Art of Business: Better Blooms

Stems Inc.

Maggie Oyen arranges a bouquet for a client’s birthday as Sophia Tarassov paints birch cups for petal flowers.

At Stems Inc., a wedding, floral, and event design studio in Red Hook, Maggie Oyen and her staff don’t use black buckets, the staple of most florists and grocers. Instead of placing their product in black containers, which mask the condition of the water, they coddle their stems in white buckets, allowing them to gauge the cleanliness of the water and to change it often.

Stems also doesn’t use a cooler, another rarity in the business. “Our flowers are never put into a cooler—never,” Oyen says. “They get to drink and revive.”

A former pilot and flight instructor, Oyen is adamant about how flowers should be treated after traveling thousands of miles by air. “Flowers are living things,” she says. “After flowers are harvested, they’re put into boxes. They’re thrown into unpressurized cargo bins on airplanes, without oxygen. It’s freezing cold at 37,500 feet when you’re not sitting in the passenger cabin.” She winces when comparing her product’s journey to that of a dog trapped for hours in the belly of a plane.

After the flowers land, they are loaded onto trucks and delivered to wholesalers. Then they are picked up by other wholesalers or florists. “They get chopped and thrown into cold water and put into a 42-degree cooler,” says Oyen. “How well would you do?”

Over the past 10 years, Stems has gone from being a company that ships flowers throughout the US, including Alaska (which is “very difficult,” according to Oyen), to a small but successful event design studio. Instead of operating as a traditional flower shop, or being located in an area with constant foot traffic, Stems is based at the Chocolate Factory, a restored 19th-century industrial building that now houses galleries, shops, and businesses, and that is tucked away a short distance from the intersection of Routes 199 and 99 in Red Hook. The Stems space is loftlike, with sleek wood floors, a high ceiling, and skylights.

While individuals are welcome to purchase flowers directly from Stems, they need to order ahead of time. “Our position on purchasing is that we do not purchase unsold perishable materials,” says Oyen. Occasionally, on a Monday or Tuesday, after the weekend’s weddings and events, there are flowers to sell. Yet there is no guarantee. “Walk-ins should preorder,” says Oyen. “We have one nice woman who comes up from New York City, and she’s the only one who will stop in by chance. Sometimes she’s lucky.”