How to open your flower shop from scratch and without a franchise. (Book of Yelcheninov A.A.)
5. My experience as a florist in Russia and the USA.
You always need to learn!
When I came to the flower trade, I sold them from a tray (many do not know what this is), that means I stood on the street and suggested people buy a bouquet. After that, some flower growers began to build wooden stalls like boxes, this was done for flowers so that they would not freeze - this trade was called from boxes.
At that difficult time, I realized that I want to do it flowers, I dreamed of getting into a school of floristry. Since it was dashing 90s I didn’t have money to go to study in Moscow, I had to think about how to survive, how to feed myself and my family, so the training remained only in my dreams.
As many remember, after the collapse of the USSR, problems were not only with food or education, but also with the flower assortment. At some point, imported, unfamiliar flowers began to enter the market, no one knew if the new flowers would be in demand, they took risks, took and tried to sell.
At that difficult time, I lived in a small town, far from the capital and dreamed of learning to understand colors, I dreamed of becoming an experienced florist. On this basis, one fine day, I opened my own small flower shop. I tried to understand a wide variety of new plants, and often surprised buyers with beautiful bouquets and a new kind of flower.
I often ordered flowers from suppliers that I heard about for the first time, I wanted to understand and see a new unfamiliar flower. Once, I ordered Heliconia. An amazing plant, almost a meter in length ... at that time I could not even imagine where and how to put it in, what bouquet of flowers can be gathered from it, can this giant be added somewhere. This is ridiculous now, and then everything was new to us, we often ordered new unfamiliar varieties and were happy to replenish our assortment. Often we chose varieties from price lists that were received by fax. Sometimes I had to call Moscow at night to make an order, because we had a time difference of about 7 hours. There were no computers or other gadgets at that time, so we had to order everything at random, we sometimes did not know what they would bring to us and what size. It was both scary and exciting at the same time.
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