Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Toni Sicola. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Alright, Toni thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to start by getting your thoughts on what you are seeing as some the biggest trends emerging in your industry.
I think this question is interesting because the larger aesthetic trends within the customer base and the sort of “inside baseball” trends seem different to me in the wedding floral world. Floral trends change with the seasons and with the year, but what I’m seeing from florists more and more is the move toward eco-friendly solutions.
I came to this industry on a bit a whim and with no experience, educated only by a handful of Youtube videos. So it took a while for me to figure out my own aesthetic and the best way to achieve it, mechanics-wise. I continue to learn informally and have taken some steps to get some more formal training too, but I bring this up to say that when you’re building the plane as you fly it, you tend to grab the closest, easiest tool or ingredient at your disposal to get the job done. For me in the beginning, that was floral foam and plastic cages. Since I’ve always featured succulents in my work, I’ve marketed myself as an eco-friendly option. But the more I learn, the more I realize I have so much more to learn in terms of how to truly embody earth-conscious practices in my business.
In the last year and a half, I’ve made a concerted effort to transform the mechanics of my art to better reflect my eco-friendly values. It’s changed the way I ship, the way I build large-scale installations, and the way I preserve my product. I try to reuse everything I can, especially if ingredients come to me in packaging I don’t want to throw away and can give a second use. I even collect water tubes to reuse them when possible.
Learning about and implementing structurally sound foam-free and/or plastic-free solutions is a game-changer for the ecological impact of the industry, but it’s not always top of mind for every client. It feels like an important facet of my business, even if it only marginally moves the needle on actual events booked (if at all). That’s why I mentioned the difference between industry trends and consumer trends.
Couple-wise, I’ve noticed a shift toward whimsical, carefree, airy floral arrangements with lots of space and flow designed into each piece. I’ve loved shifting my work in this direction and have viewed using heavy succulents in these lighter designs as an incredibly exciting challenge. It’s like combining the art of optical illusion with floral design strategy. I’m having to figure out creative ways to hide the mechanics of hand-stemmed succulents while pushing them further out into the design in a creative way, and all without “showing my work.” It’s like a weird 3D art project every time, and I love the challenge.
Conversely, but along the same lines, I’ve also viewed shifts in my own style and the demands of my new location (and new clientele) as a sign that I no longer need to rely on succulents the same way I did when I first started back in 2017. There’s a lot in flux right now for my offerings, and I’m viewing the shifts as really positive and exciting changes.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers
I would love to answer this question as a florist and as a musician.
I fell into wedding floral by accident, by way of a succulent obsession. I started my business with the intention of focusing on workshops, gifts, craft fairs, and home staging. Then a friend asked me to do her wedding, and the photos of my bouquets exploded my Instagram account. I knew succulent-based wedding floral was a thread I needed to pull on, just to see where it would take me, and 5 years later, I’m still absolutely loving both wedding floral and the wedding industry. It’s funny, if you would have told me 10 years ago when I was working in a hospital as a Wellness Program Manager that I’d become a wedding florist, I would have laughed in your face. But you know what they say about best-laid plans …
Moving my business from California to Utah has transformed the offering in unexpected ways. When my husband and I decided to pick up our lives and move from the San Francisco Bay Area to Moab in 2020, I thought I’d be giving up my business entirely. I had no idea that there was a new and thriving destination wedding industry in this small town, but when I did some initial searching, I met the perfect person to welcome me into it, Angela Hays, a local photographer and eventual owner of one of the premiere venues in Moab where I work regularly, The Red Earth Venue. Angela assured me that Moab needed more florists, that there was plenty of room for my business, and that I’d be busy the second I unpacked my house. She was right, and I’m eternally grateful for her counsel in that first encounter!
Serving couples getting married in Moab means serving mostly travelers, so I am offering more rentals than ever, and I’ve shifted the succulent offering quite a bit as well. For one, I’m now renting the plants themselves in larger installation pieces, and even in centerpieces.
This shift is both practical and selfish. It’s practical because traveling couples don’t always want to be responsible for bringing live plants home on planes or long drives. It’s selfish because succulents are MUCH harder to grow in Moab and MUCH harder to find in this area of the country. I’ve also begun to create designs that don’t include succulents at all. My goal is to lighten the load for our traveling guests and make their floral experience as easy and elegant as possible.
