Sustainable officer flowers are a must for any company looking to highlight their commitment to long term sustainability and positive environmental impact, but have you considered paper office flowers?
This week we are joined by our talented in-house florist and designer, Candice, who is here to share a little about her role at Page & Bloom, her experience of designing with paper flowers, and how they can help your organisation reach their sustainability goals.
Introducing Our Florist & Designer
Hello! I'm Candice, Florist & Designer at Page & Bloom. My work involves designing paper flower displays and arrangements for our corporate clients with a focus on sustainable, eco-friendly flowers that have a reduced impact on the environment.
I trained as a traditional florist and still love using real flowers in my own practice, especially more sustainable blooms grown in the UK (and in my own allotment!). But joining Page & Bloom gives me an opportunity to work in a different medium alongside this where I can really experiment and push the boundaries of how we think about sustainable floristry.
Keeping it Natural
I always base my designs on the way things grow in the garden – no flower is identical and so no bouquet is identical. I have a loose and wild garden style to arranging flowers. I also use Instagram and Pinterest to help inform my design choices, but as all our flowers imitate life, I'm always out exploring parks and gardens!
The Possibilities of Paper
All of our paper flowers are made from recycled and salvaged materials, including books, maps and sheet music, but we've also made them from newspapers, old headed paper and brochures. This means far less waste than if real flowers are used, and it also makes them reusable. We can take a bouquet from an event and turn that into corporate gifts for staff at Christmas, or as a thank you to partners. The possibilities are endless!
Working in paper is a completely different discipline to working with real flowers and it brings both opportunities and challenges. For example, we have to think more creatively about how to create texture and volume, without using large amounts of small leaved foliage- something which is cheap and easy when using real foliage, but very time consuming when it's hand crafted from paper.
A paper flower display also has a much longer life than fresh flowers, so we think much more about the life cycle of the product. With some careful dusting, a paper flower office display can last as long as you want it to! Most of our corporate clients change their paper displays each season, so they keep looking new and exciting and remain a talking point for staff and visitors. We are experimenting with how we and our partners can reuse the flowers, either by recycling them into future displays or through repurposing them as gift bouquets for staff, clients or charity partners. It's a really interesting part of my job and one that makes me approach the brief in a different way to working with traditional flowers.
Plus with paper flowers, there are no regular trips to refresh vase displays and change water in corporate flower displays- definitely a bonus for us as florists as well as for the client!
Reducing the Carbon Footprint and Environmental Impact of Flowers
There is a massive movement in the floristry industry to reduce our carbon footprint and become more sustainable. As an industry that works with such a natural beautiful product it doesn’t make sense to add unnatural ugly products whilst designing such as floral foam or plastic – destroying the environment that it comes from. So I'm always on the look out for different materials to recommend for use in our designs and try to reuse and repurpose materials that are already available to us. Sourcing things that have a smaller carbon footprint is a key part of my work. We've already changed the way we assemble our corporate flower displays to use more sustainable materials- really simple things like using chicken wire instead of floral foam. Part of my job is to train the other women who work at Page & Bloom how to work with these alternatives, so they are confident putting flower displays together in a more environmentally sustainable way.
Paper displays are a brilliant choice in terms of sustainability and reducing environmental impact, especially compared to imported cultivated flowers that can have a really high environmental toll. Research from Cranfield University found that growing 12,000 cut roses in Kenya emitted 2,200kg of CO2, and up to 35,000kg in the Netherlands- that's up to 2.9kg of CO2 per flower! In comparison, as our flowers aren't grown, the emissions are reduced to just our operational costs (electricity in our studio and transportation for postage etc). We also used salvaged and recycled paper, so we're reducing paper waste as well.
Socially Responsible
We pride ourselves on our social purpose: to provide fair employment opportunities to women affected by domestic abuse, so when you buy our flowers, not only are you making an environmentally conscious choice, you're also supporting women into work. You can find out more about our social purpose here.
Looking Ahead
We're working on a big Christmas project, so keep an eye on our corporate page for more details! As part of it we are designing lots of new winter themed flowers and foliage, from rosehips to pine trees- there's never a dull day in the office at this time of year! We are also really excited about some huge paper flower installations for another corporate partner, which will allow us to show how paper flowers can be used on a bigger scale to really create a statement.
Find out More About Our Flowers
Want to get the ball rolling? Our corporate page has a full list of the services we offer. You can get in touch via this form, or you can email us at: hello@pageandbloom.com directly for more information.
Looking for Something Else?
We also offer wedding flowers, and a wide variety of flowers in our online shop.
Comments