I first met Cheryl Denham, owner of Arizona Family Florist, at the Society of American Florists event in Maui in 2016. Her friendly, outgoing personality and playful nature immediately struck me. We had a lot of fun. It was nice to see her five months later at the SAF Congressional Action Days in D.C. while presenting to their Retail Councils, of which she sits on the board.
It's always nice to see a familiar face, and Cheryl was both friendly and complimentary. It was after this meeting in D.C. that she and her team began implementing Details Flowers Software into their business in Phoenix, Arizona. Getting to know Cheryl and her team has been a treat, and after talking with their team, I realized that their flower company was unlike a lot of event design firms that we work with. Not only do they create outstanding events, but they also have a successful traditional retail house and a wholesale marketplace open to the public.
As we continue to grow our network, we are fond of those florists who have embraced and encouraged their flower friends to utilize our software. We were excited to sit down with Cheryl Denham and the incredible team at Arizona Family Florists to learn more about what they do and how they do it!
What is your business name, and how did you come up with it?
Arizona Family Florist is our parent company, and we have a few different brands. We understand the importance of family, and we treat all of our customers like family thus, Arizona Family Florist began.
First and foremost, we are an everyday retail florist. At Arizona Florists, we accept wire-in orders, local customer orders, website, and walk-in traffic on a daily basis. We have an excellent retail store location and have a traditional base of business to sell floral arrangements and gifts. Daily, we were in flower orders from Teleflora, FTD, etc., to service our local community.
Along with our retail division, we also have the Arizona Flower Market. This market is where we offer wholesale pricing of flowers, and we are open to the public to browse through our coolers. We encourage our customers to come in and purchase products in bulk volume, and they can purchase just like a florist does from this location. It's great to have people come in off the street and buy fresh flowers. We really have embraced serving all the different components; from the DIY type customer to those customers that want to look and feel flowers. This part of our brand launched 3 years ago after we visited the Miami Flower Market and the Charlotte Flower Market. We found that our city really needed that type of marketplace, and we found a unique niche for the public to purchase flowers. Because we really purchase such a large volume, we found that we can offer high-quality products to sell to the general public. If it helps the industry why wouldn't we want to have quality products for them to purchase? This offers an alternative to the supermarkets and has fresher products and a greater variety with better pricing.
Our Lux Floral Design brand launched in 2008 and we regularly service Weddings, Corporate Accounts, House Accounts, and charities of every kind. The Lux brand has wholly evolved since we launched and is growing strongly. We recognized that our brides typically want a connection with a boutique-type floral business where they can get all of their wedding designs. We like to work closely with wedding planners to bring in clients so that we can show all the best offerings. Having the market available for our brides to wander through and see the flowers is nice. At Lux, we also do every type of decor, and we really offer whatever is requested from the client when custom design is required. We have close relationships with all of our customers, and we want to keep everyone happy and do what we do best... Design!
I love that Phoenix is very spread out and open. Our city is not as compact as, say, Chicago or New York; however, Phoenix has a bit of breathing room, and we like that. We can go from doing a traditional event at a golf club to a Southwest theme in someone's backyard. We also service a ton of Indian weddings here in Phoenix. And our botanical gardens are always hosting tons of events outside. Our business is busy year-round in Phoenix, although we do slow down a bit in the summer with the heat. We don't have super downtime because the weather is so great. When the heat is up, people bring their events inside. This past summer was our busiest summer in a long time, and our designers didn't have a lot of time off. It has been an excellent year for us.
When you are part of a wedding creation that is the most important day of someone's life, it is a unique experience for the client and our team. We enjoy being creative and developing relationships with our clients through the process. We don't specifically do any particular style; we like that our clients are very diversified. Their themes are entirely different, and we like the challenge and variety in the creative process. When we start building relationships with our clients, they trust our team to come up with different ideas; that's when we are at our best. Our team loves to have that freedom. That's why we love the wedding flower part of the industry. The more creative we can be, the more rewarding our jobs become, and it becomes less of a job! Usually, what ends up happening when they receive the customer service and quality of service is that our brides are customers for life! They enjoy the design process, and they end up becoming great repeat businesses on the retail side. Referrals are huge for us-- and we love to have them return for more.
