From a farm in Baltimore to a studio in Singapore, florists are quietly reinventing the way the world’s most sentimental holiday is sold. It turns out that caring about your customers is also very good for business.
On a Tuesday morning in late April, Laura Beth Resnick is moving through the cold room at Butterbee Farm in Baltimore, assessing what she has. There are ranunculus — good ones, tight and deeply coloured. There are tulips, though they’re on their way out; in the mid-Atlantic, tulips rarely hold into May. She’s got the very first sweet peas of the season and she lifts a stem to the light, considering. It’s pale purple, almost translucent.
“I can’t really grow roses here,” she says, setting it down carefully. “So I don’t try.”
Resnick grows more than forty varieties of flower on her one-acre farm, most of them the kind of thing you won’t find at a petrol station forecourt or a supermarket self-checkout: varieties too fragile, too short-lived, or too individual to survive the cold arithmetic of the industrial supply chain. She sells almost entirely to local florists. The arrangement is, she’ll tell you, increasingly viable — not just ethically but commercially.
This is the week before the week before Mother’s Day, and Resnick is thinking about what that means for a business like hers. The logistical challenge is real: May is an awkward moment in the seasonal calendar, caught between the last of spring and the first of summer. But there is a second, less obvious challenge that she and a growing cohort of florists around the world are also grappling with: the question of who, exactly, is being invited to celebrate — and whether all of the people receiving their marketing had any desire to be.
“Flowers mean something,” she says. “They always have. The question is whether you’re thinking about what they mean to the specific person who’s going to receive them.”
A brief history of good intentions gone commercial
The story of Mother’s Day and the flower trade is, at its core, a cautionary tale about what happens when an industry gets hold of a good idea and runs with it rather faster than the idea’s originator intended.
Anna Jarvis — the woman who campaigned tirelessly through the early 1900s to establish a national day of maternal recognition in the United States — succeeded in 1914 when Woodrow Wilson signed the proclamation making the second Sunday of May official. She then spent the next three decades attempting to have it cancelled.
What Jarvis had envisioned was private and handmade: a letter, a visit, a white carnation. What materialised was, by the 1920s, a fully operational commercial machine. Florists marked up carnations by 40 and 50 percent. Greeting card companies printed millions of units. Jarvis protested outside flower shops, filed lawsuits, once attempted to shut down a carnation sale and was arrested for her trouble. She died in 1948, in a sanitarium in Pennsylvania, penniless. The rather pointed legend — unverified, but persistent — is that some of her medical bills were paid by the greeting card and floral industries she had devoted her final years to fighting.
The holiday has, needless to say, continued to thrive. Americans alone spend over $35 billion on Mother’s Day each year. Flowers rank among the top three gifts purchased. It is the second-biggest commercial event of the year for most florists, surpassed only by Valentine’s Day.
But Jarvis had identified something real, even if her proposed remedy — abolishing the whole enterprise — was not going to work. What she called commercialisation, the florists who are doing the most interesting work today would call thoughtlessness: the failure to consider who, on the receiving end of a bouquet or a promotional email, might not be celebrating.
The email that started something
The most significant development in floristry’s reckoning with its own habits began, appropriately enough, with a very short piece of writing.
In March 2019, a copywriter named Lucy at Bloom & Wild — a London-based online florist that had been building a reputation for doing things differently — wrote four sentences to the company’s entire customer list. She acknowledged that Mother’s Day could be difficult for some people. She offered them the option to receive no further Mother’s Day marketing. She asked no questions.
Almost 18,000 customers accepted the offer. And then they wrote back.
The letters came from people who had lost their mothers. From women in the middle of IVF cycles who found the holiday’s saturation coverage almost impossible to navigate. From people whose relationships with their mothers were complicated by estrangement, by harm, by the ordinary but rarely acknowledged fact that not all maternal relationships are warm. The message, threaded through hundreds of letters from people who had never written to the company before, was some version of the same thing: thank you for noticing us.
“I had no idea so many people would find it so touching,” Lucy told Grazia magazine afterwards.
