More Than a Delivery: The Personal Side of Being Your Local Florist

Every day, new customers place their first order with The BloomBox. We appreciate every one of them, and we hope that first order isn't the last. Whether you've ordered from us for twenty years or discovered us this morning, the flowers receive the same attention and the person receiving them matters just as much.

But something happens when that first order becomes a second, and then a fifth, and eventually we've been helping the same family celebrate life's moments for years. A relationship develops. We're not suggesting we're all best friends who hang out on weekends. That would be ridiculous. But there is a relationship that becomes much more than simply taking an order, making an arrangement and dropping it at someone's door. Over time, we get to know people, their families and some of the important moments in their lives.

That's one of our favourite parts of being a local florist.

Sometimes We Know Who Is Getting the Flowers Before We See the Address

I make most of our deliveries throughout the year. Occasionally I even get a day off, and someone else takes over the delivery route. During major holidays, when our volume increases considerably, we'll also bring in an extra driver or two for a couple of weeks to help us keep everything moving.

But there are some deliveries I try very hard to make myself. When you've been delivering flowers to the same person for years, you begin to know when their birthday is coming. You recognize the annual anniversary order. Sometimes you see the customer's name come through and already have a pretty good idea where those flowers are going.

If one of those long-standing deliveries happens to fall on a day I had planned to take off, sometimes I change the day. Other times I'll take a few minutes out of whatever I'm doing and come in specifically to make that delivery before getting back to my day. Nobody asks me to do that, and there's certainly no additional delivery charge for "Shaun has to bring this one." I just want to. After you've knocked on the same door year after year, handing that particular bouquet to someone else to deliver doesn't always feel quite right.

We Get to Watch Families Grow Up

One of the remarkable things about owning the same flower shop for this many years is realizing just how much of people's lives we've been allowed to witness.

We have couples we've been delivering flowers to since before they were married. We may have helped with their wedding flowers, delivered anniversary bouquets over the years, celebrated new babies and birthdays, and suddenly we're making a corsage or boutonniere for one of those kids' graduations. Other times it's a milestone birthday for a child you remember being born. You occasionally find yourself wondering when exactly all that time passed.

There are customers whose birthdays we celebrate every year, and some of those relationships go back to when we purchased the business in 2008. One woman in particular comes to mind. If my math and memory are correct, she'll be turning an incredible 107 years old in a few months. We've been delivering flowers to her since we bought the shop, and she still lives independently.

And I do mean independently. One day I was making a delivery and happened to be holding the elevator for her. Her friends were waiting for her for coffee, and when she realized the elevator was there, this woman—well over 100 years old—ran for it. I remember standing there thinking that I hope I'm doing half as well if I'm fortunate enough to reach anywhere close to her age.

Those aren't things that appear on an invoice or an order history. They're simply little moments you accumulate when you've been showing up at the same doors for a long time.

Flowers Have a Way of Putting Us in the Middle of People's Lives

We get to be there for a lot of the good stuff: birthdays, anniversaries, graduations, new babies, engagements, weddings, new jobs, new homes, retirements and milestones someone decides deserve to be recognized with flowers. We celebrate those wins right along with our customers.

But a flower shop also sees the other side of life. We deliver when someone is sick. We create flowers when somebody needs encouragement. We deliver to hospitals and care homes. We make sympathy arrangements when there aren't really adequate words for what someone is going through. We create memorial flowers for families we've known for years and sometimes for people we've personally delivered birthday and anniversary flowers to many times before.

Those orders hit differently. Over enough years, you don't just learn someone's favourite flowers or that they love bright colours. You learn a little about who they are.

Sometimes we're invited into people's lives in a very literal sense. Because we call ahead before every residential delivery, I've had recipients who were unwell tell me over the phone that they couldn't get out of bed and invite me to come right in and bring the flowers to their bedside. Once I'm there, if they need a glass of water or an extra pillow within reach, I'm certainly not going to tell them I only deliver the flowers. It takes another minute or two out of my day and makes things a little easier for the person I've just delivered to.

Sometimes Personal Service Has Nothing to Do With Flowers

Making deliveries also means I see people where they live, and after enough visits you begin to recognize personalities, routines and habits. With some of our long-term customers, apparently my job description has expanded considerably. I've even been recruited to move furniture on occasion—a couch, to be specific. I'm reasonably certain furniture moving isn't included in our delivery fee, but when you've known someone for years and they need a quick hand, you give them a hand.

