We recently connected with Lesa Fenwick and have shared our conversation below.

Lesa, appreciate you joining us today. Can you tell us about a time where you or your team really helped a customer get an amazing result?

So many of my days and interactions with customers are meaningful – the floral industry is here for all occasions, the happy and the sad. My customers become friends, people I can share a glass of wine with. One of the most meaningful stories though was this one: A man called from out-of-state. His mother had recently passed, and he wasn’t able to make it but got to be with her and the rest of his family thanks to Zoom. Before she was to be cremated, he wanted to cover her with flowers. I mean – every inch of her was covered. Flowers were always important to her, and he always gifted them to her (from Candlelight too!) as he was growing up. So I went to the funeral home and filled her cremation box with flowers. Fast forward almost a year later, the same man calls me again as it’s now time to finally bury mom and again, he wants her surrounded! We filled the plot with flowers, and then after the ceremony when they set her box down into the ground, even more flowers were added. Talking to him about his memories of his mom and her love of flowers filled my heart with joy. Being invited to be a small part of such an intimate time, was one of the biggest honors of my career so far.

Lesa, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Candlelight Floral & Gifts has been in downtown Wayzata MN since 1963. I started working here in 2010 when I was looking for a business to own myself one day. The previous owner, Vickie, was at year 38 of biz ownership at that time and had never had any of her prior employees show interest in taking it over. She basically offered me the store in my interview! I told her “Give me a job and we’ll see how it goes.” Fast forward five years and my husband and I purchased the store in 2015.
We are a traditional brick and mortar retail flower shop offering fresh cut flowers and arrangements, house plants, custom sola wooden bouquets, and unique gift items. We have a group of delivery drivers that enable us to deliver to the entire Twin Cities Metro Area – almost 100 different suburbs. Flowers and plants are 95% of our sales, and we take great pride in the quality we offer. We source as much of our products locally, not only for freshness but also for the best pricing available to us. We are happy to say we are here to serve for all occasions – birthdays, anniversaries, funerals, holidays, new babies, weddings and more. Funerals are becoming our specialty; those orders are more meaningful than any others to me.
Charity and volunteerism are at the core of our shop – you can often find us volunteering at local Chamber of Commerce events and giving out free flowers to passerby’s at lunchtime for our annual Petal It Forward campaign. We also partner with a local charity for women dealing with breast cancer and donate proceeds from our sales every October. My husband and I have both been involved in the local Lions Club of Wayzata and he serves on the Wayzata West Metro Chamber Board of Directors. In 2022 I received three awards for my volunteerism and community involvement.
In 2023 I created a mentorship group for other florists in the state. The Minnesota Floral Mentorship Community is open to all retail brick and mortar shop owners in the state of MN to connect with and support each other. Our tagline is “Community over Competition” and it really speaks to what we’re about. I’ve had some great mentors in my run with Candlelight, and now I have the time and space to give back to other florists.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

Our flower shop has been in business since 1963, so we have a long history in our community. There have been three owners of the shop – all women (with their spouses by their sides of course!) and the true testament to what we do is the fact that we’re still here! We’ve made it through recessions, major world events, a global pandemic, rioting – you name it, we’ve persevered. We have grown with the industry – from being excited for a $50 order, to now our average is in the $100-150 range! We have pivoted when we needed to, and we have adapted to changes. I think the main success factor of the business is our customer service is #1 priority. Sure, we take great pride in the quality of our work and the freshness of our product, but our people skills are the most important to us. We listen to our customers, anticipate their needs and execute to the very best of our ability. A testament to our service, is we are doing third generation of weddings. We’ve done Grandma, Mom and now daughter’s weddings. We have done multiple generations of funeral work for families. We are so proud to be a part of all moments in people’s lives.

We’d love to hear about how you keep in touch with clients.

I work with a couple of really great companies to help with our online presence but do all my social media marketing myself. I want the business to have my voice, not someone else’s. One thing that I take a lot of pride in is my handwritten birthday and anniversary reminder cards I send in the mail. I sit down at the computer and go through week by week in the previous year and send a reminder card to anyone who sent a floral gift from our store for a birthday or anniversary. Often times, people forget where they bought a gift from the year prior, and this is a good way to keep us top-of-mind. Also, when doing this, I can customize each note with messages specific to the client if I haven’t interacted with them in a while. Another thing we love to do is every October, on the third Wednesday, we (along with other florists in the country) hit our main street during lunch time and give away free bouquets! We call this event “Petal it Forward” and what we do is give two bouquets to each person – we ask them to keep one for themselves and petal the other one forward to brighten someone else’s day! The community looks forward to it every year and just last year, we gave away 1000 bouquets!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://candlelightfloral.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/candlelightfloralandgifts
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/candlelightfloralandgifts
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lesa-fenwick-87288a108/
• Yelp: https://biz.yelp.com/biz_info/5hEJbXoyVFIiBmNt2xyuiA