, but it proved to be wonderful for my self-esteem because apart from three older women who have been florists for more then 15 years, I was next in line for experience. Everyone else was starting a new business or just branching out as freelancers. The more they spoke, the more I discovered that I knew more than they did. They asked “stupid questions” which I arrogantly answered in my head before Shean could. (They weren’t actually stupid questions – but they were rookie questions.) I relaxed a little after the introductions and lots of folks were excited that I’m from Charleston and they wanted to hear what the weddings are like here. Most of the attendees were from small towns or cities that aren’t so wedding inclined but I think I still let them down with my answers. We have 7,000 weddings each year in Charleston and I know about approximately 20 of them.

While Shean spoke about marketing tactics, I gazed at the display of flowers behind him. I mentally picked out ingredients for a bouquet I made while Shean answered the rookie questions. Eventually he split us into groups and we set out on our large-scale installations. In my group were two start-up business girls and two gals that have been doing blooms as a side business. The start-up girls were shy about diving in but that didn’t matter because one of the other two girls was the bossiest, over-confident person I’ve had the displeasure of working with. During that moment of polite hesitation that takes place when a group is given the green light to get started, Bossypants took it as a sign that she was working with inexperienced idiots and she took the lead. That’s fine with me really. I’m an Indian, not a chief but she immediately took on a condescending tone and turned down our suggestions or moved and replaced our blooms to where she wanted them. I don’t like that kind of thing. We were building a big, hedge-like wad at the base of a column and there are mechanics involved that must be incorporated but also hidden by the time it’s built. Bossypants would block the wad with her body so that anything we tried to place had to literally run by her. The rest of us glanced and shrugged at each other. Shean noticed that most of our group was standing around her and he encouraged everyone to contribute, “Don’t be shy!” he said with a smile. Bossypants turned around to see us all standing with stems in our hands but no accessible places to put them. She stood up and told the others exactly where to place things. I backed off because I had been grossly offended when she pulled out my mechanics-hiding greenery to add it to her peony display. Sure, your peonies look full, but, is… is that chicken wire and foam I see on that entirely empty side? I wasn’t going to pull the “superior” card but I know the order of operations and we’re low on greens and she hasn’t backed up to see the big picture and all the places she’s missed.

Bossypants saw me standing and watching and she walked over and told me to “Go ahead. You’re going to do fine. You can do it.” and I almost poked her with my thorny rose. In doing this she finally saw our blob from a distance and realized we were low on greens and that she hadn’t backed up to see the big picture and all the places she’s missed. Shean came over to assess our work and he seemed troubled by our blob. He distracted Bossypants while we uprooted her crowded stems and dispersed them along to fill in the holes and chicken wire sightings. We worked together quickly and silently before BP would notice what we were doing.

I was seething when the photographer snapped this picture.

I was entirely enraged by the blob-making process. I cursed BP in my mind for making me stand beside an inferior product. I knew I was better than that column blob and I hated her for it. This served only to support my hatred for group projects.

After each group finished their column, we collectively worked together on a dangling ceremony-floating-flower-cloud deal. Some folks rigged up the wires and cages, others added base greenery, some added focal blooms, and the last group came in with accent and filler flowers. In the end we had a big floating wad of foliage to anchor our makeshift ceremony space. Though I contributed but a few linear pieces of greens, I picked up some great tips on the mechanics of such an installation and otherwise picked the brain of the Mayesh representative, making him name and spell all the plants present that day that I didn’t know. I asked the Mayesh guy to look into accepting smaller shipment sizes and he just told me that wasn’t his department.

After lunch we gathered around to hear about Shean’s very particular method of building bouquets. Traditionally, bouquets are a jumble of flowers gathered and placed so that all the stems collect at the bottom in an easy to grab handle. What makes bouquet making tricky is getting certain shapes right. If you want a bouquet to look loose and earthy and have lots of bits sticking out in all directions (as is the current trend) you will also have stems sticking out in all directions and when you smush those stems together to form the handle, the flowers up top also smush together and it negates your loose, wild look. So florists have to wire things into place or cut stems too short and tape them to others stems and add lots of extra greenery to get a big loose shape that still gathers together as the collective handle. Shean here, just makes his sticky-outy stems bouquet and then gathers groups of stems resulting in a bouquet with two (or more) handles. This unofficially breaks the rules. There is no hand-book that says a bouquet must only have one handle but everyone knows about the one handle bit so I can’t decide if Shean is a rule-breaking innovator or just lazy. Either way though, he hands you that bouquet with so much confidence and markets the double handles as a beneficial feature of your wedding bouquet and you accept it because Shean obviously knows what he’s doing.

From Shean I learned the value of fake confidence. I thought to myself, “Well I could be a floral designer too if I just jimmy rigged everything to look great from the front.” And then I realized, that’s exactly what I do every weekend and I am a floral designer.

Then it was our turn to try Shean’s technique. It was admittedly difficult to hold things the way he does and the lot of us decided that part of it is that he has big man hands. Few of us succeeded in the Shean-style bouquet and I’m proud to admit I am one of them. With such beautiful blooms available to us, no one made a bouquet that couldn’t have gone straight to a photoshoot but what was interesting about it, was seeing how differently they all turned out, like 30 chefs given a basic chicken pot-pie recipe but left to use their own herbs and spices; similar but different and some that become favorites.  Some girls had great shapes and textures but I didn't like their colors. Others had great colors but too few blooms. Some gals made the perfect balance of everything and I couldn’t stop staring. One of the women who has been doing flowers for 20 years made the most beautiful one of all. I floated around her bouquet, marveling at the shape. 

“This is the greatest!” I told her. She looked over at me admiring her bouquet and casually said, “Oh, well I cheated. Look.” and she lifted the bouquet out of the vase to expose an extensive and elaborate greenery ruse used to plump up the shape of that bouquet.

I walked out of the whole thing realizing that I know more that I feel like I know and that everyone everywhere is jimmy rigging those Pinterest photos of perfect weddings. In some ways I already knew this but part of me also figured that the two official businesses I’ve worked for doing wedding florals were unique in their unprofessionalism. We jimmy rigged things into place at Duvall and Bloom and that’s where I learned to jimmy rig for Lux & U. The workshop confirmed to me that everyone is scrambling to get by. Thats quite comforting. I also learned that I’m doing a lot better than some folks out there that are being paid for their work. That’s worth every mile and penny. 

I walked out of there grinning like a fool. I know what I’m doing. Mostly.

Brett picked me up at 6:00 and helped me load my floral loot into the car. He told me all about his day visiting Andrew Jackson’s home and walking down Broadway, admiring cowboy boots. There was one thing he saved for me though. On our way out of town, we stopped for some Nashville Hot Chicken and Brett finally got to experience those infamous Scovilles.