One of three Denver-based Black-owned flower shops, Black and Blossomed, was booming with business on Valentine’s Day.
Gearing up for Valentine’s Day takes a lot of preparation as it’s typically the busiest time of the year for florists. Ensuring orders and deliveries made it to their destinations in time, Dr. Breigh Jones-Coplin and her team prepped and processed well over 1,500 flower stems for the arrangements a week in advance, CBS News reported. Proud to have birthed a company from a hobby she grew to enjoy during the pandemic, she’s happy to see her business booming.
The entrepreneur sought out a new activity for leisure to tap into when she was overwhelmed with personal situations that affected her mental health. To find an escape from her day-to-day life, she turned her kitchen into a creative space and started her journey of making flower assortments.
“I was going through my doctorate program and throughout the pandemic, I was just really having a lot of mental health concerns, just feeling unmotivated,” she told CBS News.
This led Jones-Coplin to take trips to the nearby farmer’s market to pick the fresh flowers she used to create the masterpieces she began to enjoy so much. Taking notice of her enthusiasm, her husband gifted her the opportunity to take a floral certification class to support her newfound joy.
“They teach you how to start a flower business and everything, and so I was just like, ‘a side hustle doing flowers shouldn’t be like that hard,’ like, ‘let’s do it,'” she said.
Three years later, in 2023, the doctor decided to turn her passion project into an esteemed business with the purchase of a storefront location. The name Black and Blossomed was significant to her because it spoke to her life as a Black business owner who is in her lane and evolving.
“It was going from this survival mode of trying to get my doctorate and my grind mode, to stepping into a creative venture that I didn’t know was going to make any money and it just made me happy,” she explained. “That’s how the business was born; through the pandemic, self-care, endeavor of my own, and here we are.”
Several murals celebrating Black beauty are painted on the walls of the store. It was important for her brick-and-mortar location to embody her culture as a form of representation for customers in the community who look like her.
“Everyone doesn’t have this experience of being able to like go and be immersed in their own community, people who look like them have similar values to them,” she said.
Jones-Coplin hopes that when people see her shop, they know anything is possible.
“I think Black people, especially in my family and my community, we never give ourselves a chance to step out on our creativity, or do things that actually fill us up, she said. “If you can inspire somebody to like take a leap of faith on themselves and be able to see that anything is possible for them as well, so they don’t have to limit themselves.”