The commercial result was, as these things go, rather spectacular. Social media engagement quadrupled on the day the campaign launched. The brand loyalty generated — the word-of-mouth, the goodwill, the press coverage in outlets that had never previously written about flower delivery — was worth considerably more than the 18,000 names removed from a mailing list. Aron Gelbard, Bloom & Wild’s co-founder and chief executive, understood immediately that something structural had shifted. “Mother’s Day is, of course, really important to us and to many of our customers,” he said, “but also a sensitive time for many. Offering our customers the ability to opt out allowed us to make the time of year that little bit easier for some.”
The following year, Bloom & Wild turned the idea into a movement. The Thoughtful Marketing Movement — a commitment from participating brands to offer opt-outs from potentially distressing holiday communications — attracted over 100 companies, including restaurant chain Wagamama and a range of retailers and beauty brands. By 2021, the opt-out had been extended beyond email: customers who chose not to see Mother’s Day content would find no trace of it anywhere on the website when logged in. The idea spread to Australia. To Singapore. To Hong Kong. The British parliament weighed in: Matt Warman, a Conservative MP orphaned at 27, raised the issue in the Commons and called for a voluntary advertising code.
What had started as a four-sentence email on a Sunday morning had, it turned out, been waiting to happen for a very long time.
The people the window display misses
To understand why this matters commercially — not just ethically — it helps to look clearly at who is actually on the receiving end of the industry’s standard approach to the holiday.
Roughly one in six couples experiences difficulty conceiving. Miscarriage affects approximately one in four pregnancies — it is, by clinical measures, the most common pregnancy complication, and by social measures, one of the least acknowledged. Grief, as bereavement researchers have established with some rigour, does not resolve on the schedule that marketing calendars prefer; a person who lost her mother four years ago may find the fifth Mother’s Day harder than the first, as the initial wave of support from friends and family has receded and the permanence of the absence becomes undeniable. These are not unusual circumstances. They describe a significant portion of any florist’s customer base.
Beyond bereavement and fertility, there are the structural gaps in the industry’s visual language: the same-sex couple where both partners are mothers, rarely seen in mainstream floral advertising; the grandmother who has been the primary carer for years but is consistently positioned as a supplementary figure; the father raising his children alone; the aunt who stepped in; the person whose relationship with their mother was defined by harm or silence in ways that “she deserves the best” does not accommodate.
Petal & Poem, a florist in Singapore that has become something of a reference point for sensitive holiday marketing in the region, has developed a guide for its peers that addresses this directly. Train staff, it advises, to avoid the assumption baked into the question “What are you getting for your mom?” — a question that encodes, in six words, a particular model of the world that excludes a substantial number of the people hearing it. The alternative — “Who are you celebrating today?” or simply “How can I help you?” — costs nothing and changes the texture of the interaction entirely.
“Craft messaging that validates varied emotions and relationships,” the guide says. “This Mother’s Day, we’re here for celebrations, remembrances, and everything in between.”
Bloom & Song, a floral studio in Hong Kong, puts it with similar directness: “Not all relationships with mothers are positive. Some individuals may have strained or toxic relationships. For these customers, the holiday may evoke feelings of anger, sadness, or confusion. It’s important for florists to steer clear of cliché messages that may alienate these customers.”
The language shift extends to product design. A growing number of florists have moved away from the single, undifferentiated “Mother’s Day Collection” and toward ranges that name different kinds of care explicitly: the Grandmother, the Teacher, the Mentor, the Chosen Family. The industry shorthand — “chosen family” — captures something real: for a meaningful portion of the population, particularly those in LGBTQ+ communities or those who have built lives at some distance from biological relatives, the person who functioned as a mother may have no legal or blood relationship to them. The florist who acknowledges this has enlarged both its moral imagination and its market.
The woman who sends flowers to a different kind of mother
In 2017, on the two-year anniversary of her first miscarriage, Chelsey Hauge-Zavaleta received an anonymous bouquet at her door. She doesn’t know who sent it. She has never found out.
“It made me feel so cared for,” she says. “So seen. Like someone had remembered with me.”
She spent three years thinking about what that gesture had meant, and in 2020 she founded Evermore Blooms, a non-profit that sends flowers to mothers of miscarriage — not on Mother’s Day itself, necessarily, but on the anniversary of a loss, or on what would have been a due date. It operates through partnerships with local florists across the United States, many of whom provide their services at cost or donate their design time.
“These are dates a mother never forgets,” the organisation explains. “But when they come around, her initial support system has faded or unintentionally forgotten.”
