EDWARDSVILLE - When COVID-19 Pandemic hit, hit in March 2020, Deborah Orofino and Anne Morris locked the door to A Wildflower Shop at 2131 South State Route 157, Edwardsville, but their phones never stopped ringing.
“It made us realize that people do see the value of flowers, that they bring happiness and joy,” says Orofino, sharing their biggest 'aha'moment.
“The floral industry is set up to survive COVID,” she continued. “Our delivery processes were already in place.”
Adapting to contact-less delivery went smoothly and in fact, A Wildflower Shop still offers the service to customers who remain wary about having a driver hand them flowers. But the two women had to get creative when it came to accommodating others who, suffering from cabin fever, just wanted to get out of their house.
Orofino says: “We had a box outside our back door, and we set up times for people to come by and pick up their arrangements. As long as they honored their specific time slot, they didn’t run into each other and we didn’t see them either.”
The irony, they say, is that everything they do is to drive people into the shop because they have a lot of gift items. In fact, just before the pandemic started, they had gone to the gift show in Atlanta. “We were going to pivot and do more gift items,” Deb says. Faced with COVID-19, they had to pivot again.
In general, they “kicked up” Facebook and Instagram. One marketing strategy that worked particularly well was five weeks of “Random Acts of Kindness” in celebration of their five-year business anniversary in January 2020. Starting that May via Facebook, they solicited nominations of people deserving a surprise of flowers and a gift and then selected one recipient each week.
“Everybody needed a pick-me-up at some point, and that was what we felt we were able to do,” says Morris. “It was very well received within the community and got us a lot of new likes and followers.”
Unwittingly prescient, about six months before COVID hit, Orofino and Morris produced a Google 360-degree video of the shop. For people who didn’t want to leave their homes, the immersive visual tool showed them exactly what was in the shop that they could purchase.
“When things relaxed a little bit, we allowed private shopping,” Morris said, explaining that she and Orofino would stay in the back while their customers shopped. “People were so grateful, and if someone requests that now, we arrange it. You can always find a half-hour in a day to let someone come in and be the only one in the store.”
For more at the Wildflower Shop contact (618) 692-5094.
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