Hannah Allen: Putting Petal to the Metal

About this Episode

Hannah Allen stumbled into the flower industry with a customer service job. “I had no intention of touching flowers whatsoever,” Hannah said. “Only because my manager was just like, ‘This is your job. Don’t expect much.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, sure, fine.’ I was young and dumb, so I was like, ‘I’ll just do whatever. Just give me a paycheck.’”

Then the head florist, Marie, asked her for some help. “She got really overwhelmed one day and she was like, ‘Come on over,’” Hannah said. “She was drilling me on the flowers, on what’s what, I had to label them. She taught me all the basic arrangements that I needed to know.”

Marie was transferred, and Hannah became head designer at the shop.

She’d always loved weddings since she was young. As the flower girl at the weddings of her mother’s friends, Hannah was determined to do the best job she could. When a bride came into the shop looking for affordable wedding flowers, Hannah remembered how much she loved weddings. “A girl came in looking for cheap wedding flowers on the fly,” Hannah said. “My manager handed me this big binder full of wedding information on all the questions you need to ask and all this stuff. And he was like, ‘Here you go. You can do it.’ I was like ‘Oh, ok.’ Having that sit down with the bride and getting excited and talking about what we’re going to do for her wedding was what ignited that, I think. I had this entire trade-style crash course on how to have a wedding consultation. That’s where it started, I think. It was the wedding stuff.”

In 2018, when she decided to “go rogue” as she described it, she started with Hannah Allen, Flower Gal. Then came Petal to the Metal Floristry. “I was just making an Instagram post one day, and I was just like, ‘Everything is going so fast, it’s petal to the metal.’ It just clicked in my head. It was the best pun of all time for a flower business.”

Find more of Hannah's work:
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/petaltothemetalar/
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/petaltothemetalar/

Sustaining Craft is a project of Hew&Weld Writing. There are no fees for artists and craftspeople to participate. Everything is funded through partnerships with friends. Music provided by Jim Ciago (Seven Second Chance on iTunes and Spotify & Nomad Neighbors in the Denver area most weekends).
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Facebook - http://facebook.com/sustainingcraft

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