What Hauge-Zavaleta had understood — and what the best florists now working in this space have also understood — is that flowers have never been exclusively a celebration technology. They are at least as old, as a human gesture, in the context of grief and witness. The forget-me-not carries its meaning in its name. The sympathy arrangement sent to a bereaved household needs no caption. The bouquet that arrived at Hauge-Zavaleta’s door communicated, wordlessly, something precise: I have not forgotten. I am here.
Some florists have begun stocking forget-me-nots prominently in the first two weeks of May — alongside the peonies and the ranunculus and the arrangements optimised for social media — and the gesture is, for the customers who need it, considerably more than decorative.
The supply chain conversation nobody wanted to have
The emotional dimension of mindful floristry is where the public conversation tends to focus, but the environmental dimension is equally significant — and in some ways more structurally challenging to address.
Nearly 80 percent of cut flowers sold in the United States are imported. The majority come from Colombia, Ecuador, Kenya, and Ethiopia, transported by air freight to refrigerated distribution hubs across North America and Europe. Air freight is, by considerable margin, the most carbon-intensive commercial transport mode available. The environmental cost of a Mother’s Day bouquet is, by most calculations, substantially higher than its price tag reflects.
The social costs of the same supply chain are no more comfortable to examine. Cut-flower farms in the Global South have faced decades of scrutiny over labour conditions — wages, pesticide exposure, worker protections — and while certification programmes exist (Fair Trade, Rainforest Alliance, Veriflora), the market penetration of genuinely ethical sourcing remains, by most estimates, limited.
Into this landscape arrived the Slow Flowers movement, founded by Seattle-based writer and advocate Debra Prinzing in 2013. The analogy to the slow food movement was deliberate: the same values (local, seasonal, sustainably grown), applied to a different crop. “Grown not flown” is the three-word philosophy. The Slow Flowers Society launched an online directory in 2014, just before Mother’s Day, listing florists and farms committed to local sourcing. It now has nearly 700 members across North America.
Amber Flack, who runs Little Acre Flowers in Washington DC and sources almost entirely from nearby farms, frames the constraint honestly: “The closer to the source, the less distance there is to travel. That’s going to be a more sustainable option.” Resnick, at Butterbee Farm in Baltimore, is similarly direct: “I can’t really grow roses in the mid-Atlantic so I don’t try.” The locally sourced florist’s menu for Mother’s Day is therefore determined by what is actually blooming — peonies, sweet peas, the last tulips — rather than by what global logistics can deliver on demand. The arrangements look different from the industrial standard. According to the florists producing them, they sell considerably better.
The movement has its limitations — it is, by definition, a proposition for buyers with the means to pay a premium — and its self-policing mechanisms are imperfect: some farms market partially imported stock as domestically grown. These tensions are real and worth acknowledging. They do not, however, cancel the underlying argument.
The green brick under the peony
There is one further dimension to this story, and it lives, rather literally, at the bottom of the arrangement.
Floral foam — the dense green block that has held stems in position in commercial floristry since 1954 — is the material responsible for the precise, architectural aesthetic that defines most professional arrangements. It absorbs water, it’s easy to cut, and it has made possible a level of formal complexity that would otherwise require decades of training to achieve. It is also, as a growing body of research confirms, a significant environmental problem.
A single block contains the plastic equivalent of ten carrier bags. It does not biodegrade. It crumbles into microplastics that contaminate waterways and are ingested by aquatic animals. A study by RMIT University in Australia found that the chemicals leaching from floral foam microplastics were more toxic to freshwater invertebrates than those from most other plastic families. The florists who work with it daily — cutting it, soaking it, disposing of it — are routinely exposed to formaldehyde, barium sulphates, and carbon black.
Since 2023, floral foam has been banned at RHS shows, including Chelsea. Blooming Haus in London — the world’s first florist to hold both Planet Mark and B Corp certification — has eliminated it entirely, replacing it with kenzans (the weighted, pin-studded discs that have been central to Japanese ikebana practice for centuries), chicken wire, moss, and reusable water vessels. New plastic-free alternatives, including a design block called Sideau made without any plastic, are entering the professional market.
