When the COVID-19 pandemic really started to take hold in March and the first stay-at-home orders went into place, like many small business owners Tinley Park’s Lisa Wiencek felt blindsided.
“At the beginning of COVID, I was like, ‘I want to chill out. I don’t know what I’m going to do,'” Wiencek said. “I just shut down.”
Wiencek, 34, had just started FloraLore, a floral design company, out of her home studio roughly a year and a half ago. But 2020 marked the first full year for her, when she expected to get the business off the ground and truly up and running.
COVID-19, and the restrictions and anxieties that came with it, quickly changed her expectations. She was trying to regroup.
“Then, I got three calls wanting flowers in the span of maybe two days,” Wiencek said. “I was like, ‘OK, maybe I need to come out of hiding.’ But then I was realizing to fulfill those orders, I was buying more than I actually needed, because I buy wholesale bunches. What can I do?”
That is when she remembered posts she saw in a Facebook group, where some fellow florists mentioned they had started programs during their slow months. They would take nominations and send surprise flowers.
“It wasn’t called Community Uplift, but it’s basically the same thing,” Wiencek said. “I was like, ‘That sounds really beautiful.'”
She saw an opportunity to help some folks through the trying times ahead while using flowers she had bought in bulk. FloraLore’s Community Uplift Project was born.
“I delivered them around the neighborhood with a little note on them,” Wiencek said of the first round.
She was about to make a connection through one of those deliveries and turn the effort into something much bigger.
“I got a call from somebody who owns a pizza parlor a little bit south of where we live,” Wiencek said of Tony’s Villa Rosa Pizzeria in Frankfort. “He was like, ‘I just wanted to say thank you. You delivered one to my mother.’
“So we started exchanging flowers for pizzas. I sent out some from his shop, actually. I brought about 20 to his shop that he then distributed to his customers. It started taking off.”
People started posting about the flowers they had received. And FloraLore was getting more nominations and donations on her website on a page set up for that purpose.
“I think overall I delivered 262 arrangements,” Wiencek said, with her site noting she received $1,820 in donations for the program. “I guesstimated $10 per, which covers the cost of delivery and flowers, but it’s not quite the retail price.”
She took a hiatus from the program in the warmer months while she was doing farmers markets in Oak Lawn, Evergreen Park and Mount Greenwood.
Wiencek said the farmers markets involved 13-hour days, but she loves them because in addition to showcasing her floral artistry she can truly connect with her customers — connections that became exceedingly harder to make in 2020.
“I end up talking to them about whoever it was that died or their niece who just had a birthday,” she said. “It’s really nice to be able to connect with people in this world where community is so fleeting; it’s so hard to really build and find. It’s really nice to be in a space where people feel more at ease to share their burdens and their blessings.”
Wiencek originally got into the floral business in 2016 after spending some time in academia and realizing she needed to pursue something else. She took a career quiz that pointed her in the direction of floral design. She had plenty of questions, so she shadowed a florist and that experience inspired her to pursue the profession.
Before starting FloraLore, she managed the floral department for a grocery store, which taught her a lot, and then decided it was time to do it for herself.
“I started seeing as I was tracking sales from my department that it kept going up every week consistently,” Wiencek said. “And I thought, ‘If I can do this for someone else, why can’t I do this for myself?'”
Starting her own shop also allowed her to explore a creativity that was hard to pursue at a store, where there was always too much to do. She wanted to do arrangements for weddings and retail and everything in between. She wanted to tell stories with her flowers.
“I really try to connect with the community in a way that’s different,” she said.
The name, FloraLore, came from a friend she played Dungeons & Dragons with in high school and combines her loves of folklore and flowers.
“I felt like it just worked,” Wiencek said. “People really do tell stories through flowers, especially with weddings. They’re telling their love story through the flowers they bring.”
The Community Uplift project is not where Wiencek’s charitable efforts end. She sets aside 10% of her profits to donate to local charities such as the Crisis Center for South Suburbia and the Greater Chicago Food Depository.
After the farmers markets came to a close this year, Wiencek and her husband took a break before the holidays. But she was back in action for New Lenox’s Christmas in the Commons, an annual event for her.
Typically, she would be focusing on over-the-phone and online deliveries (and delivering many herself in the Orland Park, Tinley Park and Frankfort area), but she is laying low while COVID-19 numbers are high. She is expecting to return to work in spring.
Bill Jones is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southtown.
