With Valentine’s Day fast approaching, here’s a tip to save money: Stroll down to the actual physical flower shop before placing your order for a dozen roses.
If you do a Google search for Chehalis florists, four links pop up before the flower shops in town. Those are call centers, which collect the orders, slap on a service charge that can nearly double the price, and then send it to the flower shop.
“It’s a really sore subject with local florists,” said Cara Sabin Dean, owner of Benny’s Florist on Market Street, who created a beautiful floral basket while explaining floral design to the members of the St. Helens Club last week. “We call them order gatherers.”
A customer recently ordered a $70 sympathy basket, but the price tag came to $140 because she used one of the call centers.
In the past, FTD required its members to have a storefront and maintain certain inventory. Orders can be made directly to the local florist at mybennysflorist.com.
Dean, an Adna native, started working for Uptown Floral as a teenager in 1986. Four years later, when that shop sold, she started working at Benny’s Florist and Greenhouse in Chehalis. Al Benny, who started working in the flower business in 1941 for Wybra and Cloud, later known as Birley’s, purchased the shop with his brother, Ted, in 1955. They renamed it Benny’s Florist and Greenhouse, and later purchased a Centralia flower shop, which they owned until 1991. Ted died May 17, 1994, and Al sold the Chehalis shop to Dean and her father, David Sabin, in February 1999. Sabin had worked in Benny’s greenhouses in 1962.
Dean, who has three grown children and three grandchildren, is gearing up for a busy day Feb. 14, when the shop delivers more than 3,000 yellow, white and red roses.
“Last year we did 167 deliveries that day,” Dean said.
Valentine’s Day is the busiest single day, and Mother’s Day is also a busy holiday, although deliveries are staggered from Thursday through Sunday.
As a young woman, Dean studied floral design in Bellevue and received certification.
“The truth of how I got into designing is I was the worst delivery driver,” she said.
Dean expanded her business, at one point owning three flower shops, but in 2014, she scaled back to just one. Benny’s keeps her and five part-time employees busy. They average 25 to 30 deliveries daily.
“It’s a lot of work, a lot of fun,” she said. “It’s a great industry. I love it, obviously.”
As the business owner, she does it all — janitorial, bookkeeping, designing, deliveries, banking, and payroll.
But drawbacks mean most holidays she’s working. Her favorite (and least busy) holiday is Fourth of July.
“The family all comes in on holidays and we have a big potluck and party,” Dean said. “Dad delivers. Mom helps. Aunts, everybody. Without my family’s help, I couldn’t do this at all.”
She said her children helped a lot, but they swore they’d never become florists because it’s too much work. They worked 36 hours with little or no sleep one time.
As she spoke, she put together a gorgeous basket, starting with a hunk of floral foam soaked in water and strapped inside the wicker basket. She used Israeli Ruscus and leatherleaf fern from Florida for greenery, inserting the greenery at an angle to cover the edge and follow the shape of the basket.
“The goal of the greenery is just kind of hide your mechanics,” she said.
Dean doesn’t normally use salal, an evergreen plant native to the Northwest.
“The permits to pick, that has raised the price so high that it’s cheaper to get the Israeli and leatherfern from around the world than to pick it,” she said.
She added two stems with four lily blossoms as a focal flower and filled in with odd numbers of colorful roses, carnations and spray roses, which have replaced sweetheart roses. She cut all the flower stems at an angle. A splash of bleach can stiffen up the stems of baby’s breath and other flowers.
Dean orders through flowerbuyer.com, an auction house that pulls from four or five different growers. She’s ordered flowers for so long she can calculate how many she needs in her head. She has a standing order each week to keep her costs down and then bids on special flowers to fill in.
“The bulk of our product comes in three times a week,” Dean said.
Most of the flowers now come from South America and plants arrive from Canada. Roses cut in the fields of Ecuador or Colombia on a Monday are flown through Miami and delivered to her shop by Wednesday morning. More farms are opening in Mexico and Kenya, she said.
“What I’m paying for a Colombian rose to get shipped all the way to my door is like a quarter of what a California rose costs, which is sad,” Dean said.
Coral is this year’s color. Greens and whites, which together create a serene feeling, are a common color combination for funeral arrangements. Wrist corsages are popular for dances. Vase designs are more challenging than baskets. And chrysanthemums and African violets can sicken cats. Lilies can give them renal failure.
What a treat to see and hear an expert share her passion.
Editor’s Note: Cara Dean is also an employee of The Chronicle.
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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at memoirs@chaptersoflife.com.