Sometimes, they will do their own bridal or baby shower flowers, and they enjoy coming in and getting their personal flowers, and they can go to the market. This is a massive advantage for us; we can capture their business. People have a lot of fun going to the market, too. Our team takes them to the market to select the best flowers they like. We have probably every flower you can imagine- they can go into the market and see all the flowers they provide. We even have an indoor greenhouse that is not a traditional flower shop. It's a great selling point for us, and we have all the possibilities at their fingertips.
I don't think there is anything I don't like about the industry! On the wedding & event side, the unseen variables of nature are that you cannot always control what happens to the product. It's hard to meet expectations when fresh products are decided by nature or weather. The unpredictable side and managing expectations is probably the most demanding "challenge." We cannot control when something isn't available, which is the job's most challenging part. We are sensitive to these moments; the most challenging part is if the customer cannot understand.
My biggest daily challenge is not having enough hours in the day. It's a good challenge to have. Because we are so diversified... there is never a dull moment. We don't have enough time to give 100% on everything we have to do all the time, so organizing the day is tough. Everything we touch on must be covered daily. We are now in a world that requires immediate gratification, and the answers are desired immediately. If not, the client moves on to the next thing. Sometimes, it's hard to know what something will cost, so bringing that back around helps us always be quicker for our clients. Capture more business... using Details is excellent for us as it allows us to be faster to the clientele and give them the instant gratification that they desire and need.
Our team recently worked on a wedding that wanted to incorporate all the traditional Arizona elements, and they are the 5 C's of Arizona: Copper, Cotton, Cattle, Climate, and citrus. The client wanted to find a way to incorporate all 5 of these to make it beautiful. The client pushed our team to think outside the box and think differently. It was great fun and a great success. We incorporated beautiful Kumquat trees, cotton, cattle skulls, and cactus. We found things everywhere and pulled elements from everywhere. It was a "family" commitment, and we connected with various people. It pushed us to be different. It is so easy to get caught up every day, but one client allowed us to step back and be unique. Everyone on our team enjoyed this event.
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Innovation! Offering services to the public that are different. Innovation is critical to staying ever-evolving and challenged. Money has never been our motivator, but helping our team grow is high on our motivation list. We've seen and helped some of our employees buy their first home. We wake up every day helping people, and helping them to be able to provide for their families is gratifying. Blessings are huge. Being innovative is something we pride ourselves on. We've worked in the florist industry for 13-14 years, and you must think outside the box to succeed. The flower industry has changed so much that if businesses are complacent, they fail. So we've always tried to be innovators.
Think that Details has helped us grow our bottom line. We found that we were not pricing several things correctly in only a few months. It did take some work to get it going, but now, we are not over or under-ordering. When you do it by hand, there is much room for human error. Details has allowed us to be on top of our pricing and have helped us to become more profitable. It has also helped us to capture sales more quickly and has been a massive tool for our design team. We enjoyed some of the benefits immediately. We're very diligent with communication, and Details has helped get proposals out quickly. And the images have improved with the proposals! It's also helped with inventory, and we all feel more confident. Choose more things. Details Software gives us more confidence with all our endeavors, such as resort lobbies and Neiman Marcus, and with each setup.
The business is evolving, and we foresee a ton of growth. We hope to add more salespeople and a larger design team for Lux. We'd also like to add a lot more corporate event work. We'd love more design tools and resources incorporated into our daily habits. That is something I will have a bit more confidence in when those things happen. We're hugely interested in getting in touch with our community, and we look forward to having a more significant presence in the next ten years. Community outreach and bringing families into the market are huge goals and ones we treasure.
Thank you, Cheryl and your team at Arizona Family Florist, for allowing us to peek into your daily life of flowers in Arizona! If you want to check out more of their work, please visit their Arizona Family Florist website.