We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Kara Admire. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Kara below.

Kara, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s one of the most important lessons you learned in school?

I met my business partner in Architecture school at CU Denver – where we both learned a number of important lessons. Perhaps the lesson most pertinent to KaraKara Blooms was learning how to consider every aspect of the finished product from the inception of the design and throughout the design process.

Projects in Architecture school required us to take an idea for a building and consider every aspect – where it was going to be built, who it was for, how it would sit on the site, how it would interact with roads, trees, other buildings, the sun, the weather, what the building was for, how people would move through the building, and so on. Designing flowers for a wedding, for example, requires a similar amount of consideration. How many guests are attending, how are the tables arranged in the space, how tall are the ceilings, how will people enter and exit the space, where the dance floor is, and so on. Being able to know and understand these things as we design the event has been one of our biggest take aways from school.

Kara, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

KaraKara Blooms is a full service floral and event design shop in Denver specializing in Weddings, Events, and Daily flowers.My business partner, I opened KaraKara Blooms in September 2022 with my business partner, Connor, after we graduated from the College of Architecture and Planning at CU Denver.

Our backgrounds are our superpower. Our design sense has been honed over years of experience and schooling and gives us a particularly unique skillset with which to design our flower arrangements and events. Let me explain what it means to marry architecture and floral design. Our education and our experience allows us to look at wedding and event design through a more complete lens. We don’t simply arrange flowers for our clients, we help them design a complete experience. Through hierarchy, we can guide guests eyes as they arrive. We design the order in which they will see things as they enter a room. We design moments of interaction between guests, moments of pause – through design we can impact how quickly or slowly guests might walk through a space.

When it comes to weddings and events, we have the ability to build our own structures and to apply flowers in ways and places that might be unimaginable to our clients. This level of knowledge also gives us the ability to express ourselves in studio sessions, building out structures and designs that offer extremely unique experiences to people we work with and prospective clients.

We can create 3D models and renderings of what our designs will look like. We can use materials and manufacturing processes that most other florists don’t have the ability or skill to use. It allows us to curate a highly specific vision for an event and to own the creative design behind it. Everything from signs, to small furniture, light fixtures, art, decorations, backdrops, installations, and beyond are elements that we personally design and manufacture. Our ability to create so many of the visual elements gives us the ability to design an event that is cohesive through and through, nothing feels out of place.

However, floral design is just one of the many way we can express our creativity and design but we don’t limit ourselves to just flowers. Our experience made opening a flower shop the logical first step, but it’s just the beginning of our creative enterprise.

How’d you meet your business partner?

I met my business partner, Connor Jordan, in school for Architecture and Planning. Our backgrounds are both creative. While I a florist in Arkansas for over a decade, I’ve also worked as an event planner and done marketing work. Connor grew up in construction, and also has a graphic design and branding background and is deeply interested in experiential design. We both are also attracted to a challenge. Those paths led us to pursue an education in Architecture and Planning in Denver.

We met each other for the first time outside our Studio 1 instructors office where we both had questions about the project we were assigned. In discussing our questions, we found that we both were there for the same reason. We were obsessed with the details. How could we get a cleaner drawing? Sharper lines? How could we improve our overall composition? Are there design elements we haven’t considered yet? Our chance meeting outside the office lead to a conversation that lasted hours that day and hasn’t stopped in the almost 5 years since. We began discussing opening a design firm together. Not just for architecture, but for anything and everything that interested us. Signs, furniture, lights, jewelry, homes, spaces, buildings, landscapes, environments, school curriculums, the list goes on.

As we finished Architecture school, we began to see a hole in the market. We knew we could deliver a higher quality floral product with design and structure unmatched by anyone currently in the market. So we began focusing heavily on opening the floral design firm. Given our backgrounds, we knew we could quickly make an impact in the market and thus set our sights on making it happen.

Once we decided to open our own business, it all came together pretty quickly. We found a great space on Broadway in Baker, signed a lease and after renovating the space ourselves, we had our Grand Opening just two months later. We’re only just getting started, though. We are developing number of additional ideas we can’t wait to launch in the near future

Can you talk to us about how your funded your business?

We opened KaraKara Blooms on a shoestring budget and with a good deal of luck – putting together the capital to open the shop was just one of the financial considerations we had to make. The initial capital itself was saved up from working our 9-5 jobs.

Once we had decided to open KaraKara Blooms, the first thing we knew we had to find was a storefront – not an easy task in Denver. After a good deal of searching, calling on “For Lease” sings, talking with landlords and real estate agents, touring spaces, going back to our budget, we came across a great space at 4th and Broadway in Baker at a rate that would work within our tight budget.

Once we had a space, we were able to finalize our initial capital needs and get to work. Our shop was used for years by a coffee roaster, so it required a good deal of renovation and repair before it would be ready to open. We did all the work ourselves. We’d work all day at our day jobs and spend nights and weekends at the shop painting, building custom furniture, cleaning, redoing the bathroom, building the cooler. Our construction and architecture backgrounds gave us something of a head start in having the tools and skills to get the space into proper shape.

Purchasing an initial inventory of flowers, vases, plants and pots was by far our biggest, and scariest expense. Trying to anticipate how many of any particular vase or style of pot, for example, was a bit more stressful. My experience as a florist helped inform a lot of the decisions at this time, but curating our own vision of a floral shop was not without some risk. Our entire initial inventory was on the shelves – we didn’t have any back stock, we didn’t have extras of anything. We had to get creative in our packaging, in how we decorated the shop, we had to do most of the work ourselves, though our friends and family were instrumental in getting through the final push leading up to the grand opening.

Initially, Connor kept working at his 9-5 job to help the shop pay its rent for the first several months, but we knew that wouldn’t last forever. That pressure helped drive us to be as efficient in our budgeting and as aggressive in our growth as we could be. Within 6 months of opening, I’m proud to say the shop was paying all its own bills.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.KaraKaraBlooms.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/karakarablooms/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/karakaraflowers/
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@karakarablooms

Image Credits
Stephanie Parsley Photography Alex Medvick Photography McKenzie Bigliazzi Photography IndyPop Photo Chelsea Beamer Photography