On a Monday afternoon, chilly and overcast in stark juxtaposition to the warm weekend, Kim Wilson is busy at work, cutting, arranging, and rearranging flowers at Expressions Flowers & Gifts, a shop at 420 Merchants Road.
Carefully but quickly, she lifts an oriental lily, cuts it at an angle, and drops it into a pink crystal vase. That first lily, also known as a “stargazer” is pale pink, accented by darker pink tones and even darker spots; its six colored petals are as if a star was shaded in a pink gradient.
Wilson follows the first lily with a second, cuts it, too, at an angle, checks and trims it stigma and then places it in the jar. She repeats this several times before walking away from her workstation to the front of the shop, carefully selecting a snap dragon from a bucket, and beginning to trim and arrange it as well.
Expressions looks like what it is: a well-loved, several-decades in operation shop. There’s a mixture of live and silk plants. Potted peace lilies, palms, baskets of potted plant gardens overflow on a table that’s immediately visible on entering. There’s a table with bundles of single-stem flowers. Behind it are additional, well-stocked, tables with plants and flowers. On the back wall, there's a display of greeting cards, above which many wreaths are hung; remnants of the days when Expressions was primarily a gift shop.
The buckets of flowers are indicative of the day and the workload: Kim is, after all of these years, essentially the only employee.
It started in a caboose
Wilson's mother Nancy opened Expressions in July of 1976.
The shop started out of her mother’s “Mary Tyler Moore Days” when she was underpaid, Wilson said. Nancy worked as promotional and advertising manager for a large company and loved her job but things changed when the board split up and in the ensuing struggle for power, the board brought in a New York City man from outside of the company.
Wilson says the man stole her mother’s ideas and presented them as his own. “She was miserable everyday,” Wilson said. “So she eventually managed to get fired. He let her go and she decided to open up her own store, her own shop, her own business, which surprised us all. That’s how it happened.”
The first shop, a gift shop, was at the Caboose in North Field Commons. It was an actual, old train caboose, Wilson said. The space was small — it didn’t even have a bathroom — but the shop put down roots and eventually flourished there. It was eventually time to move to a larger space that was equipped to handle increased business.
The shop has had locations throughout Rochester and its suburbs, but Wilson says they were forced to move each time due to landlord problems or to rezoning that changed the energy and dynamic of the location. Expressions has been in the current location for the last 14 years. One change that happened during this time was that customers started requesting live flowers – in this way, they became florists.
“You learn to become a florist the hard way,” Wilson said.
Though they had worked with silk flowers from the beginning and therefore had experience arranging flowers, learning how to deal with fresh flowers, which can be temperamental and require a specific level of care, had its own learning curve.
A field...of online orders
Wilson says that the industry has changed, in large part due to the advent and increase of order gatherers. Expressions is a preferred florist for 1-800-Flowers, so, in addition to orders they receive directly, the shop is often fielding online orders.
She says that locals appreciate her creative arrangements, but, many of the order-service arrangements are what she calls “pedestrian.”
Wilson has care and specificity when it comes to her arrangements. Most regular or local clients call her to request flowers. She discusses their desired delivery: What style? What are their favorite colors?
“If they want something with height, you don’t want to send something low and lush,” she said. “My repeat customers know us and they know our work, so they’re happy.”
Advance planning for seasonal business has become more difficult because of order gatherers. Now, people see a picture online and want that specific arrangement. Further, because those companies create the images for the websites, it’s not even guaranteed that Wilson will be familiar with the arrangement.
“I am not a FTD florist, but I keep getting orders from one of the order gatherers that’s an FTD arrangement and I don’t know it. So I have to go and look it up and… it’s time consuming. We spend more time looking up pictures. It’s not like the old days when you could just whip something up or have something ready in the cooler and someone just walks in.”
Wilson says that people ultimately get the short end of the stick by not ordering from florists directly.
“People don’t realize they can get it for less money calling me direct. They’re paying more going through the sites because that’s how they’re making their living, plus they get a cut of the order fees and I get paid once a month… We have to come up with the flowers, the delivery, the labor, the retainers and all that stuff,” Wilson said.
Supplies stifled by the pandemic
During the pandemic, Wilson says that business has been booming — sometimes so much so that she has to stop taking orders. She says that her shop was a conduit for people to care for and connect with each other during the pandemic, when they were unable to physically see each other.
“Last March with the shutdowns—that’s how people were reaching out to each other: flowers and balloons and chocolates and bears and plants,” she said. “We were overwhelmed with orders. Somedays we still are. A lot of days. I have to stop taking the orders. I just can’t do the work.”
The downside is the pandemic caused a shortage with suppliers, which in turn means that there is a shortage for florists.
“You could order 100 roses and you only get 50. Of course everything is going up right now, especially roses. They’re at a sky-high price and it’s all different,” Wilson said.
As the sole employee (sans the people who are hired to do deliveries), Kim makes all the arrangements herself. She says she’ll hire someone, train them—teaching them everything she knows — and then they’ll ghost her. Because of this, she often works holidays without any help.
Even on non-holiday days, she says she is sometimes overwhelmed with the number of orders.
“If you got too many on one day, you get the important ones out,” Wilson said “You have to do the funerals, you have to do the schools and businesses. You try to get as many birthdays as you can because we think it’s important to get your flowers on your birthday. But thinking of you and get well — if I can’t do it, I can’t do it and they’re going to have to wait until the next day… We’re only human. We can only do so much in a day. Time marches on.”
'Hands-on growing'
Nancy Wilson was a single mother of four in the '70s. She worked to make sure her kids were taken care of. The model she created for the business is the one Kim still uses today.
“The way my mom set it up is the way I run it. I had some design classes, plus hands-on what my mom taught me. She specialized in ikebana… You grow.. Hands-on growing and years of experience,” she said.
Wilson uses her years of growing to help others, budding plant owners or curious people inquiring about arrangements, to learn how to care for plants. She educates clients about the various flowers they’re purchasing. If she had more time, if she were able to hire and retain more experienced employees, Wilson would use her Facebook or website to educate a wider audience about flowers and arranging.
As it stands, though, Kim Wilson is in the back of the shop, inspecting, cutting and arranging flowers for customers.
Adria R. Walker covers public education for the Democrat and Chronicle in partnership with Report for America. Follow her on Twitter at @adriawalkr or send her an email at arwalker@gannett.com. You can support her work with a tax-deductible donation to Report for America.
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The Link LonkApril 19, 2021 at 03:21PM
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Flower shop that started in a caboose is chugging along half-century later - Democrat & Chronicle
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