Inspiring Conversations with Hannah Waller of All Purpose Flower

Today we’d like to introduce you to Hannah Waller.

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I became a florist on accident! Truly.

I have a background in Marketing and Brand, having attended Seattle University for a degree in Business Administration and a minor in Studio Art. I’m a 2020 grad who has had to make a lot of pivots along the way to make it work. I’ve had just about every job under the sun and tried a lot of different things. I was working in the AEC (Architecture, Engineering, and Construction) industry as a Marketing Proposal Coordinator when I started playing around with flowers. I would go to the farmer’s market each weekend and pick up flowers for my home. This ritual turned into my favorite part of the week and I started to think more creatively about how I could display them.

As I started to explore new ways of arranging and taught myself about the different mechanics possible to make an arrangement, my flowers started to look more elevated and polished and I started to share what I was making on my Instagram just for fun. People reacted immediately. I wasn’t expecting any interest, but all of the sudden I had messages asking if I was selling arrangements and how people could buy them. For the first few months, I brushed it off and found it funny that people wanted to buy my flowers, but the messages kept coming and interest didn’t slow down.

One day it finally clicked for me: I didn’t like my construction job (I hated it in fact) and people wanted to pay me to do something I did really love. It took another year-or-so after this realization for All Purpose Flower to become a reality. I agonized over the decision to leave the corporate world and start my own business at the ripe age of 26, because let’s be real… that’s scary! and a huge leap of faith.

It wasn’t until I got honest with myself and the people I love about how much I really enjoyed working with flowers that things started to snowball. I confided in a close friend, Kirstie Crowder, owner of Skin Solstice Boutique in Malibu about my fantasy of starting my own floral business and she was immediately hugely supportive and encouraging. She became my first monthly recurring order and helped me find the confidence to build my own business.

It’s all still very new, and I’m very much still working out the administrative kinks, having officially launched in January, but so far, it’s been the most exciting and edifying thing I’ve ever done. I get to create beautiful things for people to express their love, joy, gratitude, condolences, and every other range of emotion to people important to them and that feels like a really special job. I’m excited to see where the business goes and so grateful that I get to pour all of my effort and energy into something that means so much to me.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Yes and no! I feel really lucky to say that finding clients hasn’t been the hard part, it’s been structuring and setting up a business.

I underestimated the amount of research and due diligence that goes into starting a business and doing it correctly. When I filed for all of my licenses (business, wholesale, resale, etc.) it quickly became apparent to me that there is so much to know and that no one was going to package it up neatly with a bow for me. There’s no master list of “things you need to file” or “paperwork you need to complete” to start a business and it’s a little different for everyone and every business, based on what you’ll be offering. The hardest part so far has been staying organized, and figuring out all of the un-sexy parts of running a business (taxes, pricing, building a website, etc).

It’s funny because I have been told my entire life that all the experiences I take on will matter and that nothing I ever do will be a waste of time, but I found that really hard to believe for a long time. I mean, at one point I worked for a cannabis brand and rolled joints full-time for a living… so, naturally it was hard for me to believe that would ever have any meaningful or practical application to my life. In starting a business, I’ve found that: I was wrong and everyone else was on to something.

Every job I’ve ever had has prepared me for what I’m doing now in some way, even if the application of knowledge or experience isn’t direct. Rolling joints in my living room for a year prepared me to be able to push through mundane and arduous tasks. It also taught me the importance of quality control and meticulously keeping track of inventory. The construction job that I hated taught me a lot about parsing through and making sense of dense, technical documents, which has been so helpful in the actual filing and structuring of my business. Really, I have found that I’m more prepared than I gave myself credit for because of the various side-quests I took on along the way.

I’m still such a young business and have a lot of growing and navigating to do. I know I’m not out of the woods yet and that the hardest is yet to come, but I’ve been learning to take it all in stride and be confident in my ability to figure it out. I try to actively reframe the obstacles I come across as opportunities. Whether that be an opportunity to pivot and redirect, or an opportunity to hunker down and teach myself something new. The next big undertaking will be figuring out a space… now that I have some weddings and larger-scale events on the books for later this year, my balcony isn’t going to cut it as work space any more. Which is an obstacle, an exciting obstacle, but an obstacle nonetheless!

Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about All Purpose Flower?
My business, All Purpose Flower, is a small, woman-owned and operated business offering full-service floral design.

Having come from a design background and spent time working in the Architecture industry, I know how impactful flowers can be in tying together a space and curating a mood.

