Remember When...in the Floral Industry with Katy Miller and Tim Farrell AIFD, AAF, PFCI
Just before Mother's Day, Vonda gathers two friends with a combined 80 years in the business for a "remember when" session: Katy Miller, who spent 40 years at Dillon Floral Corporation rising to vice president before Vonda coaxed her out of retirement to join Flower Clique, and Tim Farrell AIFD, AAF, PFCI, owner of Farrell's Florist for 38 years and a Teleflora education veteran of more than 25. As Vonda insists, they're not old — they're seasoned. What follows is part comedy, part floral history lesson, and part reminder that old skills keep proving useful.
When everyone wore a Mother's Day corsage
Tim remembers the tradition precisely: a pink carnation corsage if your mother was living, white if she had passed, worn to church in an era when everyone dressed up. Vonda's Dixon, Illinois shop would turn out fifty mixed-color corsages from whatever blooms were on hand — every one wired and taped, since this was long before floral glue. "It's amazing we all didn't have carpal tunnel by thirty," Tim laughs, marveling at how little shops charged for that much labor. His teaching point for today's designers: know both techniques. When floral adhesive vanished during last year's shortages, the designers who could wire and tape kept right on working; the ones who couldn't were stuck. Katy adds the social context — showing up at church without a corsage was once a genuine faux pas, just as her grandmother's generation wouldn't dare arrive without a hat.
Spray-painted mums, foil-wrapped pots, and glue-gun burns
Katy's greenhouse memory: truckloads of white cushion mums grown specifically so customers could spray-paint them pink, fluorescent, or red-white-and-blue for gravesides and gifts — a coal-region Pennsylvania tradition that single-handedly kept Design Master in business. Vonda points out the full-circle moment: farms now sell those same "god-awful" fluorescent sprayed mums, and the younger generation loves them. Tim raises another lost art — hand-wrapping a potted plant in foil, masking tape on the back, before pre-formed mylar covers existed — and everyone winces remembering the first glue-gun burn, the spider webs of glue strings across the work table, and the discovery that rubbing two glue-dipped pieces of styrofoam together makes a convincing Halloween cobweb.
Before the point of sale: blackboards, credit card books, and all-nighters
The technology memories hit hardest. Orders written by hand, then rewritten on the card, the envelope, and the delivery tag; credit card numbers checked against a 40-page booklet of fraudulent accounts mailed out by the card companies; wholesale inventory tracked on blackboards with six salespeople erasing each other's numbers; and a dedicated employee upstairs at holidays phoning out hundreds of wire orders one shop at a time from a printed directory — then reconciling the statement by hand weeks later. "You young folks out there, be grateful for the time you live in," Tim says.
Then there were the holiday all-nighters. Tim once worked two days straight for Mother's Day, lying on the floor at 7:30 a.m. hoping for thirty minutes of sleep before the phone rang. But this is where the industry genuinely got smarter: the cold-chain revolution of the late '90s taught florists that arrangements made Tuesday and kept at proper temperatures are perfectly fine for Friday — even corsages hold up far longer than most designers believe. Work smarter, not harder, because the knowledge exists now.
Yellow ribbon, local growing, and flowers as community
Katy recalls the yellow ribbon shortage during the Gulf War, when wholesalers rationed rolls to fighting salespeople — history that rhymed with last year's Design Master paint shortage. Tim's shop once wrapped its entire building in 54-inch fabric with a bow for an employee called up to the reserves, a tribute the community talked about for years. Katy also reminds everyone that "buy local" isn't new: Dillon's grew its own roses and clove-scented carnations until heating Pennsylvania greenhouses became untenable and South American quality caught up in the '80s. And some traditions linger regionally — geraniums planted in graveyards each May, Memorial Day arrangements delivered to gravestones, and evergreen grave blankets with velvet ribbon at Christmas, now largely a 65-plus customer base. As for free delivery? It was real once — quietly built into the design price — but as everyone agrees, delivery today has to be a line item.
Key takeaways
- Learn the old mechanics — wiring, taping, chicken wire — because shortages have a way of making them essential again.
- Cold-chain knowledge means you can design days ahead; holiday all-nighters are a choice, not a requirement.
- Trends circle back: sprayed mums, chicken wire, and locally grown flowers all returned in new forms.
- Flowers connect shops to their communities in ways nothing else does — pay attention to current events and make a statement.
- Appreciate your point of sale system. Truly.