Behind the Scenes: Mother's Day Flowers, What you See, What you Don't See
By the time a Mother's Day bouquet lands in a customer's hands, it looks like magic — beautiful stems, perfectly arranged, delivered on time. This week, fresh off the biggest flower holiday of the year, Vonda and Lori are joined by Audrey Kristoff, product manager at Flower Clique, to pull back the curtain on everything that had to go right (and everything that went sideways in 2021) before those flowers ever reached the shop.
What you see: an order form. What you don't: a farm's whole year.
Audrey manages Flower Clique's farm-direct bouquet program, and Mother's Day consumed her week. On the visible side, a shop submits an order — this year, deadlines fell at the end of March for Mother's Day — and once it's in, it feels like the flowers will simply appear "by magic."
Behind the scenes, flower farms are grooming crops months ahead to hit the peak. And the stakes are enormous: some smaller growers rely on the two major holidays — Valentine's Day and Mother's Day — to carry them through the entire year. A bad holiday can mean going out of business or being acquired. COVID compounded everything: workers couldn't stand side by side to plant, so crops went in late, and when harvest time came, some flowers simply weren't mature yet. As Bill LaFever had predicted early in the pandemic, plants have to grow — you can't speed that up.
The journey north: chartered planes, customs dogs, and no truck drivers
Here's a number worth remembering from Vonda's research: 82 percent of cut flowers sold in the United States are imported, largely from the Bogotá region of Colombia — and about 90 percent of those come through Miami. When COVID cut flight schedules, planes had to be chartered both ways, with flower boxes strapped under cargo nets in the passenger seats and stuffed into overhead bins, all kept at 40 to 45 degrees.
Then comes customs, where flowers clear inspection just like people do — inspectors shaking stems upside down hunting for bugs while dogs sniff for drugs. And once they're through? America's truck driver shortage. Product sat ready with trucks available and nobody legally able to drive them; Lori overheard her husband's team literally fighting over a freight car. Add distancing rules that spread out workers at every farm, dock, and warehouse, and every step took longer and cost more. Shops felt it as delays, price increases, and quality issues.
Then Colombia erupted
The week before Mother's Day, a proposed tax reform in Colombia triggered riots and roadblocks. Some flights were canceled because farms couldn't get trucks to the airport. At one farm of roughly 1,300 employees, only about 250 could get to work — and vendors sent video of farm workers walking to work, crossing protest lines on foot to harvest and pack flowers bound for American shops. Vonda and Audrey admit the footage brought tears: people enduring real hardship so florists could keep a promise to their customers.
That footage changed how the team responded to frustration, too. When a shop owner got upset about delays, Audrey — usually not the calmest in the bunch, she jokes — found she could extend grace: "I have perspective now."
The magic doesn't end at the shop's back door
Once flowers arrive, the invisible work continues: unboxing, proper cutting, hydration, and cooler time so stems harden off; salespeople who know what they're selling; designers, drivers, and — least glamorous of all — the cleanup at day's end, because next week brings weddings and funerals and life doesn't pause. Some members even sent employees driving all over town burning gas and payroll just to keep blooming plants in stock, while their customers saw only a well-stocked shop on social media.
And that's the point: customers aren't supposed to see it. "We're selling magic," as Audrey puts it — and nobody sells magic better than a flower shop. But everyone in the chain deserves understanding: customers extending grace to flower shops, flower shops extending grace to wholesalers, because everybody is doing the best they can.
Key takeaways
- Order holiday product early — farm-direct deadlines can fall a full six weeks before the holiday.
- Know your supply chain: 82 percent of U.S. cut flowers are imported, and 90 percent of those move through Miami — every disruption upstream lands on your cooler.
- Delays, price hikes, and quality issues usually have a backstory; ask before you assume.
- Extend grace down the chain — to wholesalers, farms, and the workers who cross protest lines to get to work — and expect your customers to need the same reminder.
- Protect the magic: customers should see beautiful flowers, not the chaos — that's the product.
Join the conversation in the private Business and Pleasure of Flowers Facebook group.
Sponsored by:
Flower Clique
Flower Clique Prep School
Real Life Retail Florist