“You’ve got to be one that, wherever you are, like a flower, you’ve got to blossom where you’re planted. You cannot eliminate darkness. You cannot banish it by cursing darkness. The only way to get rid of darkness is light, and to be the light yourself.”
– Cory Booker
066 Travis Rigby, publishertravis@floristsreview.comWhen I took on the leadership of Florists’ Review, I took it on as a fun way to round out my career in journalism. After all, this was a well-established 122-year-old magazine, and I love flowers and florists – and work should be fun, right?
I started my career in journalism back in 1981 at the Emerald Gazette, my junior high school newspaper. What followed was time spent at my high school paper and The Utah Daily Chronicle, as well as Salt Lake City’s business newspaper, The Enterprise, and a group of Oregon newspapers. I finally jumped to corporate communications and then my own graphic design business. But my love of journalism and the media has always run deep.
My love of the floral industry also has grown, and while I’m new to it, my love isn’t. I remember growing up in the Intermountain West looking for early buds of peony plants poking through the melting snow. I loved working with my mother and grand-mother planting and tending their beautiful flower gar-dens. Even seeing my dad’s pride at watching his potato, grain and hay fields grow every year gave me a deep connection to the plant life around me.
Today, my partner and I bring home fresh flowers at least once a week, and we enjoy them more than ever. It may have been flowers that seduced us into this industry, but it’s the people that have kept us here.
