How did you get started?
Holly: I started dabbling with flowers in school and continued throughout high school and college. After college I moved to NY. I had some lofty ideas when I was 21 and I wanted to work for the Economist. It was in NY that I started working for a florist. It was easy for me to do, and I just sort of stuck with it. After NY I moved to LA. I worked for a few mediocre florists before ending up at the Velvet Garden. I was planning on not doing it anymore, and maybe change my career but the Velvet Garden was so much fun that it really opened my eyes to what was possible. It was a really inspirational place. The cool thing about the Velvet Garden was that if someone called in to place an order, they were given the royal treatment. There was this deep emotional investment in what the arrangement might be. I worked there for 7 years before eventually moving on. My friend Miguel was opening a space, Marvimon, and he wanted me to help service the wedding venue, and that sort of launched HollyFlora. He also named it. He thought it would be cool, Hollywood, HollyFlora. I was never totally on board with that name.
Becky: I was a hairdresser in Chicago, and in doing that I also wanted to do something else so I started bar tending. Hair became less and less inspiring and I ended up at bars exclusively. I had a regular in Chicago at one of my bars that was a florist, and she was basically in Holly’s situation where she would go to the flower market at 4am and by 2pm she was shot, so she asked me to help out. It’s a little different in a walk traffic city like Chicago because people are going home from work or getting off the train, and they would come into her bucket shop, and grab a couple of stems and we would then make it into an arrangement. When I moved to California, 10yrs ago, Holly was managing the Velvet Garden and we met there. It was a much higher end deal than I was used to so I was learning all these new things like etiquette and design. Eventually Holly left and when that happened while I loved the people there the inspiration for me also left, and I didn’t have to have that job. I had 3 jobs at 3 bars so I quit Velvet Garden, and went back to the bar. A year passed and she was so busy that she would call me and say I have a big party could you help.
At what point did you become partners?
Becky: When Holly’s business started to build she said look I need a partner. And I was like oh great, here are all these names of all these great people you should ask, and she said I don’t want them and I was like you don’t want me because that is a terrible plan. We discussed it a bunch and it was like, you’re probably not going to be the hot bartender when you’re 50 so maybe you want to consider having another career at some point. It was the right career path. It felt like an investment in my future. We are really good partners because we are different and there is perspective. Holly is driven by the art form of the whole thing and I tend to ground things a little more. It’s a good balance for us. It’s 6yrs in January. We were actually partners for 4yrs before we finally wrote it on a cocktail napkin at some place. We had a waitress sign the cocktail napkin, and we were like this is our contract.
Do you still have the napkin?
Holly: She does.
Becky: I still do. It’s the only contract we have. I trust her. You going somewhere (to Holly)? (laughter)
Photograph by Jasmine Star
How would you describe Holly Flora’s style?
Holly: It’s challenging to say exactly what that is because we love developing people’s ideas. We love indulging in a theme, and that could go modern, arid or richly organic but I think I always want to try to twist it a teeny bit to my personal aesthetic. I don’t know if I speak for Becky too.
Becky: Sometimes (laughter).
Holly: It’s usually pretty arty. Pretty asymmetrical and weird, yet cool. It’s a marriage between garden plus bizarre. It’s like a subtlety.
Becky: Garden bizarre that’s pretty accurate. Both of us are very attracted to usually making a focus of some element that is unusual or special for some reason. There are a lot of people kind of doing these relaxed, kind of loose movement, organic shapes but there is a nuance in our work where if you set it up with or next to someone else’s you may not be able to pinpoint exactly why it’s special. It honestly is this attention to detail that sets us apart.
Holly: I think what sets us apart is that we’re willing to do all sorts of different things and almost every florist I know has their typecast. They’re either romantic or they’re urbanist or whatever. They have a thing that they are dedicated to and we’re dedicated to ideas and figuring out how to make whatever that fiction is into some sort of reality.
Becky: Totally. We’re now at an interesting point especially with Holly’s experience where it has been three decades of different styles. We’ve done every kind of style now and it’s fun to sort of re-visit things that when somebody does have something, let’s say that’s kind of dated, it’s interesting to re-invent that and bring it back to life.
What would you say inspires your work?
Becky: Holly (laughter).
Holly: There is a place in Santa Barbara called Lotus Land that inspires me immensely. It’s a botanical garden unlike any other that’s dedicated to unusual, cool, weird, cycads and succulents and things that are spiky and curly and have fun movement and have history. I love LA in general. I think that is inspiring. It’s this crazy very frustrating place to live (laughter).
Becky: When you talk about the inspiration in LA, you could drive an hour and a half in any direction and be in an entirely different kind of planet. We’re really in this neat section of the nation where all things apply, so we can do a winter wedding and be in snow in 2 hrs. All of our, well not all, but a lot of inspiration comes from things that are not floral at all. Holly went on a trip to Zion and came back with all these photographs and it was a heavy drive in the work that we produced afterwards. It was this stunning span of nature which translated somehow into this medium. We’ve even been inspired by jewelry. There was this really great ring that was all mineral and shiny, and jagged and crazy looking, and then a flower arrangement came out of that. We are inspired by color combinations, we’re inspired by textures, we’re inspired by things that are not floral, and then we get to translate it into our work and that’s cool.
Holly: I’m often also inspired by the flower market. I have vendors at the flower market that will hold unusual things for me. I’ll go and see that thing and sort of build an arrangement around that.
Becky: And that’s actually another cool thing about Holly just having the experience that she has. She has a rapport with these people that they are getting something that nobody has ever seen before where they’re like, “I don’t even know what this is, nobody knows the name of it. It came from Japan. It’s totally weird. I don’t know if I can sell it. It’s really expensive. Holly will want it.” We’ll take it, and we’ll photograph it or do something with it, and then it starts to appear in our work and then it gets on instagram and somebody is like, “what the hell is that,” and the next thing you know, it’s in weddings the next year the whole summer.