I’m actually in the early stages of a pretty massive rebranding effort, due to all the recent changes to my offering. I’ll always include succulents on the menu, but I want potential clients to know that my scope goes far beyond that now, and I not only work with fresh and dried ingredients, but also with sola (wood) flowers (which I hand-dye myself) and top-quality faux florals.
I’m incredibly proud of the tenacity it took to move my business to a far more challenging environment and continue to thrive as an artist, as a business owner, and as a collaborator. I bring that same tenacity to every project I work on, and I think that balancing vision and flexibility is what allows artists to make a living and feel fulfilled.
I’ve had the privilege to work with so many wonderful creatives in Moab and the surrounding areas, from planners to photographers, hair and makeup stylists, caterers, videographers, cake makers, and more. The wedding industry is continuing to grow in our town, and how it grows will determine what will be possible for years to come. I’m very, very invested in helping to lead this growth endeavor alongside the original founders of the industry in Moab. My years of experience working weddings in a major metro area (including Napa and Sonoma wine country) bring a valuable perspective that I think will help elevate Moab weddings to new heights.
As for music, I’ve been singing for as long as I can remember, and I picked up the guitar as a teenager. I was so eager to write that I started creating my own songs as soon as I could string three chords together. I performed professionally for a few years during and after college and released two full-length albums (2001, 2005) and an EP (2008). After a long hiatus from music in my 30s, coming back to it at age 40 with the support of some incredibly talented local players has been such a rush. In addition to playing live in the bar scene here in town, I also offer ceremony music and cocktail hour music to the same folks I’m designing flowers for. It’s a dream-come-true to have so much of my own creativity paying the bills these days. I plan to incorporate my music offering into the rebrand I mentioned, but I haven’t quite solved that puzzle yet. Stay tuned!
If I had to pick one thing that sets me apart as a wedding professional, it’s the uniquely rock and roll vibe I bring to all of my work. Floral artistry can be delicate and sturdy at the same time, edgy and elegant, tasteful and wild, whimsical and grounded. To work with me is to work with both a creative and a collaborator who wants to make music with your flowers and set a scene that will capture the magic of the day.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
Wow, to answer this question is to look out my window at the greenhouse we built for my succulents in our backyard last summer. I won’t take credit for the manual labor involved to erect the actual structure, but I will say that the greenhouse journey has almost sent me over a cliff more than once.
As I mentioned, we came to Moab from the San Francisco Bay Area—Alameda, CA, to be exact. And in California, you can grow succulents year-round in any kind of container, in the ground, inside little pieces of driftwood, in the sun, in the shade, anywhere. My husband and I poured our hearts and souls into the landscaping of our front and back yards at that little house in Alameda, packing every inch of plantable space with succulents over the course of the eight years we lived there. So when we decided to move to a place that has a real summer (in the 100s and even the 110s) and a real winter (with snow and days of freezing temps), we knew that we’d need a greenhouse. We also knew we wouldn’t be able to erect it til well after we arrived at our new home in the winter of 2020.
When we sold our house in California, the new owners generously agreed to allow us to take whatever plants we wanted out of the landscaping to bring with us to Moab. Long story short, things did not go as we’d hoped that first year.
First, the plants had to survive the winter before the greenhouse was built. So I bought grow lights and set up a giant industrial shelf in the garage, turned on a fan for circulation, and hoped for the best.
About half the plants molded that winter—mold in the desert. What?
I couldn’t wait to get them out of the garage once the spring came, but at 4600 feet elevation, the sun torched much of what was left, so I rushed them to a shaded area on the property. From there, they only got morning sun and had to be rotated every few days because they were reaching for the light and becoming disfigured.
After months of searching for builders, we eventually got the greenhouse built in the late spring of 2021, but when I put my plants inside, they began to shrivel and die, one by one. The greenhouse was an oven baking my plants to death, even when we covered them with shade cloth. All the while, I was booking weddings and promising succulents. I was having to dip into my margin to buy plants and hope that they arrived on time from various wholesalers shipping from California. I drove to Grand Junction, CO and cleaned out the succulent sections at various stores there, slowly filling up our porch with new plants that I’d need for the weddings I’d booked while the original plants recovered.
