For area florists, Valentine's Day bouquets bloom from hours of work

Days before the big day, the back rooms at Linda Brown’s Floral in Donegal were bursting with boxes of colorful flowers, sorted individually into cases by size and type.

“We cut and condition all those flowers in a flower preservative that makes them last, and they have to have those three days to process to take up the water to be in tip-top shape before we put them in arrangements,” said Brown, who has been in the floral business for 38 years. “We won’t just take them out of the box and straight into an arrangement. We cut and process them in floral solution and do proper cut and care before we do arrangements with them.”

One of many in Western Pennsylvania, Brown’s shop employs 14 people at two locations, one in Donegal and one in Mt. Pleasant. The shop creates hundreds of arrangements for Valentine’s Day annually.

For floral shops across the region, the bouquets delivered to sweethearts Feb. 14 have their origins in days of preparation, planning and work up to the last minute of Valentine’s Day to make a petal-perfect finish.

“We built that product from scratch,” Brown said. “We start with just the loose flowers and have to build that arrangement from just the flowers themselves into the containers with greens to make it the beautiful, finished product. There’s a lot of work and a lot of time and effort that goes into the bouquet.”

Holiday workload

Jill Kunkle, who runs Just for You Floral Shop in Lower Burrell with her husband, Keith, says her small shop gets a couple dozen customers for Valentine’s Day. She described the holiday as bringing “long hours and no sleep.”

“A lot of the guys wait until the very last minute” to order, she said. “I have a couple of people waiting on silk flower arrangements, and I told them I can’t do it until after Valentine’s Day.”

A lot of the busy atmosphere of the holiday comes not necessarily from the flowers but from the trappings and decorations, said Michele Pattison of Springdale Floral in Springdale.

“Preparation goes (back) a few weeks, to decorate the windows and order all of the supplies, and redecorate the store,” she said. “Once everything comes in, it’s got to be priced and put on display. … We’re putting all the flowers out and making vases and putting them out and blowing up balloons.”

Making the displays involves a lot of “scrambling,” said Joshua Rittenour, owner of Rittenour Floral in Jeannette, but it is rewarding.

“It’s exciting and stressful all in the same, but we enjoy it,” he said. “It’s nice to see their faces when they get the arrangements, so it’s all worth it. But it will be busy.”

‘Total chaos’

Valentine’s Day is only on par with Mother’s Day for sheer activity, Brown said. Customers come in up until the last minute.

“We do get those who think ahead and order ahead, which we love, and that’s wonderful, but, as long as I have been doing it, it’s a man’s holiday, and it’s last minute,” she said. “They will come in and stand in line, and that doesn’t seem to bother them, as long as they can get something to take home with them.”

At Miss Martha’s Floral in Scottdale, owner David Mardis, who has been a florist for 40 years, cites Valentine’s Day as one of the busiest weeks of the year.

“The majority of it is last minute,” Mardis said. “This year, we are better at beforehand orders than what we ever have been, which is good. It’s smart on the customers’ part, too … That’s a good thing because it helps us prepare.”

The span of Feb. 13 and 14, he said, is “total chaos.”

“But we get the job done,” Mardis said. “We will have 14 people employee-wise, 15 counting myself, in the store on Monday and Tuesday. Typically, it’s normally four on a normal day.”

Mardis estimated that, on a regular day, the store does 20 deliveries. On Valentine’s Day, he said, the store does between 150 and 200 and will have six vans on the road.

“There’s a lot of prep work that people don’t realize,” he said. “It’s actually longer than a weeklong process for us. We have multiple days of deliveries. Then we have the preparation and preparing all the arrangements to go out and get delivered. Usually, the 13th and the 14th are the heavy days of delivering to the local sweethearts.”

Economic impact

Last year’s Valentine’s Day season was plagued by a layer of frustration for some florists. Supply chain issues made some flowers hard to get, and costs rose with inflation. The impacts haven’t totally abated, Kunkle said. Her suppliers have cited issues with their flower sources in South America.

“(Supply chain issues) happen a lot, even yesterday. I tried to get pink gerbera daisies, and they didn’t have them,” Kunkle said. “She said we probably wouldn’t be getting them in. But, today, I got some, so that’s good for Valentine’s Day.”

At Springdale Floral, Pattison said, owner Al Zimmerly’s experience helps the store know a few planning tricks to avoid supply chain pain.

“We’ve been able to get them OK, but Al’s been in business for 46 years, so none of this is new to him,” Pattison said. “He knows when he needs to order and how much. The supply chain hasn’t impacted us this year.”

To accommodate inflation’s impact on customers, Pattison said, Springdale Floral offers bouquets and arrangements at a variety of prices.

“Everybody deserves something on Valentine’s Day, so we try to accommodate every price point, whether it’s a single rose or an entire dozen,” she said.

At Miss Martha’s Floral, Mardis has tried to avoid hiking prices, though some items have increased, he said. His starting price for roses is the same as last year, he said.

“We’re still trying to keep our prices reasonable in today’s economy,” he said. “I understand that people are strapped a little bit, so we aren’t increasing things the way they should be.”

At Brown’s store, supply chain issues have been less intense as compared with last year, she said.

“Nothing seems to be hard to get,” she said. “We can pretty much get it. It just takes longer to get it. Where we had a one-day turnaround, now it takes two or three days. But we have been able to get what we need.”

Last year, vases were harder to find, which is less of a problem this year, she said. Some prices have gone up because of shipping costs, Brown added.

“It’s sourced from all over the world. Our roses come from Ecuador,” she said. “It is the shipping to get the farms to our door.”

Some customers, she said, have been cutting back on purchasing flowers because of the economy.

“I think we have experienced that just on a day-to-day basis,” she said. “I am still hoping that it recovers itself for the holiday.”