We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Nicole Ko a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Nicole , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Are you able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen?

I launched my floral design company ephemera in 2019 with only 6 months to spare before the Pandemic shut everything down in 2020. I was able to book a few weddings in that first 6 months before getting shuttered and held on hope during the Pandemic that I would be able to flower again soon when things resolved.

Before launching my company I managed a flower shop fulltime in the West Village and learned how to communicate my design goals with our clients and win their trust. This built the confidence I needed to run my own show and I built a portfolio for my website on the weekends with my friends who were photographers. I eventually took up the craft myself and began photographing my own portfolio and that is how I built ephemera. In the beginning you don’t get the big projects at your doorstep so I advertised my services and reached out to anyone I knew who might be looking for flowers for events and networked with wedding planners. Each small job added something to my existing portfolio and gave me a chance to refine my business strategy and sales procedure. I found myself booking jobs more organically after our first few weddings through word of mouth and the portfolio began to speak for itself. I found myself needed to “put myself out there” less and less and felt a gravitational pull where clients we’re coming to me. In my third year of doing business (post pandemic when we started booking again) I can successfully say we attract our dream clients who really appreciate what we do and see value in our work. I continue to offer incredibly detailed mood boards and a refined vision tailored to our client’s interest and know that we offer something unique that other florist do not tend to offer.

I believe having creative control of my work and ownership of the images I create by photographing our portfolio has helped me to excel by creating a unique brand and I also believe my attitude toward design as a service makes what we offer truly luxury and distinguishes us from our competition.

I didn’t know if my business would come back after the pandemic but I am so glad I held on to hope. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for my mentors, cheerleaders, and clients who helped support us along the way.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I love answering this question. I’m a painter/visual artist by background that got into floristry when I moved to NYC and was starved for nature. My formative years in the big city we’re spent exploring the botanical gardens and wandering into flower shops seeking inspiration. It was very difficult to get hired as a florist without any prior experience. After 6 months of searching I found a shop in the West Village that was willing to hire me on for deliveries and began designing after a few years there, eventually rising to management. In some ways the flower shops function much like a classical atelier requiring people to work their way up through the ranks with discipline.

I bring my background in fine art to my craft with floristry. I love the surreal, sublime, ikebana and the dutch masters. I also love the impressionist period of oil painting and am very influenced by their use of color. I treat the petals like brushstrokes in my work getting a feeling for color and form craving freedom of expression.

I named my floral design company ephemera because it means “something that only last for a little while” and often refers to the fleeting ephemeral beauty of autumn leaves falling. I hope my clients get a sense of living in the moment from the phase and see their investment in the flowers as a chance to heighten the experience. We focus on weddings primarily so my focus is to help time slow down with the flowers and provide the two adjoining families a chance to savor the moment.

Paintings take months to develop and so do our weddings. I believe what set’s us apart from our peers is my interdisciplinary approach to floral design. I bring a study of photography into my practice as well as illustrations to help guide my clients. We are very service oriented. When you are working with ephemera you are getting something that feels very custom, collaborative and unique to your taste.

For anyone looking to get into floral design I recommended getting your hands dirty. Work with flowers and learn their relationship to gravity. You need material to pass through your hands so you can get a feel for how the material will fall in the vase. It doesn’t have to be the biggest name brand, start anywhere and things will lead one baby step at a time.

For someone looking to book a florist that offers custom high quality designs be open to their process. Respect their ideas and invest in the experience. People who care about their work and reputation will handle things professionally and be committed to the vision that will hopefully exceed your expectations. We work with two kinds of clients typically, those who don’t know exactly what the want but are willing to be led through an experience and the other kind that is very decisive and strong minded going in. We work well with both and are happy to lead and collaborate either way.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

Being able to speak from the soul in my work. It’s great to be able to trust my instincts and to have built a career around work that requires me to intuit the designs. Our world is too often rationalized, calculated and commodified. Floristry allows me a brief moment to focus entirely on beauty which has no “logically” value but it’s inherent to our sense of wellbeing. Being able to give that experience to other’s is my greatest calling and I’m glad that I get a chance to speak about things in terms of the value of beauty.

I also love being able to create my own hours and have control of my work schedule for better work life balance.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

I wasn’t build for a 9-5. I don’t think the creative soul is meant for it. I had to unlearn this capitalist system of work in order to find the peace I needed to run my company long term. I need the flexible hours, weeks of open ended planning for our events and the slower lifestyle between events in order to properly rest and recover between big projects. If I tried to keep up with the demands of a 9-5 while also investing into the weekends of weddings I would crumple at the weight of it all. We cannot be accessible to our clients 24/7. The weeks we have event work we try to fully invest in the experience to live in the moment and let our other clients know we will reach back out the following weeks.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.nicoleko.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/e_p_h_e_m_e_r_a/

Image Credits

I am the photographer of all the images, you can credit myself Nicole Ko as the creator. Even the self portraits.