We recently connected with Katie Wellenkotter and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Katie thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.
I have been a nurse for nearly 20 years. In that time my entire career has been at the bedside in intensive care units, my current employer I have been with for over 12 years in a level 1 trauma/med/surg ICU at an academic institution. Over the years in my nursing career I have seen more sorrow and sadness than I care to admit. The covid years were especially hard, while I don’t care to get into the nuts and bolts of covid as there are still so many opinions and theories surrounding that time. I wish to dive no further into that issue because it seems that regardless, people have come to their own conclusions regarding that period of our lives however, it did help shape where the business is today. We had started growing flowers and selling them just before covid, we sold them under a tent in our driveway, I was simply looking for a way to utilize the late 1800’s farmstead that we lived on and to give myself an outlet that was a way to spread some joy in this life. I was a farm kid growing up, I wasn’t and am not afraid of hard work, and I’ve always had a green thumb. I spent all of 2019 growing and diving into everything I could get my hands regarding the cut flower world. I took a cut flower growing class through the university, i read countless books, scaled the internet and let my brain soak up all the knowledge it could regarding the industry. I learned a lot and I failed a lot. Fast forward, covid hit, we were home, we were quarantined. My husband and I decided to be productive. We needed a better space to sell the flowers, we knew we didn’t want to spend time at markets and cart our flowers all over the place. We thought, maybe if we love this farm so much, we could share it with other people. So we set to renovating our old shed, once corncrib, into a useful functional space where people could come. We gutted it, we replaced almost everything but the bones, and put an addition on the side which would be our retail space. I have a side passion for designing spaces and where I’m really fortunate is that my husband Matthew has the inherent ability to tap into my brain and not only understand my visions, but also to make them come to life. As we were building it, the ideas morphed and as I saw the space come to life I was like, well, we could sell more than just flowers. What if we focused on things you can’t find everywhere? What if we gave the people a place to find things they can’t find mass produced in stores, or we could back people, and artisans, and social good companies that give back and people who stand for something? We set out sourcing brands and items we wanted to sell in what we call “the mercantile” and once construction was done we starting filling the space with retail items as well as flowers. Honestly, the construction was a good distraction for me, at that time. We opened the new shop space in 2021, under mask. It was a welcome distraction for people, to buy flowers, spread some joy, and shop unique goods.
With more and more people coming to the farm we knew we lacked infrastructure to house multitudes of people at once so the summer of 2022 we leveled our old milk house, it was too far gone to save, but we knew we wanted to keep the same esthetic of the farm with multiple buildings. We wanted to keep the esthetic of the farms that once painted the countryside with multiple small buildings. We rebuilt in with the same footprint but with updated mechanical and plumbing. This space now houses our public restroom and our flower bar area. We just opened that space about a month ago. Yes it took us a year to renovate, but we do all the work ourselves to save money. Lots of love and elbow grease have been put into this place and it fills our cups to see the restoration come to fruition.
I get most excited when I think about our future plans, how we can continue to make things better here, to keep adding and streamlining, to grow more flowers, and to leave the land better than we found it.
Katie, 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?
Like i said in the previous question, I am a nurse of nearly 20 years. I’m also a wife and a mom….oh, and a business owner so I wear a lot of hats. I think what I am most proud of is that we provide a hub where people can find locally grown and made goods. Are there exceptions here? Of course. We outsource flowers when necessary due to our short growing season so we definitely sell flowers that aren’t grown here at times. We also do sell things that aren’t American made, but we make every attempt to source things from brands that meet one of our pillars of criteria that we have set for ourself which include the following: Locally made, social good, eco friendly, women owned, US made, and diversity conscience. One of the other things that I am most proud of about this business is the connections we have made. We have met so many wonderful people throughout the business, it restores our faith in humanity in more ways than one and we have somehow created a space where people feel a sense of calm, unity, and community. We hear all the time from people how peaceful our space is and ultimately hearing those words is a dream come true for us.
We love our customers so much, we have gotten to know many of them and love seeing their faces walk through our door, we hear their story as much as they hear ours. Creating weddings is also a wonderful experience for us, meeting couples, communicating with them and helping their nuptial floral dreams come to life.
Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?
We work very hard to ensure that we harvest our flowers at the correct stage and that we don’t hold them for long periods of time to ensure vase life on the customer end. We often here from our clients that our flowers last a long time, some of that comes from what we do on our end, but it does matter what the customer does so we do our best to try to educate people on the best care for their flowers once they leave us. There are a lot of misconceptions on how to care for cut flowers so we try to communicate that to our customers and the response we often get from people is how long our flowers last.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
The biggest lesson that I have had to learn is that I can’t be all things to all people all the time. I remember one of my very first customers, she complained that the bouquet she received was too small for the price. I was so hurt, I thought wow, that was $15 of beauty that she complained about, $15 of flowers that I had started from seed, nurtured, grown, harvested, arranged, and sold for $15! That was hours of my time and I thought really!? She’s going to publicly complain about that!? I knew her words would hurt my business so I did the best service recovery I could and offered a refund. I pined over that for longer than I should have. Her words consumed my thoughts. I could NOT get that out of my mind. It was certainly a quantity of the freshest stems that was worth that amount if not more, but in her mind the perceived value wasn’t there. So, is bigger always better? In some people’s mind maybe, I could have easily provided her with a giant bouquet of older flowers to reach her perceived value of size, but the quality wouldn’t have been there. So, in business I think you just have to learn that you aren’t for everyone, not everyone will like you or your work no matter how hard you try. Not everyone will appreciate the time and effort you put it, and that’s ok, they aren’t your customer so stop letting those people influence you. Foster the people who do love you and what you do and value you your work.
One thing I want to point out here is how hard creatives work on their craft, how much time and effort they put into their art, business, etc. For us farming is hard, really hard, the work is hard and physical, it’s hot and its dirty, so much is beyond our control, weather, bugs, etc. but you keep on plugging along, taking losses as learning experiences and pivoting when necessary.
Anyone and everyone who has created something from the ground up, learned a skill, or works hard creating something deserves recognition for how much time they have put in perfecting whatever it is they will do. There are people out there who will value that and appreciate the uniqueness of it, and there are people who won’t, that’s just the nature of the game. If foster the relationships you have with fellow creatives and makers and you will not only gain friendships, but also validation and gain an outlet with like-minded people who understand you.
My second lesson that was VERY hard for me to learn is the if it’s ok to say no. While the business was growing I felt I had to say yes to every request and to take on all the work that was thrown at me. While often for beginning business owners who are just getting started and building a portfolio this does feel necessary. I was and am still growing, maintain, and harvesting the flowers, maintaining the shop, managing weddings, and creating the designs, BUT, I have learned what my limits are. The first couple years I was killing myself, literally working all hours of the day and I felt like I was dying. I quickly learned that I have to have balance in my life as well, I am still working as a nurse (and I won’t stop) and I still have a family, so I learned that I only could take on a certain number of weddings, I could only have a certain amount of shop hours a week. After all, all those flowers take an immense amount of time to harvest, condition, and arrange. There is a lot of maintenance involved in caring for the farm, sometimes, we just need a day a week to do maintenance. Saying NO to clients is the hardest lesson to learn, BUT, in order to prevent burnout and to keep the joy alive it is sometimes necessary. Learning your own personal limits as a human and creative is exceptionally hard at times especially when you feel you have to please everyone. I think a little explanation goes a long way for people though, choosing the correct verbiage is essential to explain why you cannot meet their demands. Our hours fluctuate, they have to with all the work it takes, we communicate them weekly via our website and I do think sometimes people find it frustrating we aren’t open everyday, but we just can’t be. We have done our best to train our customer base to find our hours on our website, and if they need something outside of that to reach out. There are a lot of factors that go into our hours, sometimes we have bounty and sometimes we don’t. Working with a perishable product such as flowers is hard to predict how much to have pre-made, after all if it doesn’t sell, it goes to the compost pile, and the biggest factor is time, there’s never enough of it. All in all my biggest lesson I had to teach myself was grace…..that sometimes I just had to give myself some.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.whitefenceflowerco.com
- Instagram: @whitefenceflowerco
- Facebook: @whitefenceflowerco
Image Credits
Willow walk photography Autumn Ferriera