Starbright Floral Design in New York City approached Women’s Day from a number of different angles, including a massive window display and floral gifts for every female staff member. “The trick is to believe in the day-embrace it without commercializing it, so you don’t look opportunistic,” said senior partner Nic Faitos.
Society of American Florists members marked International Women’s Day, Thursday, March 8, with a variety of creative initiatives, including design classes and surprising female business leaders with bouquets.
“International Women’s Day really took off this year,” said Nic Faitos, senior partner of Starbright Floral Design in New York City. “Its roots are outside of the U.S. and the holiday was unfamiliar for a long time, but I’m happy that now it’s being embraced here — not just as a Hallmark moment, but rather as a movement.”
“When you see McDonald’s turning the arches upside down and making the ‘M’ a ‘W,’ you know that that there is some traction, good publicity, goodwill and without a doubt a genuine appreciation for what women have contributed to society,” Faitos said.
Starbright went “all in” for Women’s Day with a window display featuring the Venus symbol made exclusively out of floral product, bouquets for every female staff member, posts on multiple social media platforms and a dedicated Women’s Day section on the shop website.
“We also planned on giving away roses on the street, but a snowstorm the night before impeded that,” Faitos said.
All in all, Women’s Day provided Starbright a nice bump in revenue and good exposure. “The trick is to believe in the day — embrace it without commercializing it, so you don’t look opportunistic,” Faitos said.
In Miami Beach, Florida, Surf Florist had its most successful International Women’s Day ever — up 25 percent over 2017.
“The main thing I did was rearrange my website so that the products that I thought would sell on IWD would be the first products the customers saw,” said president Chaim Casper.
Additionally, Casper called customers who’ve purchased Women’s Day flowers within the past two years. (“One year of not ordering means the recipient may have just be out of town, but two years of not ordering means the sender has no more interest in ordering for that occasion,” he explained.) A challenge with this approach particular to this holiday is that a number of Women’s Day customers are from Russia and don’t speak English. “With the help of Google translation, I send a foreign email to these customers,” he said. “It may not be perfect, but it gets the message across!”
Tory Burch, a recent addition to the International Mall in Tampa, Florida, reached out to Ian Prosser, AAF, AIFD, PFCI, owner of Botanical International Design Studio to design bouquets inside the shop for Women’s Day.
Tory Burch managers described an aesthetic they wanted and Prosser chose flowers that fit their deadline and worked within their budget: lilacs, anemones, garden roses, spray roses, lisianthus, ranunculus, waxflower, eucalyptus and ruscus.
“Huge success,” Prosser said. “The women loved, loved, loved it. We sold more than 100 bouquets.”
