(Editor’s Note: The third edition of the Laine Business Accelerator recently awarded $5,000 to 11 enterprises seeking to launch or expand their businesses. The following is a profile of one of those businesses.)
You might say Amy Rivera has spent her whole life in the family business, now named Swan St. Florist.
“Mom would bring me to work there and put me in a bassinet,” she said. “She took over the business from my grandfather, who had run it as a grocery store, as had my great-grandfather before him. But, overnight, Mom changed it from food to flowers … and that’s what it is today.
“Even as a youngster, I loved flowers and bring creative,” she said. “Mom always said I could run a glue gun at the age of 5. I really love working with flowers and the creativity it affords me.”
Though she inherited what was a grocery store, her mom was looking for a different line of business.
“Mom’s inspiration to go into flowers came when she was looking at a beer cooler in the store, and thought, ‘What could I do?’ And her answer was flowers … that was 36 years ago.”
The fourth-generation in her family to work in the same building, Rivera never strays far from the flower shop — she lives across the street from where her great-grandfather started the business some 76 years ago. But that longevity doesn’t mean Rivera has had the business remain static. In fact, she has reimagined the business and turned it into a flower shop extraordinaire.
“Even though we’re a small town (Salamanca) florist, I wasn’t going to let that dictate what we could do,” she said. “I know it’s a trite saying, but we were thinking out of the box, and we decided to go into commercial decorating for weddings and events. We love to take the customer’s vision and bring it to life.”
One of the best examples of Rivera’s creativity in planning events and weddings — and resourcefulness — occurred when she won the bid to do the decorating at the Seneca Allegany Resort and Casino.
“OK,” I thought. “I won the bid … now what?”
“Now what?” transformed into more than 1,500 ornaments, work by the local BOCES to construct a 10’ x 10’ frame, finding red and gold and some silver ornaments — some made by hand — and a U-Haul to get all of that to the casino.
“My vision was to create a stunning backdrop that greeted people as they walked in,” she said. “And it worked.”
Though she enjoys the challenges of the big events, Rivera doesn’t minimize the needs of the local floral customers.
“They are just as important,” she said. “There’s no ceiling on what we can do.”
Her involvement in the Laine Business Accelerator program “just kind of fell into my lap,” she said. “I was looking into different business opportunities, and the Accelerator program looked very inviting. It’s giving me the tools I need to expanding the flower shop. Perhaps the most important thing I’m getting from the program is the networking it gives me. That’s been a blessing to me and my business.”
Rivera said to her attention to quality to detail sets us apart. “We source the freshest flowers from South America, carefully selecting the appropriate flowers to match the color palate and the season.”
She exults in preserving the family business and building on the hard work and sacrifices of her family, both past and present.
Rivera says flowers are so important to her because people convey their emotions through flowers, she said. “I love to bring creativity to the world through flowers. I’m doing now what I’ve always dreamed of doing.”
Perhaps those dreams began for her as an infant in a bassinet so many years ago.
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