Hello to all,
our little store "Every Bloomin' Thing" is located in Iowa City, Iowa. My daughter, Maja and have 5 employees at this time but had as many as 12.
Our store was flooded in the Flood 2008 and we lost everything. We had 4 feet of water in our store and everything floated away or was destroyed by being submerged for over a week.
By now I consider myself an expert in catastrophic loss, getting bids for repairs and in general dealing with insurance companies.
We are a custom work shop and like to work with quality flowers in English garden style as well as with tropicals. Lately that has become a real challenge. The quality of flowers had gone down (snaps came in moldy today, and iris looked like someone sat on them). Our customers want quality flowers and I am increasingly disappointed with what is coming through our door. If anyone has input about where I can find lilies, snaps, stock, gerbs, wax flower, delphinium, orchids, large and quality alstro we would greatly appreciate it. This problem has become so serious that my daughter and I are considering selling our store to someone who will change the customer base and just stick to more basic flowers. I would be more then willing to fly my product in.
Before the economy downturn our shop was doing just about $500K but things are noticebly slower now and I fear will be for a bit longer. Because of this I would like to spend more time building our site and doing some guerilla marketing so brainstorimg about that would also be welcome.
Sometime in January I will post pictures of our little flooded store using Google Picassa.
If anyone feels that they have a dynamite site that produces sales please let us know.
Thank you for reading my introduction and if I can be of any help please write.
Sanja Hunt
