30 YEARS OF SMELLIES

30 years ago today, I registered the business name Smellies.

Two days later, the doors to my little, humble florist shop opened at 45 Yarra Street, Geelong. 

Three days after that, it was Valentines Day. 

The year was 1995. I was 23 years old.

30 years ago, the Geelong CBD was a thriving retail shopping hub.

There were banks on every corner, a bustling city pedestrian-only mall, two busy shopping centres, retail shopfronts were highly sought after, there were no empty shops, they were all full of aspirational dreamers and doers selling their goods and services in an emerging city.  I was one of those dreamers and my dream was a simple one – sell fresh cut flowers in brown paper packaging to passers-by. 

That was it. 

30 years ago, all the florist shops in Geelong were selling over-designed floral arrangements.

I had a very amateurish “business plan” written down on one A4 sheet of paper, no financial plan, no marketing plan, nothing beyond painting a shop, turning a key and hoping people would like the same things as me.  At the time, there were no less than 7 florists in the Geelong CBD, but my idea of simplistic cut flower retailing filled a niche, which is just as well because I had absolutely ZERO skills in floral design and had never worked in a florist shop.   I was a Deakin University drop-out, on annual holidays from my job in the wholesale Melbourne rag trade.  I had borrowed $16k from the bank to buy a Ford Laser Liata (didn’t buy the car) and used that money to open up a florist shop.

30 years ago, there was no internet, no smartphones, no social media.

Businesses like mine relied on print advertising like local papers, letterbox drops, flyers, magazines, Yellow Pages and White pages to spruik their goods and services.  Word of mouth and a strong street presence were essential to letting people know you existed, window displays were paramount to luring people through your doors.  To this day, a prominent location and creative window displays remain a pillar of my retail acumen.  I wanted and still want people to be able to come in to see, touch and smell flowers – you can’t do that through a screen!

30 years ago, there was no online banking.

Customers paid for everything with cash, a handful paid using a Bankcard that was manually processed through a ‘clickety clack’ unit and I paid my business bills with cheques.  This meant that every day I would lock the shop for 15 minutes to walk to the bank so I could deposit credit card paperwork, cash and cheques.  It was all logged in a bank book using carbon between the sheets – there was lots of stamping and signatures.  The bank tellers became trusted friends who would save up tales for our daily chats over the transaction.  Deposits would often not be immediately available; you would have to wait for cheques to clear and credit card summaries to be manually approved.

30 years ago, booking jobs with clients would sometimes take days or weeks.

The growth was fast, very quickly customers wanted me to create floral designs for their business reception areas, weddings and events.  My limited skill set didn’t stretch to this kind of work, so I put on my first employee (Shannon) a fully qualified florist and watched everything she did – everything!  Later, I would take days off work to travel to Melbourne to go to floristry school to hone my skills so I could take on more and more advanced floral work.  I did quotes for larger scale events in writing using a duplicate book, which were then folded and put in an envelope with a stamp and posted through the mail.  Later I would get a fax machine to transmit quotes and flower orders to suppliers, but it was only possible if the receiver also had a fax machine!   

30 years ago, I thought my business would be lucky to last 2 years. 

We outgrew the little shop in Yarra Street within 4 years and took the leap to a much bigger shopfront on Moorabool Street, where the shop remains today.  I was always meant to lease an historical building, a vintage structure with exterior character, and an aged, friendly ghost.  I love old stuff that tells a story, and this building had lots to tell!

The old Dan O’Toole furniture store boasted the first commercial sprinkler system installed in Geelong, that grand Grinnell system still sits proudly inside the front window as a sign of how far Geelong has come and in many ways of how far I have come.  It was 1999 and my new landlord would come in with his receipt book to collect the rent on the first of every month and tell me how pleased his late father would be that the shop had been given a new lease of life. 

I’m happy that our ghost is happy.

