on flowering for Louis Vuitton and growing pains

Well into my third week of isolation at the farm, I had the chance to reflect on some of the projects we worked on in 2014...a few of which were with Fiona Leahy for Louis Vuitton. Fiona is one of those women who can wear fringed capes like it's nothing and who, when she posts videos of herself hoola-hooping in gold snake stilettos poolside, inspires me to be a better woman like that.

These photos are all by Belathee, one of only a handful of photographers who really knows how to shoot flowers. I am grateful for her prowess in low light scenarios.

We don't typically do a lot of fashion work, I think for one thing we were pigeon-holed some time ago as wedding florists - hashtag brooklyn hashtag romantic - and arguably weddings are where we can really make some of our best creative work - #wild #organic #seasonal #local #obama ... But occasionally I think it's nice to test the waters in other stratospheres of the NYC event world. It keeps us on our toes, and admittedly one can only make so many 'beauty and the beast' weddings, as our breakdown crew apparently calls them (much to my horror).

These pictures are from November 7th when Louis Vuitton hosted 150 of the fashion elite in a glass house fabricated in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art. The production took a week, hundreds of people and the logistical wizardry of Prodject of whom I am in great awe of. I love logistics but these people obsess over them. It was fun to watch this come off.



Hi it's me, I'm just fixing something here...



These next photos are from back in September when we flowered with Fiona for LV at Saks Fifth Avenue. Again, so different from what we usually do, but interesting to struggle with the simplicity of single stems in Fiona's collection of gold tube vases. Not as easy as it looks.

[Rest assured that an entire section of my upcoming flower tell-all memoirs will be on the incongruity of my city/farm experiences. Leading up to this event, there was a day that started with a messy sheep wrangling scenario and ended with a Louis Vuitton meeting in midtown.]

Right now we're working on a new mission statement at Saipua. We've actually never had one, and when a business gets as top heavy as ours we realize we desperately need one to refer to as we say yes to somethings and no to others. We've been in a period the last few months of saying YES to everything which has taught us (or reminded us) about why we are good at some sorts of things, and bad at others.

For example, we are bad at making money on small events. In fact, often we loose money on small events. Because we have built a machine geared towards producing large events, we unknowingly apply those practices to small events. For small weddings now we tend to overbuy flowers and materials, over hire staff. We take too many taxis or spend too much on lunch out of habit....

In December our team hustled so hard saying yes to everything: deliveries, events, photoshoots... all these little things swarming the studio every week. Come January I had a depressing meeting with our bookkeeper and accountants to learn that all that work resulted in *zero* profit. Money was coming into the business and leaving just as fast. More importantly, saying yes to all the little things meant that we were not focused on the events that we really want, the ones that we're good at. For us now, the sweet spot -- where our business really works (meaning we have the right staff, the expertise, the right infastructure) are events with budgets of (and for those of you outside NYC, remember this is a bubble market) $25-$150K. That's what we've grown to do well. Over that and you get into construction elements that we're not equipped for, under that and we don't profit or worse, loose money.

These last few months I've been struggling with how to make Saipua profitable again so I can start sending resources to the farm. I've become a money-head which I fucking hate. Money is so boring; it feels like the absence of creativity. When my bookkeeper (who - lets be honest - is my mother)(who is also our soapmaker) calls me to talk numbers my eyes glaze over and I get confused. But the reality is that you need the green to do some things in this world. Like build a farm.

I want to finish our barn already and get moving on building the farm into the creative mecca it's destined to be.

So I'm working around the clock starting at the beginning -- writing the goals of Saipua both BIG (to fund a farm that can become a non-profit floral nerve center where people can come learn not just about flowers and farming, but also explore the juncture between general creativity and the natural world) and small (to have more excellent coffees, and less shitty ones -- i.e. open my coffee shack on the beaver pond.)

So that where I'm at; where Saipua is right now. Wish us luck chickens, we need it!!!