Poppy Flowers founder says following your passion takes time to bloom

When Cameron Hardesty worked a corporate job, she used to get DIY flower arranging kits sent to her Washington, DC, office and make custom designs after work. She’d dream of making flowers her full-time job.

“If I could just do flowers all the time, I’d be happy,’” she remembered thinking.

Today, Hardesty runs Poppy Flowers, a full-service wedding florist founded in 2019. Hardesty told Founder Brew that she hesitates to sound “woo-woo” but believes following your passion can bring you to the right destination.

“If you’re really following what’s inside of your soul and your heart, and you’re putting everything you have into it, and it’s an honest effort, I have found that things fall into place,” she told Founder Brew. “Somehow things just form around you.”

Finding your passion

A visit to the White House set Hardesty’s dream in motion.

As a communications staffer under the Obama administration, Hardesty gave her parents a holiday tour of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. During a stop in the Red Room, one particular arrangement, with a vase covered with sugar-spun birds, left Hardesty stunned.

“I was like, ‘This is art. Who’s doing this?’” she recalled.

Hardesty searched online and discovered there was an official White House florist. Around the same time, her therapist had suggested volunteering in a flower shop as a way to see if she actually liked working in the industry.

“I ended up doing that. It was just in the White House flower shop,” Hardesty said.

Soon Hardesty was stuffing bouquets on nights and weekends for official events. One of her first major parties was Michelle Obama’s 50th birthday, where she arranged table settings while Beyonce’s dancers rehearsed.

Hardesty would take that experience into a future role as head of products at flower startup UrbanStems and believes those volunteer hours helped get her foot in the door.

Her recommendation to others is you don’t have to make your passion into your job or a new company right away. Sometimes, it’s better to have the stability to give you the time and space to discover your interests.

“Get a job, pay rent, but let it be a job. It doesn’t have to be your dream job.” she told Founder Brew. “It’ll pay the bills and give you some mental space to think about what you really want to do.”

Spotting opportunity

Hardesty credits her wedding in 2017 with giving her the idea to start the company.

“I had seen all my other friends’ fancy weddings, and I was like, I gotta blow the flowers out,” she said.

Leveraging connections from her UrbanStems job, she found farms to contract with directly. She hired individual floral designers. On the week of her wedding, she thought to herself there may be a business idea forming.

Hardesty started running the numbers in her head. She spent $5,000 on flowers and $2,000 on labor. She knew other designers in the industry might’ve charged as much as 4x markup. By her estimates, the total costs could’ve been as high as $25,000, but using a direct-to-farm model, she spent less than a third of that.

Another insight from her wedding was that there were talented florists who didn’t necessarily want to run their own businesses. An in-demand designer named Katie impressed Hardesty. She asked why Katie wasn’t doing more to promote her services. According to Hardesty, Katie shared that she wasn’t interested in the business side, and preferred to focus on design.

“Okay, there have to be other Katie’s out there,” Hardesty remembered thinking.

Hardesty determined she could be the one instead to run the background of the business for talented professionals.

Sourcing directly from farms and utilizing a network of freelance designers eventually became core parts of the Poppy Flowers model.

Hardesty stresses that working in the industry first can help you decide if it’s the right fit for your career—or future company.

“Getting exposure to the thing you’re fantasizing about and making it more real can help you make a more concrete decision,” she told Founder Brew.