It is a question I have quietly carried with me for years: Who decides what becomes beautiful?
Where do trends actually begin? Does fashion influence floristry, or does floristry sometimes influence fashion? Does a new color first appear on a runway in Paris, in home furnishings, through art, inside a luxury hotel or perhaps much earlier? Maybe it’s in the greenhouse of a flower breeder who notices an unusual mutation worth preserving.
I sometimes wonder whether there is a room somewhere filled with incredibly stylish people gathering to decide what the rest of us will eventually consider beautiful. Something like the way Pantone announces the Color of the Year.
It is a funny thought, but the question behind it is real: How does an idea become beautiful enough that people across cultures, industries and continents begin embracing it?
As a child growing up in the Caribbean, I spent a great deal of time at my aunt’s home while my mother traveled for business. My aunt was the most sophisticated woman I knew. She loved flowers, plants, gardens, beautiful interiors and gracious entertaining. The table, the garden and the hospitality mattered. Every detail seemed intentional.
At the time, I simply admired her. It was only years later, after I discovered floral design, that I realized how profoundly she had shaped my relationship with nature and beauty. Perhaps that’s also why, while studying biochemistry as an undergrad, botany became one of my favorite subjects.
I later earned my Master of Science in pharmaceutical sciences while working for biopharmaceutical companies as a scientist, spending my time cloning DNA, protein engineering and developing antibodies as potential cancer therapeutics.
While I was happy in my world of biotech, my fascination with plants and flowers, how they adapted, survived and responded to their environments, remained constant. Science and creativity seemed like entirely different worlds and I never imagined those interests could become a career.
Eventually, I would discover how wrong I was.
Economy of Flowers
When I founded À Votre Service Events®–an event planning and production company–in 2008, flowers initially entered my professional life for practical reasons. I took a small floral design class in 2009 simply because I wanted enough knowledge to better guide my event clients before introducing them to florists.
I had no intention of becoming a floral designer myself. I simply wanted to ask better questions and become efficient for my clients.
A few years later, as our event-planning business matured, growth began to plateau and I was faced with making a critical decision: increase the number of staff to secure more events and volume or create more value for existing clientele by adding floral design services to the menu. What began as a business decision quickly became something I genuinely loved.
One summer day in 2013 I was faced with yet another eye-opening opportunity that would change the approach to my business. I was walking through New York City’s Flower District, doing what had become part of my informal floral education–visiting wholesalers, looking at flowers and asking endless questions–when Roland, a salesperson at J. Rose Wholesale Flowers asked, “Are you going to the Gift Show?”
I had no idea what he was talking about. He explained that it was taking place at the Javits Center and that companies from around the world were exhibiting their products. I made plans to attend and walked into a world of possibility.
There were candles, ceramics, glassware, textiles, plants, fragrances, furniture, gourmet foods, home accessories and beautiful objects from around the world. Thousands of vendors seemed to stretch endlessly through the Javits Center and beyond!
But what fascinated me most was not the merchandise, it was what the merchandise represented.
Every booth was someone’s idea. Someone’s risk. Someone’s business. Someone believed strongly enough in what they had created to bring it into a marketplace and ask buyers from around the world to believe in it too.
For the first time, I began seeing beauty not simply as something to admire but as an economy. Until then, I had unconsciously thought about flowers belonging solely to the floral industry. But I quickly realized that flowers are a part of an interconnected world of design, culture, craftsmanship, consumer behavior and commerce.
Network of Influence
That experience changed how I viewed my business forever, and it would also change the questions I began asking. From breeding and mutation, market demand and development, propagation and growth, trade regulations and guidelines, and everything in between; the more questions I asked, the more people I met.
Growers, scientists, wholesalers, farm workers, customs brokers, floral suppliers, designers and people who pack and process flowers long before most of us begin our work. I even met a cargo agent, Anita, who invited me to visit Ecuador to further build my network in the industry.
Many contacts in my new network became my teachers.
They answered questions, opened doors, shared knowledge accumulated over decades, and allowed me to observe parts of the industry I had never known existed. As my knowledge grew, my scientific background helped me research further, question assumptions, experiment and eventually develop methods and business practices of my own.
I thought I was learning more about flowers. In reality, I was being introduced to an entire economy. And somewhere along the way, I began returning to my original question: Who decides what becomes beautiful?
After years of wondering, I wish I could tell you that I discovered the answer; that somewhere there really is a room filled with extraordinarily stylish people deciding what the rest of us will want next year.
I haven’t found it.
What I have found is far more interesting: No one decides what becomes beautiful. Or, perhaps more accurately, everyone does.
A breeder developing a new variety. A grower deciding whether to devote valuable greenhouse space or farmland to it. A wholesaler who is willing to introduce it. A designer who sees something unexpected in it (just think back about our excitement when we first saw the terracotta roses a few years ago or the green cabbage rose). An editor who publishes it. The hotelier, retailer, artist or fashion designer whose interpretation influences another creative field. And ultimately, the consumer who sees it and says: I want that.
Each influences the next.
Beauty may be subjective, but demand has economic consequences.
When enough people respond to a flower, color, variety or aesthetic, the marketplace responds too. More may be grown. More varieties with nuances may be developed. More may be imported. More designers request it. More retailers carry it. Breeders may pursue similar characteristics. Investment follows opportunity.
Our individual preferences become signals. Collectively, those signals become demand, and demand creates markets. This is where my idea of Floral Commerce™ begins.
Floral Commerce™ explores the science, art, culture, people, economics and commercial systems through which flowers and the ideas surrounding them move through the world.
But understanding that ecosystem is only part of the story. The other part is understanding what we can do with that knowledge.
For those of us who make our living with flowers, deeper knowledge can have real economic value. And when that knowledge helps us build healthier, more sustainable businesses, its impact can extend beyond our own bottom lines to the people we employ, the suppliers we support and the communities in which we work.
Our expertise can become valuable in new ways through education, consulting, intellectual property, product development, procurement, licensing, technology, partnerships, global markets or entirely new business models.
None of this diminishes the traditional flower shop or the extraordinary craft of floral design. It simply invites us to think more expansively about how we participate in the flower economy. That is what I hope to explore through Floral Commerce™: The Business Behind Beautiful Things.
We will follow flowers to farms, laboratories, cargo agencies, customs offices, wholesale markets, flower shops, hotels, homes and extraordinary events. We will also explore science, breeding, grading, trade, taxation, logistics, culture, design and consumer behavior.
And most importantly, we will meet some of the remarkable people who make this industry work. Because while flowers, ideas and knowledge move, value is created along the way.
Perhaps beauty really is in the eye of the beholder. But I have come to believe the beholder is doing far more than looking. Together, we are helping shape what becomes possible next.
Marie Danielle Vil-Young, À Votre Service Events®
Marie Danielle Vil-Youngis the Founder and Creative Director of À Votre Service Events® and AVS Events & Floral Art Institute. A former biopharmaceutical scientist turned luxury event producer, floral designer and educator, she brings nearly two decades of entrepreneurship together with her background in science to explore the global business of flowers. ThroughFloral Commerce™: The Business Behind Beautiful Things, Marie Danielle examines the intersection of science, art, culture and commerce, and the people, systems and opportunities that keep the floral economy moving.
