We spent a year selling beautiful things that were in a bin by the weekend. Here is the arithmetic that changed the whole studio.
For our first year we sold fresh flowers and we were quietly miserable about it.
Here is the arithmetic. Cut flowers arrive in this country by air, twice a week. By the time a bouquet reaches a customer it has usually been out of water for a day of travelling and has had at best two days in a chiller. In a Maldivian living room at thirty degrees, with a fan on and the windows open, four days is a good result and two is common. So somebody spends eight hundred rufiyaa and gets a weekend.
We tried everything a florist tries. Conditioning overnight, cutting under water, sachets in the vase, advice cards in the wrap. All of it helps and none of it changes the shape of the problem, which is that the flower is fighting the climate and losing.
So we stopped. Everything we make now is dried, pressed or preserved. The same eight hundred rufiyaa buys something that sits on a shelf for a year, and people write to us about arrangements they have had for three.
Two things surprised us. The first was that dried work is harder, not easier. A dried stem has no forgiveness in it: bend it wrong and it snaps, and there is no second attempt with the same flower. The second was that it opened up the whole country. Nothing here wilts, so a box can go on a boat to any island, and that has become a real part of what this studio does.
We will still get fresh flowers for somebody who wants them, ordered four days ahead against a flower day. What we will not do is hold fresh stock in this room to sell to whoever walks in on the fourth day.