30 years ago, I never imagined employing staff to work for me

Any small business owner will tell you that their staff become an extension of their own family, and I can say that over the last 30 years I have walked alongside my employees through the best and worst periods of their lives.  I have watched so many of them grow from teenagers into adults, meet their soulmates, I’ve seen them get married, been to their family celebrations, held their babies and hugged them through grief.  If our old workbench could talk there would be tales of heartbreak over love lost, joyous laughter at what happened over the weekend, cheering over personal achievements, warm hugs for days where you just need a hug and copious conversations about food, recipes and sugar fixes.  I have supported numerous young people as apprentice florists, honing their skills to be the best florists they could be and encouraged others to develop their skills whilst under my old tin roof.  Lots of those people have gone on to own their own florist businesses and forged successful paths in other industries when their Smellies days were over, a small testament to what they learned from me.

I am honoured to have remained in contact with dozens and dozens of people who shared time with me at Smellies and am so very grateful for their efforts in helping my business grow.   Those special work relationships are among some of the most treasured parts of the last three decades.

30 years ago, 90% of flowers sold in Australia were Australian grown.

Supply of flowers to the shop was all about building relationships with local flower growers, hardworking people (lots 1^st and 2^nd generation Australians) who would work around the clock to plant, nurture, harvest and process flowers to take to the Footscray wholesale market or deliver direct to our door.  Those with bigger operations invested in hothouses to extend growing seasons and trucks would bring other varieties from farms interstate with different growing climates.   I would rise at 3.30am twice a week to go to the wholesale market to buy flowers for the store – it was physically demanding, but there was so much joy in hand selecting from those who had poured their hearts into every stem and connecting with other florists doing just the same.  I travelled to the market for over 20 years, the growers I bought from became a huge part of the weekly routine of my little shop until the wholesale market moved to Epping and I decided to tap out.

Sadly, 50% of the flowers sold in Australia are now imported – most of the growers I dealt with decades ago have been unable to sustain businesses to compete with cheap overseas labour and increased costs of operations.  It has been challenging, but our commitment to stocking ONLY Australian grown flowers is a mainstay of our “paddock to vase” philosophy.  On a weekly basis we support over a dozen local flower farmers from around Victoria who deliver direct or through wholesalers to our shop.

Every stem I sell supports an Australian to pay their mortgage, school their children, put food on their table, employ others and (hopefully) have a holiday every now and then.  This ethos is something that I take great pride in, and I know our incredibly loyal customers are equally as focussed on supporting and buying local flowers.

Heartfelt thanks to our customers from everybody in the Smellies supply chain.

30 years ago, the world was very different, I was very different.

In the course of thirty years, so much has happened that has had a profound impact on lifestyle, business operations and communication.  We have navigated the devastating impacts of events like September 11, Global Recession, COVID-19, cost of living crisis, worldwide conflicts, bushfires, floods and other atrocities.  Along the way I have embraced new technologies, evolving trends, adopted techniques to be sustainable, adjusted mechanics to reduce waste and never stayed stagnant.  

The greatest change of all has been the arrival of the internet – information has become so accessible; people have become connected well beyond 9am-5pm.  We can now operate a business from anywhere in the world at any time of the day and setting boundaries around when to switch things on and off has been something everybody is trying to make balance.

The world is so much faster, but the flowers continue to grow at their own pace, in their own time and by the cycles of the universe that are billions of years old – there is something very humbling about that. I turn the key at 5.30pm each day and switch off like I did 30 years ago, so I am present for family, friends, books and my garden when the shop is closed.  Keeping things as slow and balanced is a lynchpin of my longevity.

30 years on, what does success look like? 

It’s waking up every day and knowing that:

somebody will come home to flowers on their doorstep because they are adored,

that someone who is ill receives a bunch to lift their spirits,

that a widower gets a bouquet to ease some of the hurt,

that a bride will hold flowers whilst declaring their love,

that a new mother gets a design to welcome a new life into hers,

that a new graduate gets flowers to acknowledge their effort,

that a hard worker gets a posie to congratulate them on their retirement,

that a friend receives a stem from another to say they will be okay,

that somebody buys flowers for themselves as a gesture of self-care.

There’s a magical moment when somebody gets flowers.  It’s the moment where you feel the pull of their heart, sense an inhale of their breath and a softening of their face.  It’s that moment of realisation that somebody has thought of them – it’s the powerful connection of petals to people and of people to hearts.

Success is in helping make those moments happen.

Cheers to thirty years!

Amanda x