Today we’d like to introduce you to Amy Schlung And Andrea Fuentes.
Amy , we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
Amy Schlung and Andrea Fuentes are the fresh flower growing duo known as Flourish Blooms and Such, LLC. While Andrea and Amy have been friends and neighbors since 2008 and have always shared a love of gardening and floral design, they started their business partnership in August 2022. They began by planting fall bulbs and perennials, researching best practices and growing seasonal cut flowers in their Liberty, MO home gardens. Flourish originated by frequenting local farmer’s markets and creating special event floral orders. Flourish later expanded to providing home-delivered monthly floral subscriptions, and in the summer of 2025 launched the Flourish Flower Stand at Amy’s home in Liberty. Amy and Andrea both have full time jobs and spend the majority of their time outside of work and family in the gardens and designing fresh arrangements for treasured customers. Their business model is unique – Flourish creates fresh, seasonal bouquets, arranged in vases, ready to enjoy. Arrangements from Flourish are locally-grown, as fresh as can be found, and are selected and grown for their beauty and long vase life. Flowers, blooms, designs and color palettes will vary from week to week, and season to season, based on what the garden is producing at that moment. Flourish is producing gorgeous, garden-grown arrangements April through first frost – typically mid- October, and Amy and Andrea begin sewing seeds for the next season each January.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
So. Not. Smooth. We have chosen a business model that has a product that is extremely perishable, is impacted by weather, bugs, wildlife, and other environmental impacts. It requires constant care, attention and frequent problem-solving. We learned early on that some people think of fresh flowers as a luxury item or a waste because “they’re just going to die.” And while we totally get it – flowers are a want, not a need – we learned that farmer’s markets are not our target customers and were consuming our weekends with very inconsistent sales. When we spend hours harvesting blooms, and more hours creating custom arrangements, and then many more hours sitting at events and markets to find that those customers feel as though a fresh floral arrangement has to have an occasion (birthday, Mother’s Day, etc.) Some of those customers didn’t feel justified in enjoying flowers every day so we grew very weary and concerned that we couldn’t make our business sustainable. We continued to look for opportunities to grow our brand and identify customers who are interested in regularly treating themselves and their loved ones to locally-grown, fresh, seasonal flowers. Determined to find ‘our people’, we leaned into monthly subscription sales and expanded our hours at the Flourish Flower Stand to Fridays and Saturdays from 8 am to 2 pm, Since the Flourish Flower Stand is a self-serve, honor-system experience, we don’t always get to meet ‘our people’ so we’ve made a point to now include a comment box, gather emails, and encourage our customers to post/share photos of their arrangements they took home so that we get to know our biggest fans and can share our appreciation for supporting our women-owned, small business.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about Flourish Blooms and Such, LLC.?
There are so many talented flower growers in the metro area who we follow, admire and thank for their gracious support and assistance they’ve provided throughout the years. We don’t operate a large-scale farm with machinery, greenhouses, or employees. Flourish is all about two friends, Amy and Andrea, making new friends through flowers and bringing joy to our local community through locally-grown, seasonal blooms. We do all the research, we learn by trial and error, hauling truckloads of compost to our home gardens, digging, planting, watering, weeding, harvesting, designing, marketing and selling the freshest blooms from a suburban flower stand. Conversely, we don’t have the production volume to sell bulk stems or to provide fresh blooms November through March. That down time gives us a minute to rest, plant for next year’s garden beds, find new ways to grow more efficiently and bring our treasured customers a joyful, gorgeous experience year over year. What makes us most proud is when our customers tell their friends and share their happiness with others. There is no better feeling than knowing that someone drove up to our flower stand, picked out something beautiful, and then shared that wonderful experience with others. Our monthly subscribers text us how delighted they are about their monthly deliveries and it really makes us feel like our bazillion hours in the garden are really making a difference in peoples’ lives.
How do you think about happiness?
Amy is the mastermind of planning, production, operations, finance, technology, legal, research and development and realism. She is the seedling whisperer and is amazing at trouble-shooting issues in the health of our garden beds and has a sixth sense about when fertilizer is needed and how to best care for, harvest and extend the life of our blooms. A self-acclaimed realist, Amy is happiest when the gardens are thriving, the critters and bugs are at bay, and she’s harvesting for hours on a mild day, filling buckets of field-prepped blooms that are ready for building bouquets for our customers. Amy is always willing to take a customer on a garden tour, explaining the different benefits of each plant, how it was grown, and what it needs. Her motto in the garden is ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ because she thinks Andrea is an over-waterer – which may or may not be true.
Andrea is in charge of marketing, sales, creative, business development, social media, floral design, communications, social media and inexplicable, unwarranted optimism. She is happiest creating arrangements in her design studio (an unfinished room in the coolest part of her basement) and chatting with customers online, via text and email. Andrea creates the Flourish monthly newsletter and is found photographing, planning events, and coming up with the next sales opportunity or brand exposure moment. Andrea also loves the feedback, compliments, positive reinforcement and overall positive vibes that come from Flourish customers gushing about the beauty and value of the creation they are enjoying in their space. Andrea’s gardening style is “More is more” because she is most likely to want more flowers, will say yes to most things and thinks that Amy might be an under-waterer – which may or may not be true.
Pricing:
- Flourish Flower Stand arrangements are $18, $30 and occasionally $50.
- Monthly subscription packages are $225 (3 months), $375 (5 months) or $525 (7 months) which includes delivery in the 5 county metro area.
- Mother’s Day peony arrangements are available for preorder for $35 and $65.
- Special orders, custom and event orders are always welcome!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.flourishbloomsandsuch.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/flourishbloomsandsuch/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FlourishBloomsAndSuch
Image Credits
River Schlung
