Fire Away! This Bloomingdale Florist Is Not Your Average Phoenix

Some florists deal with adversity with their head held high. Some hide their head between their knees and pray for daylight (or so I assume). Well, Flower Shop Network florists are a rare breed. Point in case:  Vesna’s Blooming Boutique Flower Shop in Bloomingdale New Jersey. What champs!

This past year, Vesna’s was struck with with a major catastrophe. Their flower shop caught on fire! No kidding. Real. Burning. Flames. But like I said, these florists are champs. They took it one step at a time and are back on their feet with pride and pleasure. They’ve maintained their humility and remain the friendliest faces in any Bloomingdale flower shop.

Flower Shop Network recently spoke with Nick (whose mother, Vesna, owns the shop) and received his personal account of their history and how they have persevered since the fire.

We opened about 20 years ago as a craft store, then one Mothers days we had 3 buckets of flowers and we made small $10-15 bunches on the spot. In less then a year our little craft store turned in to a florist for the past 15 years. In 2008 when when the stock market crashed, we decided to expand rather then contract, So we got our website with FSN (I know we’re a little old school not having a website until 2008). We started with the basic website and received our first order with in a week. Oh yea and we got to keep 100% of the money, unlike the the other [order gatherers] which we will NEVER do business with again.

Then on September 16, 2009 @ around 3pm, we lost our home and 1/2 our business to a fire. To make matters worst there was a problem with our insurance policy. […] This all happened 2 weeks before V-day started rolling in. Some of our whole sellers, since they heard about the fire, didn’t want to extend credit to us for the holiday – because they thought we where done.

We would also like to thank Nick for his lovely compliments, as he goes on to speak of the ease and benefit he has found using an FSN website.

Guess what we did after after V Day? We expanded again. We upgraded to the wedding package and website custom controls. This is when the site became main artery for the shop. As soon as I upgraded the first thing, I added was our custom sprays for a funeral that day. With in the first week people started calling and ordering off the website for our custom spray. So we added more :) the funeral page is about 70% all of our own pictures now. The pics the website are a nice filler till we could build up our own. I can also change the color theme of the website anytime to match the seasons.

I was surprised at how easy it was to make a product. If you can make a myspace profile you can update your FSN website! Also the FSN staff feels like a family owned business instead of a corporation. When i have a question it gets taken care right away. […] To us FSN is the ONLY company that helps real florist, tell me one of the [order gatherers] that gives you 100% of your website orders and doesn’t charge 20 different fee for nothing.

Thank you for keeping us in business!

Nick & Vesna

It’s great to receive compliments like this from FSN florists. We want it to feel like a family when you call us. That’s exactly what it is to us. Even our head of accounting is lovingly referred to as “Aunt Cathy” by us all. We want you to feel like you’re calling your friend when you call Flower Shop Network because we’re going to go out of our way to help you and to make you feel like a part of our family as well.

Update: 3/26/12 It seems Vesna’s Blooming Boutique Flower Shop has closed it’s doors.