As we finish of this whirlwind crazy year, we wanted to reflect back on how it went for us here at IND.
First we want to say that our hearts go out to all families and businesses affected by COVID-19. We hope that you are finding ways to turn things around, staying positive, keeping in touch with family and friends virtually and being safe and healthy!
We started off 2020 with a calendar full of events and many projects. This was going to be one of the busiest and most successful years in business. But then COVID hit, things took a turn and every event we had on the calendar was being cancelled or postponed.
Now we’d like to share some of the ways we pivoted our business in order to keep IND thriving and vibing! We also included some tips, which we hope you find useful.
Local Business Partnerships
As a small business we love to support other small businesses and business owners. A couple of these businesses are located in our beloved city of Long Beach. This city is near and dear to our hearts. Inessa moved to Long Beach back in 2000 for college and completely fell in love with the city and the people who reside in Long Beach. To show our continued support to local business in Long Beach we decided to participate in providing Mother’s Day + Father’s Day flower offerings. We partnered with Salud Juice and Trademark Brewing for two special occasions this year. We provided bundles and bouquet pick ups at both locations for Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. In addition, we now supply weekly grab and go bouquets for the Salud Juice flower stand, available at their 4th street location. Do check them out, they are so friendly and offer some of the best fresh pressed juices along with a yummy vegan food menu.
Partnering with local businesses is a great way to support our favorite and local small businesses and shops. We believe in supporting local and will continue to do so throughout the holiday season.
Alternative Services
This year brought out our creativity to pivot to other alternatives like never before. As an event and wedding based floral studio we did not provide retail flower offerings until this year. We decided to introduce weekly fresh flower deliveries, as well as, weekly/monthly subscription services. It has been a joy to share our floral creations with you all. Flowers really do make people happy and it was a bonus getting to see so many happy faces when we delivered our bouquets and arrangements - thank you to each and every one of you that have supported and continue to support us with your flower orders.
With all of our weddings being postponed and some of our couples deciding to have a smaller ceremony this year, we also introduced our micro weddings packages. It has been truly fun to work with our couples to make their small celebrations intimate yet still amazing. Thank you to all our couples for choosing us to be apart of your special day. We can’t wait to party with you all next year.
Setting up the micro wedding packages was simple, we created a page on our website detailing what’s included and at what price point. We then work with our couples to make sure we are taking proper safety measures during setup and clean up. Check out the details of what’s included in our micro weddings package here!
Hiring Interns
We hired two amazing interns from CSU, Long Beach and we cannot express enough what a huge help they have been. They were able to learn floral design skills, studio operations, event prep and setup. And we are happy to say that we had one of them transition into an employee.
Hiring interns really helped this business immensely in 2020. Our first two interns learned new skills, were introduced to the inner workings of event flowers, while giving our business that needed extra set of hands to get things done. We worked with the California State University, Long Beach Job Opportunities team to hire interns. They have an easy application process for employers and a job portal for posting your jobs and intern positions.
Now as we close this chapter and begin a new one, we are still excited about the coming new year and what it has in store. We want to send a huge thank you to all of you for supporting us with comments, likes, virtual hugs, buying flowers from us, booking us for events, installations and more - we appreciate you and it’s because of you we have survived 2020!
Cheers to new beginnings - may you all be well, safe and healthy!