From Fashion to Flowers

You may not be familiar with my story, but my love for creating and design didn’t start with flowers.

From a young age, I was always very particular about what I wore (just ask my mom who had to search high and low for pink “gellies”, when they were the only kind of shoes that I would wear as a kid). This personality quirk of mine didn’t stop at clothing. I always had strong feelings about what color the walls in my bedroom should be painted and was enlisted at a young age to go furniture shopping with my mom. I was known for having very decisive “design” opinions and I never shied away from sharing them.

So when the time came to determine what I would study in college, you might be surprised to hear that I actually applied to be a dietitian… because if you want to be successful you have to be some kind of a doctor, right? Just to be clear, I have mad respect for anyone who puts in the work to become a doctor, but I personally wasn’t looking to become a doctor for the right reasons. I was always worried about being smart enough or accomplished enough growing up, so I was searching for something to give me that kind of validation. I was never the straight “A” student or homecoming queen type of person in high school, no matter how hard I tried, so I was determined to make the rest of my life different and that started with college.

With an acceptance letter in hand from Purdue University into the dietetics program, I went for a “day on campus” visit prior to starting my freshman year. As fate would have it, in the same college that housed dietetics there was also a program called “Apparel Design and Technology”. As I stood there with my dad, waiting for the balance of the future-dietitians to show up, I had this achey feeling in my gut…

I didn’t want to go with the future-dietitians, I wanted to find out more about this apparel design program.

Luckily my dad is a super supportive guy (and he was honestly just so happy that I was going to his alma mater), so we made the switch right then and there - we would spend my “day on campus” with the apparel design group instead of the dietetics group. That day was a game changer for me - for the first time in a long time I felt like I had found a group of like-minded people. We loved clothing, we embraced our own personal styles, and ultimately we loved creating - I was home.

I quickly came to realize that taking on an apparel design degree was so much more than just designing clothing. It required all-nighters of draping clothing on dress forms and putting the final pencil markings on my drawing class projects, followed by long days of fitting garments on models and taking accounting classes. The funny thing is though, that when you love what you do, it’s true that it never really feels like work.

Throughout my time at Purdue and in the Apparel Design program, I had finally learned to accept the creative side of me as the most powerful (and empowered) part of myself. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t a prom queen anymore, I was finally just me and that was enough.

After four years at Purdue, a study abroad adventure in London (which I’m certain I’ll share more about in a later post), and a successful (slightly over the top) senior collection, I was ready to pursue a career in the apparel industry. The apparel industry is notoriously difficult to get into though, especially with a paying job fresh out of college, so I was lucky enough to get a position at Abercrombie and Fitch corporate office as a technical designer.

Being a technical designer was definitely a departure in ways from my college education. Instead of focusing on all aspects of garment creation (inspiration —> to final product), I was now being asked to focus more on things such as ensuring the best possible fit, determining the correct construction, and communicating revisions to my vendor partners. While creativity was an aspect of my role at A&F, being a technical designer definitely tapped more into my analytical side.

In total I spent 9 years at A&F as a technical designer, working on a variety of different product categories during that time, from dresses to intimate apparel. I truly loved my job and the people I worked with and, in many ways, I feel that those 9 years were the years when I became an adult. Those 9 years forced me to come to terms with my own character flaws and helped me to establish coping mechanisms for dealing with stress and anxiety, while still executing at my highest caliber.

I didn’t realize it then, but this job was giving me the skillsets I needed to start my own business in flowers.

Even though I loved my job, the reality was that my creative side was begging me for more - more time and space to try to realize its full potential. I started to view arranging flowers as more than just a fun hobby that I did from time to time and instead as a potential career path. Arranging flowers had always been a little retreat for me from my everyday life. Post-college there would be days when I wanted to get crafty and create something for fun, but making a garment from nothing took hours or even days. Creating clothing as a hobby no longer melded with my demanding corporate schedule, but arranging a vase of flowers took mere minutes…

So I began to realize that while arranging flowers also demanded creativity, it was on a scale that I was able to offer at the time.

In order to go from a hobby florist to owning my own floral company, I sought out an education in floristry to teach me all of the techniques and tricks behind great floral design. I found that education in an online program, which at first I was wicked skeptical about - how can you teach someone design online? The great thing about my apparel background though, was that I already understood design. I knew what colors looked good together and which ones didn’t. Out of instinct, I could tell when something was great or maybe just a little bit off. So my online floral education was really to try to understand cut flowers and floral techniques better…

How do you keep flowers fresher for longer?

How do you manipulate flowers, while still keeping true to their natural form?

How do you create a classically wired cascading bouquet, Kate Middleton style?

The online course allowed me to build the confidence I needed to officially leave my corporate job of 9 years to pursue Blümen full time.

Even though the start of Blümen hasn’t been without it’s setbacks (I’m glaring at you, COVID), I have found that my creativity and apparel design background have shown up in ways that I could have never anticipated. This time and space at the beginning of my business has given me the opportunity to fine tune my flower design skills, expand my business to arrangement delivery, and has also allowed me to discover my love for wearable flowers.

So while the path from fashion to flowers has been in many ways an unexpected one, I truly feel that every step I’ve taken along the way has led me to becoming the kind of florist and designer I was always meant to be.