THE WEDDING SERIES: How to Find the Perfect Wedding Florist
Welcome to the wedding series, where I interview brides, vendors, and venues to dive into the intricate world of wedding planning, vendor selection, and everything in between. The series continues with an interview with Cailla Quinn, a wildly talented and creative florist who started her floral design business, Ephemirus (how beautiful, right?), two years ago and hit the ground running. We talk about how she found herself in the industry, how to go about hiring a wedding florist, her dream project, an exciting upcoming venture. Read on to learn more about Cailla, Ephemirus, and how her floral designs can set the tone for your entire wedding day.
Turning A New Leaf (please bear with my flower puns throughout this post, I can’t help myself)
Cailla has always been a creative, long before starting Ephemirus. Having studied photography at Parsons, she always thought her career would focus around her lens. But after working as a gardener and landscaper for a local company for a few seasons where she managed perennial gardens on various Estates, she found that she loved working outside in the natural world with flowers, greenery, and other plants as her medium. With this new-found love and a passion for design, Cailla began planting seeds (again, sorry) with floral design industry leaders. “I met this woman Julie who's another wedding florist and she asked me to help her on a few jobs. So, I took over some of her jobs and then we just kind of stayed in touch. And then when the pandemic hit she posted something like ‘all my weddings got cancelled and I have all these flowers coming up in my greenhouse and I can't pay anyone to help me because I don't have any income now,’ so I just had this idea where I reached out to her and said if I come down and help you garden for free will you compensate me in buckets of flowers and some design knowledge and so we did that for several months. She took me under her wing and taught me a lot about floral design and then once wedding started picking up she asked me to help her on some weddings. So that was the real intro.”
A Name With Roots
I asked Cailla how she came up with her business name, Ephemirus, as I could not stop thinking about how beautiful and poetic it sounded to me. “It comes from the word ephemeral which means transient, fleeting, which flowers are just that, right. And I've loved that word so much and I feel like it describes my design style so much, but I wanted it to feel a lot more powerful, a lot more grounded or feminine. So I had pages and pages of brainstorming names that I wanted and I'm going through all these names that I've just compiled, I want to say over the course of a year, and my mom, who's also an artist, was like ‘you know it might be worth looking at some things in their Latin root.’ So I started looking up words with their Latin root and I came across ‘ephemeris’ and I just loved it and it just felt like the right fit.” And I think she nailed it. When you see Cailla’s designs, you can’t help but feel the feminine, powerful energy they exude. They are both strong and soft, full and airy, bright and moody, eternal and fleeting.
Sprouting Inspiration
As I was interviewing Cailla, I could see various images hanging on her studio wall behind her—images from differing sources, styles, timelines, and texts. While all of the wall-hangings were unique in their own right, they also seemed to fit beautifully with the Ephemirus brand and Cailla’s floral designs. She told me this was her version of a mood board where she posts images that catch her eye to pull from for upcoming projects. “I'm always pulling inspiration from, not only just gardens and the plant world, but from Old World paintings or ceramics or stained glass and things like that.” Feeling very intrigued and inspired by this answer, I followed up to ask how Cailla would describe her design style. “My work is definitely rooted in my background in gardening and landscaping and watching how flowers naturally grow and how plants look together in a space. For me, it's always important that the flowers can kind of stand on their own and speak on their own so they're not crammed into a design. There's a lot of airiness—I love negative space. I don't feel they need to have everything look the same or be polka dotted. I love my designs to really look like we literally pulled a bunch of flowers out of the garden and put them on your table or in a statement piece for a bar. I love texture and contrast and I love things that are moody.”
From Florist to Friend
If you’ve seen my earlier episodes of The Wedding Series, you know that Cailla is designing the floral arrangements for my friend’s wedding this upcoming fall. My friend could not stop raving about how her florist came out to her venue to spend the day with her and make sure she could bring her floral dream to life, all before my friend officially booked her. And after speaking with Cailla about her relationship with her clients, this interaction does not surprise me. “For me it's really important that I have really great connections with the people I work with. It's not just about business, you know, it's not just about an exchange of goods for money. I really love getting to know my brides. I really love grabbing a drink with them and catching up even after the weddings. I did a couple's wedding two years ago before I was even officially in business and I just met their baby for the first time. We went out to lunch and it was just really nice. The people I work with mean something to me, you know. They're part of my life and I was a part of part of their life. So yeah, I care a lot about personal connection with my clients.
Picking The Florist For You
I asked Cailla what her couples should know when they are looking to book with her. She said that first she wants to get a better idea of what they are looking for. “I usually ask upfront what is it that you know you want? I like for them to give me a list of deliverables. Deliverables could be ‘I know I want a bridal bouquet, eight bridesmaid bouquets, and I need 15 center pieces.’ Or ‘I want a traditional arbor.’ So I always trying to get a sense of kind of the scope of what they're looking for. And then I always ask for inspiration photos. This can be from Pinterest, it can be from something else too, but what that does is that helps me understand what they're drawn to in terms of design style, color, the feeling of the designs. It's especially helpful for people who are like ‘I don't know how to talk about florals’ which that's okay. I would never expect anyone who doesn't work in this like automatically know how to talk about florals. So that's why I find that the visual inspiration is helpful. And it's just as important for me to know what you don't like. I want to know if you're like ‘I actually don't like the color yellow’ or ‘I really don't like daisies, please don't use daisies in my wedding.’ That's just as important to me as knowing your favorite flower is a dahlia. So I usually start there get that information then we'll schedule a call and I'll get on the phone. I always kind of start the conversation with ‘how do you want to feel on your wedding day’ and ‘how do you want your guests to feel on your wedding day’ and ‘what's important to you, what's not important to you’ and then we kind of talk through everything they're thinking, logistics of the venue, budget, etc.”
A Blossoming Career
While Cailla loves designing for weddings, she is also involved in a variety of other floral projects, ranging from bar designs to her dream project, the Art in Bloom at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, MA. “I basically get to create this massive floral installation that's going to be in one of the main locations of the museum. A lot of what this is (referencing to her mood board behind her) is me just starting to brainstorm like okay what do I want to do for this and what do I want it to be inspired by and what shape do I want it to portray. So I'm just in the brainstorm period right now but it's been really fun to play around with that.” As this is only Cailla’s second season in business, you may have thought that I was surprised that she was asked to participate in such a prestigious, exclusive event. But after seeing her designs, I was not surprised at all—she is right where she deserves to be. But she is definitely excited for the opportunity: “I'm an art kid too, like I went to art college, so I can't help it, like I'm geeking out, because that was one of my dreams was to be in a major museum, and studied photo so I think you know when I was in school at Parsons I was thinking like ‘oh okay maybe I'll be in a museum for my photography’ and then here I am, I've totally pivoted careers, but I’ll get to be in a museum for my floral design.”
Whether you are looking for a florist for your wedding or simply want to check out Cailla’s gorgeous designs, you can find her on instagram at @Ephemirus or on her website at https://www.ephemirus.com/. The Art in Bloom installations go live at the MFA on Friday, April 26th, 2024—be sure to head over there to check out Cailla’s floral arrangements! You can also watch our full interview on my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFIW8IQgGGo
*All photos from this post are courtesy of Cailla herself!
