The Keepers of the Pretty | Moments with Marlin
Some guests are so good you build them a recurring segment. That's exactly what Vonda and Lori have done with Marlin Hargrove — designer, educator, and longtime friend of the pod — in the first-ever Moments with Marlin. The spark was a line Marlin dropped in a group text: he just wants to help people make it pretty. Simple words, but as this conversation proves, there's a whole philosophy of listening, selling, and letting go packed inside them.
Teaching florists to buy (and sell) smarter
Marlin opens with what he's been up to at Green Mountain Floral Supply, a family-owned independent wholesaler in South Burlington, Vermont, where he now carries the official title of Artistic Director and Floral Education. Their belief: educate your customers and everyone gets smarter — and more profitable. They've built a physical classroom, and their first test class was a wedding workshop with a twist. A group of wedding designers sat in on a live consultation with a "bride," then each turned what they heard into a shopping list, a design, and a sales presentation. The eye-opener: not everyone heard the same consultation. When the bride said she didn't like purple, did everybody catch it? If her bouquet comes back loaded with purple, what were we actually listening to?
The class also pulled back the curtain on the wholesale side — timelines, quantity buying, substitutions, and why "I was waiting on my table count" two days before the wedding doesn't work. Green Mountain has already seen customers ordering earlier and buying smarter. Next up: a funeral-focused seminar, an idea that became personal for Marlin after his father passed away in January and he experienced sympathy work from the pew instead of the design bench. His goal is to make final tributes more effective, more profitable, and more beautiful. (One trend note from the wedding world while we're here: Marlin believes people are getting less and less scared of color — and he's all for it.)
"Where do I find a good designer?" Grow one.
The question that keeps repeating in the Flower Clique Facebook group and Shop Talk: where do you find designers? Marlin's first answer comes from his own story. He walked into a flower shop needing a job, oversold a little greenhouse experience, and got hired to deliver and wash buckets. He delivered really well, washed really good buckets, and kept watching — and an owner who saw something in him decided to cultivate it. So before you post another help-wanted ad: grow your own. Look in high school and FFA programs. Peek into carts at the craft store — if somebody's cart is full of great stuff, be nosy, ask what they're making, and invite them in for an afternoon to see if there's something worth growing.
His follow-ups are just as practical. First, answer honestly what you're looking for — someone to truly take the load off you? Those people exist, but they're rare, and here's the part that makes owners squirm: you have to pay them for what they bring to the table, not what you made twenty years ago. Second, look in your own backyard and use the people you already have for their strengths. And third, if you hand something off, give up the micromanaging that goes with it. You can't have it both ways.
That includes design itself. If a new designer follows the recipe, hits the time frame, and the end result looks right, does it matter whether they greened first or last, or built the bow top-down instead of bottom-up? Marlin greened first for years until someone showed him that greening last uses less product and makes more profit. Different roads, same result — let people take theirs.
We are the keepers of the pretty
Then comes the heart of the episode. Marlin traces his own growth to the moment he could look at another designer's work and simply say "that's pretty" — instead of "that's pretty, but I would have..." His big framework goes like this: a customer walks in with an idea of pretty in their head. We listen for their pretty. We interpret it, create it, and then present it to a whole other person on the receiving end. From sender to recipient, the florist is in charge of that pretty the entire way. "We are the keepers of the pretty," he says. What a gift — and a responsibility.
The catch: step one is listening without judgment, and that's hard. As Lori points out, the part of the brain that handles emotion is wired straight to our facial expressions — when a customer asks for purple, green, and yellow roses for grandma's service, your face may answer before your mouth does. That's where mindfulness and practice come in, one consultation at a time. And pretty is personal: for Marlin, a gardenia will always be pretty because his mother, who didn't have much, carried gardenias from the backyard bush at her own wedding. One daisy can change someone's world for a moment. As long as the sale ends in pretty, we've done our job.
Key takeaways
- Not everyone hears the same consultation — train your team to listen for the customer's "pretty" before they shop, design, or sell.
- Can't find designers? Grow your own: hire curiosity and work ethic, then cultivate it like Marlin's first boss did.
- Pay designers for what they bring today, use your current team's strengths, and decide what role you're actually hiring for.
- If the recipe, timing, and end result are right, let designers work their own way — greens first or last, both get there.
- Practice saying "that's pretty" without the "but I would have..." — judgment-free listening is the first design skill.