That's really what a lot of these little interactions come down to. Sometimes the person at the door is someone we've known for years, and sometimes they're a complete stranger we'll only meet once. Either way, they're a person, not simply the last stop on a delivery route.

For our long-term customers in particular, that familiarity can occasionally matter in a more serious way. If I've delivered to someone regularly for years, I may know that they're normally waiting for me at the door. I might know they're usually talkative, that they're sharp as a tack and want to know what's happening at the shop, or that they normally meet friends for coffee at a particular time. I might know they're fiercely independent and absolutely insist they don't need help carrying anything.

You notice when something is different.

I'm certainly not a doctor, caregiver or social worker, and I don't pretend to be. But I'm another person in the community who occasionally knocks on that door, and if something seems genuinely out of character or gives me reason to be concerned, I may make a quick call to the family member who placed the order and suggest they check in. Sometimes family is a long way away, and there's some comfort in knowing that another person who actually knows Mom, Dad, Grandma or Grandpa has seen them face-to-face.

We don't charge for any of this, and you'll never find a "fetch a glass of water," "move the couch" or "keep an eye on Mom" option on our website. We don't really think of those things as extra services at all. They're simply what we think people in a community should do for one another.

Personal Doesn't Mean Knowing Everything About You

There is a line between personal service and being intrusive, and we think that's important too. We're not trying to become part of everyone's private life. We don't need to know everything about you or the person you're sending flowers to. But after years of helping the same customers, you naturally remember things.

Someone loves lilies while someone else doesn't. Mom likes bright colours. She really loved the arrangement we sent last year. He prefers something simple. They're celebrating 50 years this time, so maybe we should do something a little special.

Those little pieces of information can make the next order better. Instead of starting from zero every time, there's some history behind what we're creating. That's one of the advantages of having an actual relationship with the local business you're ordering from.

Every Regular Customer Started With a First Order

We never want any of this to suggest that someone ordering from us for the first time matters less. Quite the opposite. Every one of those relationships began with somebody placing an order when we didn't know them.

Maybe they found us through Google. Perhaps someone recommended us. Maybe they walked into the shop because they happened to be nearby or ordered from our website late at night. At that point, we don't know whether it's the only order they'll ever place or the beginning of a relationship that will last for decades, so we treat it like we hope it's the latter.

We ask questions when we need to. We pay attention to what you've told us. We create the flowers here in our shop and do our best to make sure the experience at the other end of the delivery is what you intended. Then, if you come back, we start getting to know you.

The couple whose wedding flowers we're creating today might be the couple whose anniversary flowers we're delivering twenty years from now. The new baby we're congratulating this week might eventually be the teenager we're making a graduation corsage for. We obviously can't know that when the first order arrives, but we've been doing this long enough to know that it happens.

This Is What "Local" Means to Us

"Shop local" has become a phrase you see everywhere, and there are plenty of good economic reasons to support locally owned businesses. Money spent locally helps employ local people, supports other local businesses and stays within the community. But there's another side of local that's much harder to put into numbers.

It's familiarity. It's walking through the door and recognizing someone, or knowing the person on the phone isn't sitting in a call centre hundreds of kilometres away. It's remembering a birthday because you've delivered flowers for it year after year. It's watching a couple go from dating, to marriage, to parenthood, and eventually finding yourself making flowers for their children's milestones.

It's celebrating someone's 100th birthday and then having the incredible privilege of coming back for 101, 102 and hopefully quite a few more. It's bringing flowers right to someone's bedside because they can't get up that day, grabbing them a glass of water while you're there, or somehow finding yourself moving a couch because a longtime customer needs a hand. And sometimes it's noticing that the person you've known for years doesn't quite seem like themselves today and caring enough to mention it to their family.

None of those things are particularly dramatic on their own. They're just small interactions accumulated over years, but eventually they become part of the relationship between a business and the community it serves.

We've owned The BloomBox since 2008, and during that time we've made an awful lot of flower arrangements and driven an awful lot of kilometres delivering them. Looking back, though, some of the things that stick with us aren't necessarily the biggest arrangements or the most elaborate events. They're the people: the familiar names on the orders, the doors we've knocked on hundreds of times, the families we've watched grow and change, and the customers we've celebrated with, worried about and, sadly, sometimes had to say goodbye to.

That's the personal side of being a local florist. It isn't something we could ever put a price on or add as a line item to an order. It's simply part of being The BloomBox.

Fresh. Unique. Flowers. It's What We Do!