Alyssa Sager talks on the phone with a flower farmer while Paige Michelmore trims roses at Leis de Buds in Vancouver.The walls of Leis de Buds flower shop were decked with fir boughs and potted poinsettias as masked holiday shoppers in Vancouver drifted through, carefully edging around each other in early December.
While many retail businesses are wondering if they’ll survive the year when COVID-19 has dampened the holiday shopping season, the floral industry has a relatively rosy outlook at the end of a chaotic 2020.This past April, the picture was bleak. Half of all flowers are sold between Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day every year, but, as the world locked down in March, flower sales wilted, leaving mountains of carefully planned and tended blooms behind to mould.
Before she opened Leis de Buds, Ms. Sager was Elon Musk’s chief of staff at Space X and Tesla, and so she came into the flower business with a shoot-for-the-moon vision to revolutionize the industry with a Silicon Valley approach to selling locally grown flowers. She had hoped to grow steadily in that direction, but COVID-19 forced her to speed up her plans.A knife and shears used to separate dahlia tubers sit on a board in a greenhouse after being sanitized at River and Sea Flowers.