We moved the plants for the fourth time, returning them to the shed, where they suffered through the summer, went back to the greenhouse through the fall, winter, and spring, and I eventually figured out that the entire greenhouse needed to be wrapped in shade cloth and cooled with a swamp cooler through the hottest months of the year. Things finally started looking up this spring, but then we went to California for the month of July and came back to the worst mealy bug infestation I’ve ever witnessed.
Again, we pulled every plant out of the greenhouse, and I went to work saving what could be saved—using tweezers to remove damage or bugs, meticulously treating every leaf of every plant, rinsing the contaminated soil off of every container, disinfecting, replanting in new soil—and ruthlessly discarding what was beyond hope. Gardening is a labor of love, but the experience of growing succulents in Moab is a whole different level of labor that bears no resemblance to the weekends my husband and I would enjoy outside tending to our gardens in Alameda.
All this is to say that resilience is required when you’re working with perishables, especially plants that are living somewhere they don’t necessarily want to live. I won’t claim that I kept my cool through 100% of this trial-by-fire desert experience, but every wedding order made it out the door on time, despite the chaos happening behind the scenes. Every client was happy with their experience with me, I have photos of their beautiful weddings, and I still keep in touch with a few of them.
I’ve shared my trials on instagram stories through all of it, giving tours of the damage, outlining what I’d tried so far, asking for advice, and celebrating small wins along the way. I received tons of helpful advice from followers and friends (e.g. the shade cloth and swamp cooler idea) and discovered that strangers were rooting for my success. One of my favorite wholesalers even offered me a steep discount on some replacement plants as a gesture of support. It was hugely generous.
I also learned (and am still learning) so much about how to tend to a greenhouse. Importantly, I have learned which types of succulents are the most bug-resilient and happy in this climate, and I’ve begun shifting what I grow to reflect that—reducing variety and adding quantity of the plants I know will make it.
I have been known to call myself “Scrappy AF,” both in the real world and on social media, and I think that being honest about this ridiculously stressful (and expensive) journey publicly created a deeper, more human connection with my clients, and also with my followers, friends, and fans. I won’t say I wouldn’t trade it, but I’m a stronger person with a stronger business as a result of all the #greenhousedrama.
For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?
The most rewarding aspect of being a creative is the moment when I push through self-doubt and come out the other side. It happens with almost every one of my creative pursuits—this moment when I think to myself, “Do I know what I’m doing? Is this going to be the project where everyone figures out that I’ve been winging it the whole time?”
Doubt is an inescapable part of the creative process, as is imposter syndrome. For me, this is true no matter which medium I’m working with. It can be a bouquet style I’ve created 100 times or a brand new headpiece idea for a photoshoot. It can be an acrylic or watercolor painting, a sketch on my iPad, a song or story I’m working on, or a recipe I’m playing with in the kitchen. There’s always that moment about a quarter of the way through where I’m not sure I’ll be able to pull it off this time. With writing, it happens almost every time I sit down to work.
Sometimes I have to stop and walk away for a few minutes—or for the rest of the day. Sometimes, I just keep going and push through it. Maybe I change the background music to shift the energy in the room. Maybe I turn the air down. Maybe I take a quick shower. Sometimes I take a walk to clear my head. Whatever the case, I’ve become somewhat of a completist, so I almost never leave something unfinished for long. And if I do leave it for longer than a few days or weeks (obviously not talking about flowers in this case), it lingers in my mind, tapping on the back of my brain every so often to remind me that it needs attention.
In general, I get creative bursts, rest, and repeat. I know some artists (especially writers) say that if you don’t do your craft every day, you’ll never be successful, but I’ve learned that comparing myself to other creatives is the literal death of my own creative energy. It gives self-doubt more power to slow me down. I have so many creative interests, and, even when I retire, I won’t be able to spend time on every one of them every day. For me, it’s about the journey, exploration, experimentation, and finding out what’s possible when I overcome that little voice that tells me that I forgot how to do what I’m in the middle of doing. The high of persevering and actually making something that I can hold in my hands, see with my eyes, or hear with my ears is just unparalleled.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://succulentsforhire.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/succulentsforhire/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/succulentsforhire
- Other: TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@succulentsforhire
Image Credits
Angela Hays Photography
Ryan Lundbohm Corie Spruill Photography
Love and Latitudes Photography
Jessie Lynn Photography