During last year’s SAF Petal It Forward event, floral industry members in 467 cities handed out flowers to surprised recipients, including Taylor Farms and Sakata Seed America, who passed out 400 bouquets on the streets in downtown Salinas, California. Kitayama Brothers and Green Valley Floral donated flowers for the effort.
You never know what a difference one bouquet can make — or how much traction a single promotion can have.
On October 11, floral industry members in 467 cities in 50 states plus Washington, D.C., and Canada led 573 Society of American Florists Petal It Forward events. The pay-it-forward initiative encourages surprised recipients to enjoy a flower or bouquet for themselves, and then pass a second along to someone else.
The goodwill from that outreach keeps building. Four months after her company donated product for a Petal It Forward event in Boise, Idaho, Kasi Nelson, a sales rep at Fifty Flowers, received an email from a woman named Melanie who received flowers during last year’s event, which generated nearly 82 million digital impressions and won a prestigious association award.
“I was walking down Main Street and a police officer handed me a grip of carnations. It put a huge smile on my face in the midst of an otherwise normal day,” Melanie wrote. “Where my mind had been racing through the to-do list of my life, this moment just zapped me into the present and made me realize I was here, now, and connected to all these strangers.”
Melanie read the bouquet’s tag explaining the SAF Petal It Forward concept and then passed the flowers on to someone in the computer science department at Boise State University. She also noticed the Fifty Flowers logo on the bouquet’s tag — a memory that surfaced months down the road, when she passed by the wholesaler’s storefront.
“Today I was downtown and saw the Fifty Flowers sign,” Melanie continued, saying the sighting was a funny coincidence because she had been brainstorming ideas for a teacher appreciation event and “had flowers on the brain.”
“I remembered how wonderful it felt to get those unexpected flowers during Petal It Forward,” she wrote, leading into a request for flowers that students could give to their teachers —“a meaningful gesture that truly conveys how much they are valued.”
“This is a true testament that Petal It Forward works!” said Fifty Flowers CEO Liza Atwood, who happily agreed to supply flowers for the upcoming teacher appreciation event, which she knows is yet another opportunity to change people’s lives with blossoms.
To learn more about the impact of Petal It Forward, click here.
For more examples of florists earning positive publicity, click here.
