WHERE V-DAY IS D-DAY
South End’s Winston Flowers readies for the rose rush
Some hopeless romantics may wait until the very last minute to grab a Valentine’s Day gift.
But as Theresa Larivee, lead brand and product designer for Winston Flowers, revealed, it can take major florists about a year of preparation to get these fresh expressions of eternal love V-Day ready.
“We’ll design next year’s Valentine’s Day collection probably in a few weeks,” Larivee told the Track. “We decide what worked from the year before. We decide what we’re going to do this time — what we want to keep similar and what we might want to innovate on.”
Larivee and the team at Winston Flowers will typically take a couple of days to concoct a collection of 25 to 30 different arrangements. And although they like to put a new twist on each year’s assortment of petaled products, they also play it safe for the big day.
“Any risks we take, we avoid taking them on Valentine’s Day,” Larivee said. “With a brand new flower, we like to really make sure it’s going to perform really well and that the growers can get us the quantity we need because this holiday is huge.”
Huge isn’t an exaggeration.
“In terms of just the collection pieces, we probably design around 1,000 a day for five days,” Larivee said. “It’s big. We bring in 200,000 roses for the day. We have 187 trucks amongst Massachusetts and surrounding areas for our deliveries. It’s a lot.”
With the help of seasonal employees — friends, family members and past employees who choose to work the holiday each year — Larivee explained that their first task leading up to the week is to make space.
“You really clean everything out of the coolers,” she said. “You clean all the buckets really well. You just want everything to be clean and open and empty so that once stuff does come in, it has a nice, neat spot to go to.”
While the staff purges, boxes upon boxes of flowers are flown from overseas via passenger jets. When the precious cargo arrives at their South End design studio, all of the stems are freshly cut.
“We’ll have hundreds of buckets filled with water ready the night before in all of the stores and here,” Larivee said. “Everything is put in water.”
Before assembly starts, they put together all of the boxes that will contain roses by the dozen. They pull all of the vases that will be used for their arrangements. Then, the real magic happens.
“It is a well-oiled machine, so everything that could possibly be done that’s not a fresh product necessity is done already,” Larivee said. “Once production starts, everything gets laid out.”
“We put out all the vases around a table — sometimes 100 at a time — and then we put out all the flowers,” she continued. “Everyone who’s a designer just designs down the line. Then, there’s a quality check to make sure everything’s perfect, which it is. We keep doing that over and over.”
And while the florists may be putting in more hours than usual, Larivee said that doing Cupid’s work actually seems to be an industry favorite.
“It’s quiet before and it’s quiet after, so I feel like it’s most florists’ favorite holiday,” she said. “You have so much time to prepare. This is one day, one shot. And guys are so easy — in a good way. They want to give something that their loved one will love.”