How a Holt woman built crepe paper flower bouquets into a blooming business
HOLT - Liz Carter took a part-time job at a Colorado floral shop, hoping to meet new people, and instead fell in love with the flower business.
Fast forward more than a decade and Carter, 42, now with extensive experience working with flowers and owning her own shop, has built a business around designing and selling flower bouquets that will always be in bloom and never out of season.
Unwilted, the online business she founded in early 2019 from her home in Holt, offers floral bouquets and creations she designs out of Italian crepe paper.
The delicate flowers are created out of as many as 100 pieces of bendable crepe paper shaped into petals, buds and leaves. The bouquets Carter arranges and assembles by hand are colorful, realistic and made to last longer than the real thing.
Crepe paper flower arrangements helped Carter rediscover a love for flowers she thought she'd lost by the time she moved back to Michigan in 2016.
It started as a hobby, something she tried after seeing examples of arrangements posted to Instagram.
Today, Unwilted is a successful, growing business. Carter, a Holt High School graduate, ships her creations to customers all over the U.S. and around the world.
This month the business moved out of Carter's basement and garage and into a 3,130-square-foot suite off Delhi Commerce Drive.
"This new space will give me the room and freedom to really open up more options, more availability, for the different types of products that we do have," Carter said.
An art form
To work with flowers is to be a kind of artist, Carter said.
Bouquets are emotional, meaningful, beautiful, Carter said, and arranging them requires creativity, along with the ability to take what you have on hand and create something that matches the needs of a customer.
"I think it's such an interesting job because you're constantly working with seasonality," she said of traditional flower arranging. "Not only are you sending something that represents an emotion, but you're working with what you already have in the cooler most of the time."
In Colorado, Carter went from working in a flower shop to co-owning one for seven years.
After years spent working long hours and weekends, she came back home to Holt five years ago exhausted and convinced she was done with flowers.
I need to make a big shift, Carter thought.
She met her now-husband Alex, settled into a new house, then stumbled across some examples of crepe paper flower creations.
"It was an old-school form of art, like crocheting or knitting," she said.
Carter started to dabble in making her own and realized that with crepe paper flowers creators aren't limited by a season. For example, they can use peonies or tulips any time of the year, and their arrangements will last more than a week.
"I was like, 'Oh my gosh, there's so much potential here,'" Carter said.
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Expanding with a workspace in Holt
Her business started small and gained a following. Then it attracted investors.
Carter went from designing and making each flower herself — each taking her between 30 minutes to an hour to make — to developing individual prototypes and workbooks for making each variety, then outsourcing the production of flowers.
The finished pieces are shipped to Carter, who assembles the arrangements herself before shipping them out to customers.
Just how close to fresh flowers are they?
"You can use certain weights of this paper differently so some of the petals are really, really airy, and some are a little more dense, and at the end you're putting everything into a bouquet together," Carter said. "You end up having this realistic-looking arrangement because you do have all those textures."
Unwilted creations range in price from $29 to $385, depending on the size of the arrangement.
"They're full, they're beautiful," Carter said. "They are at the peak stage, so what you're sending, what you see online, is what you're going to get."
She realized she needed to move the business out of her home and garage this spring as she filled close to 500 orders for Mother's Day.
"It was crazy," Carter said. "I was also seven months pregnant."
Her daughter Hazel is now five months old. Unwilted's new workspace is a welcomed next step, Carter said.
More space for crepe paper flowers and room for putting together arrangements will mean more business, she said.
"I can take more orders, and hire people," Carter said. "I'm so excited because for me this is super creative. I just get to play with flowers all day."
Visit Carter's online shop at www.unwilted.com .
Contact Rachel Greco at rgreco@lsj.com. Follow her on Twitter @GrecoatLSJ .
This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: Unwilted, a crepe paper flower business, is expanding in Holt.