We offer florals for private and branded events including dinner parties, baby showers, influencer events, brand dinners, birthday parties, weddings, weekly and monthly subscriptions, deliveries, sets, shoots, styling, etc. Whether you’re looking for full-scale event florals or just want an arrangement to brighten up your home every week or month, we’re happy to help!

Some things that sets us apart from your traditional florist are our approach, unique product offerings, and commitment to sustainable design.

We truly see each arrangement as a work of art and take the time to curate it to our client’s needs and preferences. We work with some really unique and rare flowers that you won’t see elsewhere. One of our favorite things to hear from clients is “wow, I’ve never seen this flower before” or “I didn’t know flowers could look like this”. Our goal is to push the boundaries of floristry and give our clients something fresh, exciting, and impactful.

An important aspect of the decisions we make is sustainability. We are a foam-free studio, meaning we do not use floral foam in any of our arrangements or installations. Floral foam is one of the most sinister (in our opinion!) parts of the industry. It’s single-use, plastic, and filled with toxic chemicals. The floral industry can be really unsustainable, as are most, but we do our best to mitigate our environmental impact and think outside the box to come up with creative mechanics and design solutions so that we aren’t contributing more to the overall waste, and aren’t sending any harmful chemicals into our client’s spaces.

A welcome by-product of our design approach and sustainability efforts is that, with proper care, our flowers can last a really long time. Everything we send out is fresh from the market directly to our clients. We don’t keep floral inventory in the studio, which helps cut down on our waste, and ensures our clients get the freshest possible flowers that are hand selected for each arrangement.

Where we are in life is often partly because of others. Who/what else deserves credit for how your story turned out?
This list really could be endless. I have so much gratitude for anyone who has taught me any kind of lesson (even the hard ones) throughout my 20’s.

Some of All Purpose Flower’s biggest champions have been; my parents (thanks mom and dad!), my partner (Jon you make the world go ’round), and my sweetest friend, Kirstie Crowder of Solstice Skin Studio.

I get asked all the time how I was able to afford starting my business, and to take away all the mysticism and be fully transparent: I had help! While it has been entirely funded by me, I was lucky enough to have a robust savings because I had a lot of help from my parents in my teens and twenties. They paid for my college education, allowing me to graduate without debt. While I did have a full-time job all throughout college, my parents paid my rent meaning I was able to save a lot of that money. When I graduated and started working a salaried job I was saving aggressively, but they were also still helping out with expenses. So, the honest answer really is that I am incredibly privileged and have had a lot of head-starts afforded to me that allowed me to take a risk at such a young age.

All Purpose Flower also wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for my partner encouraging me to bet on myself and committing to chasing the dream with me. Starting a business in your twenties is kind of insane… especially for someone like me who felt directionless for the majority of them. My boyfriend Jon and I have been together for 5 years and in that time he’s seen me through some pretty interesting phases, but has never for a second doubted me. When I told him I wanted to start this business he was instantly committed to do anything he could to make it happen. Which, for the most part, has been being someone for me to lean on to get me through the hard moments by providing unwavering support and endless hugs. Having someone who believes in you, especially on the days you’re finding it hard to believe in yourself, is invaluable.

Another person who has really been the blueprint for me and helped me navigate a lot of the hiccups and uncertainty is my friend and fellow small-business-owner Kirstie Crowder. Kirstie is an absolute ray of sunshine and one of the hardest working and most sincere people you’ll ever meet. She pushed me to pursue my dream, and has continuously offered her help and advice along the way. It’s so nice to have someone who’s in a similar position to you to bounce ideas off of and talk all things business. Whenever I run into a roadblock, I have someone to call who has probably been in a similar position, and if she hasn’t knows the frame of mind I’m in when approaching the problem. It’s also nice to be able to commiserate over taxes and other administrative things that just frankly suck! While our offerings are so different, there’s a lot of overlap in our clients and Kirstie has been the first to offer her network and any resource she has to help me grow. I am eternally grateful for her generosity, guidance, and love! She’s an amazing person to have in your corner.

Pricing:

• Standard Arrangement – $175
• Medium Arrangment – $225
• Large Arrangement – $350
• XL Arrangement – $450
• Events – Inquire! (my minimum spend is $800)

Contact Info:

• Website: www.allpurposeflowerla.com (should be finished in the next month or so!!!!)
• Instagram: @allpurposeflowerla
• Other: You can find me on TikTok @allpurposeflowerla 🙂