People, Places, Flowers
How We Build Business
Whenever I travel for work, I make time to connect with friends and colleagues and I try to stay inspired with local art and architecture. I’m often lucky enough to do both.
While connecting with people and enjoying local architecture might not sound like “work” activities, both are actually hugely important to my business and its success. A couple of outings on my recent Detroit trip have inspired me to tell you more about Made Floral’s growth with a fun walk through a couple of beautiful buildings that nurtured it.
On one of my days off, I head over to the Fisher Building, a skyscraper in Detroit, to meet my friend Sabriyah for coffee.
Fisher Building and the Shinola Counter: Connection
I arrive at the Fisher Building and settle into a seat at a café called Stella. Looking up I see the brilliant gold and heavenly blue ceiling way up high and art deco chandeliers made with a repeated patten of scalloped shapes. In quiet moments like this, I pause to enjoy the beauty and find inspiration for my work. My eyes follow the details of the ceiling’s gold-lined shapes and then rest in the breaks of soft blue. I think about how I do this when I’m creating a floral arrangement, how I create moments of interest and pause, texture and space.
While I’m waiting for Sabriyah, I remember that this building was designed by Albert Khan. When I was in architecture school in Boston, Albert Khan was always front and center in any lecture about Detroit architecture. He even designed the clubhouse that hosts the golf tournament event that I was just in town for. It’s funny how certain artists leave their fingerprints on our lives, appearing and reappearing to remind us where we’ve come from.
When I met Sabriyah in 2016, she was the Store Manager at the Shinola flagship store where I operated a floral pop up, and now she is their Director of Visual Merchandising & Store Design. As I sat with her at Stella, we caught up with a bright and flowing conversation that revolved around how successful, meaningful careers are built in relationship, around how a small business like mine totally depends on outreach and connection.
In some roundabout way during our conversation, Sabriyah and I got to talking about that pop up at Shinola and all the doors it opened. I believe I manifested the Shinola opportunity with vision, action, and self-belief, and I’m grateful to all the people who were a part of the bigger picture. That pop up shop bonded me to lots of wonderful people: residential neighbors who stopped in every weekend for coffee (and whose favorite flowers I still remember!), dear friends from the Shinola team, and new clients and business contacts, including my connections with the Rocket Mortgage Classic and the whole network of people there.
One of the coolest opportunities I received through the pop up was the job of designing flowers for the first-ever event to take place at the iconic Michigan Central Station since 1988.
Michigan Central Station: Community
A few days after my café date with Sabriyah at the Fisher Building, I meet up with two other Shinola contacts, my friends Renee and Jenn, and we head to Michigan Central Station. The station, deserted for 30 years and now owned by Ford Motor Company, has undergone a massive $740-million-dollar renovation and I am so excited to see how the building and surrounding land are looking now that it’s complete.
Approaching the renovated building on this hot summer day, I get full-body goosebumps. The landscape surrounding the entrance is pristine, with neat rows of hydrangeas, echinacea, and other lush perennials in full bloom. Once inside the building, we are welcomed into a vibrant, lit-up, wide-open space filled with the lively sounds of people on tours. Throughout the main hall are posters, plaques, and artworks honoring the history of the station, the people who made the renovation possible, and the sprawling graffiti the station was once known for. My favorite parts of the re-opening exhibition are the preserved swathes of old station wall, decayed and marked up with spray paint. I am moved and inspired by the whole experience and by the ideas and passion behind it.
The renovated Michigan Central Station tells me the story of Detroit, and it is surreal to be here during this visit. It makes me think of how the city got to this moment, and it makes me think of how I got to this moment, too.
In 2017, I was helping a customer at my flower counter who happened to be the event planner for an upcoming event called Detroit Homecoming, a celebration of the city that invites former residents back home for three days to learn, network, and explore ways they can contribute to rebuilding the city. That year’s event was going to be very special, as it was planned to take place at the Michigan Central Station. At the height of its glory, Michigan Central was as significant to Detroit as Grand Central is to NYC—the two historic buildings even share the same design team—and its abandonment was devastating. When Detroit Homecoming’s event planner asked me to do the flowers, I felt, and still do, so honored to have been selected for such a special event, one of the last to take place before the Ford renovation began in 2018.
On my first site visit for the event, I couldn’t help but think how beautiful the decay was. The station was a living piece of art showing Detroit’s distress—what it had been through and how it was still holding on. The character of the space gave me so much to work with, with so many plant and flower options to create contrast and tell stories with.
Working with my plant vendor—the same one I still use when I work in Detroit today—we chose thirty bird-of-paradise plants and paired them with tall urns crafted by a local event company so that the plants reached about 7 feet high. I added flowers to the foot of the stage, the area of that night’s speaking engagement taking on the feel of meadow of wildflowers growing from a once-empty lot. On the thirteen floor, I added a canopy of flowers to a large window that was just outside the elevator. For the dinner tables, white flowers and greenery filled the vases of all sizes, leaving room for charcuterie boards to be placed every couple of feet. We had lots of candles, which were a struggle to keep lit because every time we lit them, they would blow out from the unexpected draft running through the building that hadn’t seen an event like this for decades. There were large gaping holes in the walls. The walls were covered in graffiti in colors of pastels, black, and neon against the original beige color. We carried buckets of water in to refill our flower arrangements since there was no running water on site.
Seven years later, during my visit with Jenn and Renee, I am blown away by the resilience of the city and I am so glad the renovation left so much of the station’s character intact. In fact, the renovation is clearly informed by and built around that character. What an honor it was for me to create in this unique space back in 2017! I knew then that the opportunity to execute a floral design in a space with that kind of magic was truly the opportunity of a lifetime. When I ask Renee, who grew up in Detroit, whether she ever thought she’d see Michigan Central revived like this in her lifetime, she tells me “Not a chance.”
Home and Beyond
Following my interests in architecture and finding my people has transformed my business in ways I never thought was even possible. From one-off jobs to pop-ups and more, my Detroit connections gave me the foundation to build a business in my home state of Connecticut. Because of those experiences, I know how to imagine what I want for my business and make it happen, how to be open to cosmic nudges to expand and be challenged, how to make uncomfortable phone calls and face fear, and how to treat the people in the circles of my creative, business life. Whether it’s a small floral counter or a sprawling architectural wonder, I know how to see every opportunity as a chance not just to grow but to connect.
I have some upcoming private classes scheduled on Zoom. My current client and I have been having one-on-one sessions where we go over any and all aspects of a business topic related to small business and floral design. One thing I want to make sure to teach her is to follow her heart on the connections she makes. Sure, there are business principles and practices that you can learn and read about, but what has been the most shapeshifting for my business has been the human connections I’ve made, nurtured, and continue to make.
We have to stay open-hearted and we have to see all kinds of opportunities as adventures: an old building with giant holes in the wall might just be the event that sparks your imagination or introduces you to a vital career contact. I think back to my younger self, a 28-year-old woman who knew nothing about Detroit when I first moved there; I’m grateful to that young woman for making some bold moves and striking out on her own as a creative and a business owner. It’s really a beautiful thing to look back on moments that didn’t make sense at the time but which can now be seen so clearly as stepping stones for brighter days.
