MISSOULA - It is no surprise that Valentine’s Day is one of the busiest days for flower shops.
At Bitterroot Flower Shop in Missoula, the day of love means months of preparations, long hours, and, of course, lots of flowers.
The inside of the Missoula flower boutique looked a bit chaotic on the surface, but the employees were running around like a well-oiled machine.
“I would say for me, probably two months I’ve been preparing,” Bitterroot Flower Shop general manager Marjorie Dula said. "Getting things ordered, making sure we have the staff trained, making the shop look beautiful. So yeah, it’s a big deal for us. We really work hard to make this good for everyone– as many people as possible.”
The first step for Valentine’s Day flowers at the shop is trimming the leaves and cutting the stems.
The flowers come in boxes from mostly the Western U.S., but in the winter there are some flowers that need to be outsourced to southern countries.
“We try to get them as close to home as possible,” Bitterroot Flower Shop owner Lindsay Irwin explained. “It’s always risky this time of year because of weather, so you know, some of them come in frozen.”
After the flowers are trimmed, they are sorted into buckets and placed in walk-in coolers in the back of the shop. From there, floral designers find the flowers they need for their bouquets.
For Valentine’s Day, there are set designs that are fairly popular and make it easier for the designers to finish multiple arrangements. Unsurprisingly, these arrangements involve more than a few roses and Irwin says they took in roughly 12,000 roses for Valentine’s Day.
There are also pre-orders or designer’s-choice, where the customer chooses the price range, but the designer chooses the flowers.
Around February, designers work long hours preparing for Valentine’s Day orders, and by the time the holiday comes, they are feeling pretty burnt out.
“This is the eighth day I’ve worked in a row, we came in at six this morning. We were here until 7:30 last night, 7 about,” floral designer Maisy Jam said.
Still, the designers are happy to work with flowers and feel it is a unique art form.
“I really like working with my hands and I think that flowers have a really unique way of expressing themselves that is different than words or other forms of art,” said floral designer Kayte Epperson. “You can get a feeling from flowers that is hard to describe, it’s really special.”
Flower arrangement takes skill and time, and all of the designers at Bitterroot Flower Shop underwent lots of training from veteran designers.
“It’s definitely a job where there is a skill involved, and so all of these folks have had a lot of training, and they’re really competent and good at what they do,” Dula noted.
Once the designers have finished their arrangement, they place the flowers in a vase with clean water, add any necessary ribbons or decorations, then bring it to either the distribution area of the shop to be delivered or the front of shop to be bought in-house.
If the arrangement is a preorder, it is set up for distribution and sorted based on zone or neighborhood. From there, delivery drivers load up their cars and deliver the flowers to the recipients. Typically, the shop has employed drivers, but because of the high demand of orders on Valentine’s Day, they also contracted 10 extra drivers to make deliveries.
Irwin says many people are enthusiastic to help out on Valentine’s Day, "some of the drivers are like, 'gosh, it’s so rewarding,' just like handing people beautiful things all day long and having them be like 'thank you so much wow'!"
The shop had around 10 times as many deliveries as usual on Valentine’s Day, but still, they say everything went smoothly.
“I think we did really well, the whole team here really came together and really knocked it out of the park,” Irwin says.
After the high of the holiday, the employees weren't quite ready to take that sigh of relief the next day.
“Everyone is really tired. It’s just been a bunch of really long days trying to get everything ready,” Irwin said. “I think probably in a couple days we’ll all be like 'ahhh okay.' It always takes a while to amp up and then a while to amp down.”
There is a lot that goes into running a flower shop, and it may be stressful for the workers on holidays, but Dula says she loves her job, and she loves her community.
“I love my customers,” she says. “We have the nicest people that come in here, and we’re really part of the community.”
And it seems the community loves them back. Dula says she believes they helped over 1,000 people get or send flowers this Valentine’s Day.
More information on Bitterroot Flower Shop can be found on their Facebook page.