Giving it up requires genuine effort. Floral foam doesn’t just hold the stems; it shapes the entire logic of how an arrangement is constructed. Abandoning it means relearning technique, investing in new tools, and accepting, occasionally, that an arrangement will look slightly different from what the customer has come to expect from decades of industrially produced floristry. For a small shop running on tight margins during its busiest weekend of the year, this is not a trivial ask. Which is precisely why the florists making the transition deserve more credit than the gesture typically attracts.
Why being good turns out to be good business
The question that florists most often ask when they encounter the case for mindful marketing is whether it is commercially viable. It is, it turns out, an easy question to answer.
Bloom & Wild’s opt-out campaign did not reduce Mother’s Day revenue. It quadrupled social media engagement and generated the kind of brand loyalty — durable, resistant to competitive pressure — that no promotional budget can reliably purchase. Florists aligned with the Slow Flowers movement charge a premium and report customers who return more frequently and recommend the shop more actively than those who buy from conventional competitors. Florists who have expanded their definition of motherhood — marketing explicitly to grandmothers, to mentors, to chosen family, to fathers raising children alone — find themselves serving larger audiences, not smaller ones.
The average per-transaction spend among consumers who bought from local florists hit a record high in 2025. The opt-out model has spread to more than 100 brands across multiple countries. The Slow Flowers directory recorded its highest-ever traffic around Mother’s Day last year.
This is not a story about sacrifice. It is a story about a better way to operate — one that treats customers as individuals with complicated lives rather than addresses on a mailing list. The surprising finding, for the florists who have tested it, is not that the approach costs them. It is that it pays.
Greenwashing remains a real risk in the sustainable-flowers space, and performative sensitivity is no substitute for genuine practice. The florists building lasting businesses on these principles can typically be identified by a single characteristic: their values are visible in what they actually do. The workbench without floral foam. The price card with the farm name on it. The staff member who asks “How can I help you?” and waits to find out.
Five things the thoughtful florist does differently
For those keeping score, here is what separates the florists doing this well from the ones who have simply updated their copywriting:
They train staff in empathy as a skill, not a personality trait. The question “What are you getting for your mum?” encodes an assumption. “How can I help you?” does not. This distinction is teachable, and the florists who take it seriously train for it explicitly.
They source with specificity. Not “locally grown” in a general sense, but this peony from this farm, cut on this date. Provenance is a selling point precisely because it is verifiable, and customers who care about it are loyal customers.
They stock for grief, not just celebration. Forget-me-nots in the window in the first week of May. Quieter arrangements available without explanation. A recognition that the same flower shop serves both kinds of errand.
They extend opt-outs beyond email. Bloom & Wild’s approach — removing Mother’s Day content from the entire logged-in website experience for customers who opted out — is worth emulating. The opt-out should mean something.
They are honest about what they can and can’t do. Resnick doesn’t try to grow roses. Flack doesn’t pretend her local supply chain is perfect. The florists winning trust in this space are the ones who lead with what’s true.
What good floristry actually looks like
Back at Butterbee Farm, the sweet peas need to be used quickly — they don’t keep — and Resnick is building an arrangement for a local florist’s Mother’s Day order, working with a kenzan and chicken wire rather than the foam that most of her peers still use.
She talks about her customers with the specific intimacy of someone who has watched people choose flowers for their mothers, for their grandmothers, for a grave, for themselves, on the same difficult weekend, for years. She has learned, over time, that the florist’s job is not to tell people what to feel. It is to offer something that can carry whatever they’re already feeling.
“Flowers have always been about feeling something that’s hard to say,” she says. “We just forgot that for a while. We started treating it like it was only ever about celebration.” She holds up the sweet pea stem again. “It’s not only about that. It never was.”
Anna Jarvis, who spent her final years protesting the industry that had claimed her creation, understood this — though she drew the wrong conclusion from it. The commercial event was never going to be dismantled. What it needed was not abolition but attention: florists who knew their customers as individuals, who sourced with care, who stocked the forget-me-not alongside the rose, who hired staff with the judgment to ask the right question at the right moment.
That is, it turns out, also very good business. The florists who have worked this out are not operating as a charity. They are, most of them, thriving independent businesses — owner-operated, neighbourhood-rooted, making considered choices about how to source and sell and speak to the people who come through the door.
Which is, when you think about it, precisely the kind of business that deserves to thrive.