You guys have just moved into a new location with a store front. Why now?
Holly: I don’t know, I feel like this is sort of a natural evolution. It’s tough to have a public persona. I never wanted to have a public persona that was polished and ready, and I feel that we are very ready at this point. We could have done it 3yrs ago but I’m a cautious person who tends to shy away from having a voice and being public, and so I think that this is a good time. I feel that Becky and I have worked out our issues. We’re in a good place and we know our place, and we could pull it off now. I’m not sure we could have pulled it off before.
Becky: Neither one of us has a business degree. We’ve worked for other people. This whole thing has been a learning curve. The first few years were pretty rocky, and when we first figured out what that was about, we had to get personal and deep. You have to get personal and deep with your partner. You learn things about their personality that’s not your favorite thing and you survive that. You learn how to communicate with them to make that a marriage. I am very much married to Holly.
Holly: Women are sensitive. Honestly, people think women are more sensitive but men are too. I live with my husband. I mean “MOODS.” (laughter). I’ve never known someone more sensitive. It’s really important to be able to communicate what is actually in your heart and at the same time respect someone else’s feelings. That is the golden rule, that’s the way to do it. My biggest challenge is to not just walk all over the person. I’m trying to slow down and listen. I have a hard time with that.
Becky: You’ve gotten really good at listening…just so you know (laughter). I’m terrible at being wrong, and that is Holly’s struggle with me. We know those things about each other and because we know that we’re forgiving in the capacity. The truth is that Holly and I address things. When it is heavy in the room we address it and you can’t always protect the other person from getting their feelings hurt but you have to be sensitive to the other person’s pain, and we are nice to each other. And when we fight everyone in the room is so fucking uncomfortable.
Holly: It doesn’t happen often.
Becky: There is bickering and disagreeing, like once or twice a year where it’s like do we need to go outside (laughter). We go outside and we sit in the van and we argue, sometimes loudly, and then everybody cries then we go back in.
Holly: People think that there is some solid forethought and planning, like a calculated move, but the way I see the development of our business has been in opportunities we saw and thought were a good idea. It’s happenstance. It’s positive things that happened to be there and I’m going to take that apple.
Becky: We now have 13 employees and not 3. We can’t perform the same way. We’ve all made peace with that, so we have to act like we’re big and move into a space that suits our company. Also, If we’re not being challenged by brides we get hungry to challenge ourselves, so that’s part of the thing with having this new space, of having a window so we could show people how we’re challenging ourselves. The moment where Holly and I both at the same time say yes this is a good idea, you have to go with it because we celebrate a lot when we agree.
Holly, if Becky were to get married what time of year would she choose and what flowers?
Holly: I think she would want to get married somewhere in January or Christmas. She wants a winter wedding, fur involved, muff, and a lot of antlers. Montana would be a really good place for that. She would probably want hide tablecloths and leather maybe. Game of Thrones wedding episode before the blood bath but a lot more white, snowy, and mossy.
Becky: It sounds so good!
Holly: Don’t think the flowers would be as important, it’s more about the conceptual, the texture.
Becky: My favorite flowers are not available at the time I would get married. I get to be around flowers all the time. First of all I know who my florist would be, and I trust that person implicitly so it’s here we go, it’s January or February and we’re in Sweden make it happen. Ice castles and fur everywhere. Moose drawn carriage (laughter). Leather hot pants, fury bearded groom looking like a longshoreman and not overdressed for the occasion. Wool sweater, done deal. Perfection.
And Holly?
Becky: I was at Holly’s wedding and I don’t think she would do it how she did it. So I think probably still the same time of year April, May or June but maybe not in a hot place.
Holly: I think it would be fun to get married in a James Turrell exhibit.
Becky: It’s difficult because she’s already done her dream wedding. Gold rush theme and it was awesome. Dry river bed. It was beautiful and done to completion. You just can’t pretend it didn’t already happen.
What were the flowers you used for your wedding?
Holly: Viburnum, dogwood, peonies, wild flowers, wild sage, and flowers we picked there, but all the flowers died. It was 105 degrees. I didn’t have any cooling system there. It was 30 degrees warmer than it was supposed to be but I didn’t care.
Becky: Holly could have locked onto this thing that I’m a florist and people are going to come and see these flowers and they’re not perfect. They’re going to think this thing on me but she was like things happen, this is the greatest day. It was hot, so hot that two of her bridesmaids got sick with heat stroke. By the time it was 8:30 at night, it was so beautiful that it ended up being the best night ever. We all ended up skinny dipping at 3am. It was the greatest time. There were 40 naked people in the creek. It was complete, she saw it all the way through. People were ripping off their gowns. Someone stole my clothes.
What?
Becky: Yep. Someone stole my clothes. I had to walk back naked. It’s really difficult to not lose sight of the fact that this is supposed to be a good time, and it’s not a big deal. If it rains big deal, go to rite aid buy several umbrellas and start taking awesome pictures.
If you could do the flowers for anyone’s wedding dead or alive, who would it be and why?
Holly: Thomas Jefferson. He was a gardener.
Becky: Such a funny answer.
Holly: What would you say?
Becky: Willie Nelson. He’s had like five weddings. I got to get in on one of those. I think I would pick someone where I know it would be full boar.
Holly: Catherine the Great. Just think of the lavishness they used to have in those places.
Becky: Mick Jagger. Coco Chanel. Erik the Red. I would want to go full viking wedding. Loretta Lynn
Holly: 70’s would be a great time but the flowers wouldn’t have been as developed then.