Mass Market News

Samira George/staff photo Lisa Aliment, owner of Bear Creek Florist, builds an arrangement of flowers. Bear Creek Florist has been in operation for 41 years as a flower shop and a gift shop. For 41 years, Bear Creek Florist — formerly known as JaRae’s — has and continues to operate as a family-owned flower shop. Since opening in 1978, Lisa Aliment, the current shop owner, said there are very few stores in Bear Creek Shopping Center that can claim to be original tenants, pointing to Safeway, Rapunzel’s Hair Salon, a barbershop and a drugstore as buildings from a time when her aunt, Janice Tanner, and her father, Ray Aliment, made a pact to open the store together. During the holidays, flower shops everywhere are preparing for the surge of orders from people wanting to decorate their homes for the festivities or to give as gifts for loved ones. A trend Lisa has noticed through the years is the fact that people are buying fewer arrangements specific to a home but rather are giving flower designs to friends as gifts during the holidays. Lisa attributes this change to more people spending Thanksgiving with friends, not just family. “So many people don’t live close to families anymore,” She said. Lisa does not believe the beauty and art of high-end flower arrangements has faded; people still prefer professionally designed flowers over mass-produced grocery store selections or a bucket shop where flowers are hastily grouped and bundled, she said. “I can give the same flowers to 20 different floral designers and give them the same container to make an arrangement,” Lisa said, “and we’ll get 20 arrangements that are very different from each other due to their own artistic interpretation of what a design with those particular flowers looks like.” Although Lisa has a rough idea of what her inventory will look like, she does not have full autonomy over the flowers and foliage that will be on the market; that is dependent on the farmers themselves and what they decide to grow. “The growers grow their crops seasonally,” Lisa said. “So right […]

Source: www.redmond-reporter.com