May 23, 2017

Meet Layla Zomorod of Happy Rose Florist in Pasadena

Local Stories

Today we’d like to introduce you to Layla Zomorod.

Layla, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
Happy Rose Florist has been providing floral designs for Pasadena and surrounding communities since 1991 when my father, Nasser Zomorod transitioned from selling wrapped rose bouquets in Old Town Pasadena bars to opening a flower shop with his wife, Ulrike. With no prior floral or business experience their first few years were spent on a learning curve. My mom, Ulrike recalls our early days and only knowing how to make one kind of arrangement and mass producing it. We’ve certainly come a long way in terms of design and now create custom arrangements for individuals and events. Happy Rose Florist is now a family business run by the couple, their daughters, their aunt Zari, and Haydee Cruz who has been with us for 20 years.

Has it been a smooth road?
The 2008 economic crisis definitely took a toll on the shop. When the economy was doing poorly people were turning to grocery markets or not buying flowers at all and at the same time a car had crashed into the front entrance of our store. The shop wasn’t doing well financially at that time, my dad even spoke of selling it. But we rode out the hard times and once I started marketing the shop more online, our sales were able to pick back up.

Upgrading technology was a bit of a struggle because my parents are old school and not familiar with things like social media. So I had a lot of freedom to set up the shop on those platforms and create an online presence for Happy Rose. I bought a DSLR camera and with limited photography experience I started taking pictures of our flower arrangements and together with my sister we would edit them and used online templates to create our current website. It was really cool to have complete creative freedom and see how much we could impact the business by enabling e-commerce and online ordering.

So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Happy Rose Florist story. Tell us more about the business.
Happy Rose really does it all. There is no special event we shy away from. One of our biggest orders to date was providing 250 centerpieces for the 2017 Rose Bowl game. The Happy Rose team had the opportunity to create arrangements for the University of Southern California Tailgate at their historic Rose Bowl victory. Every year, we are also a part of the Rose Parade by providing rose bouquets for the Pasadena City College flag bearers. Other than that, we are able to provide for weddings, funerals, birthdays and of course Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day are our biggest days of the year. As a kind of mom and pop shop that has been around for 25 years we really bring a sense of family to our business. We love our community and when people walk in, we treat them as a part of our family. As a business we are also proud of the high quality of our flowers, such as our long stem roses sourced from Colombia and orchids imported from Thailand. We have strong relationships with the farmers in the market and get the freshest flowers to give our customers an exceptional floral experience. With 25 years of business comes a ton of experience as well. If our customers email us a photo of their floral inspiration, we are typically able to recreate the design with seasonal flowers.

How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
We would love to do more large events, such as the one with Prime Sports at the Rose Bowl. Now we are more confident in operating on a larger scale. I am personally working on expanding our portfolio online to offer more options on our website. We’re also getting more orders for weddings these days so we are looking to partner with wedding planning companies to further expand.

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