About Spontaneous Flowers

The Beginning

In the spring of 2015, I opened Spontaneous Flowers as a way to honor my grandmother, Dorothy. She was the kind of person who’d arrive at a dinner party with grocery store carnations tucked under her arm, and somehow they’d become the most memorable part of the evening. Not because they were fancy, but because they meant she’d thought of you. She passed away in March of that year, and I found myself walking past this empty storefront on Valencia Street every morning on my way to a job that had stopped feeling important.

One day I just stopped walking past it. I rented the space. I didn’t have a business plan or a floral design degree—I had her voice in my head saying “flowers are never the gift, they’re proof you noticed someone mattered enough to say it twice.”

How We Work

Eleven years in, we’ve built something pretty special in San Francisco’s Mission District. We work with three growers within 50 miles—Marcus up in Sonoma County grows most of our dahlias and garden roses, Patricia runs a smaller operation south of here that specializes in ranunculus and unusual cut greenery, and Thomas manages a small wholesale greenhouse that handles our seasonal demand. I visit each of them at least four times a year, and we talk as much about what they’re excited about growing as what we actually need.

This isn’t how most florists operate. Most work with a wholesaler who works with a distributor. We work with people who know why they’re growing each flower. Marcus can tell you the exact rainfall that made last summer’s roses softer than the year before. Patricia was crying the day we visited during last year’s freeze—she lost a whole section of stock that she’d been nursing for months. That matters to us, and it matters to how we approach orders.

I spend Tuesday and Thursday mornings on design. The rest of the week, I’m in the back with fresh flowers, rebuilding, experimenting, talking with our customers about what they actually want instead of what Instagram says they should want. A woman came in last month looking for “something sad but not depressing” for her sister’s breakup. We did that. We did it with deep burgundy dahlias, olive branch, and one simple lisianthus. She sobbed when she picked it up. Not the sad kind.

Our Team

We’re small—it’s me, two full-time designers, and two people who handle orders and deliveries. Carmen has been with us since 2018 and knows our customers better than I do. She’ll text me on a Tuesday asking if we should order extra garden roses because she’s noticed three wedding season clients have their final tastings coming up. Julio started five years ago and handles most of our same-day orders. He’s the reason we can promise 6 p.m. delivery and actually deliver at 5:45 p.m.

We’re not here to be busy or to be perfect. We’re here because flowers, done right, change how people feel about moments. That’s worth protecting.

What We Actually Promise

We don’t do “occasion flower arrangements.” We do celebrations, apologies, small rebellions, grief, joy, and the moments when you need to tell someone “I see you” but don’t have the words. We use actual flowers, not filler that looks good in photos and dies in two days. We charge fairly—you pay for the flowers and for our time, not for a brand.

We close on Sundays because we’ve learned that the only way to keep doing this well is to actually have a life outside of it. “Flowers aren’t emergency medicine,” I tell people who want Sunday deliveries. “The fact that you’re thinking of someone on Monday is already the whole point.”

We make mistakes sometimes. We’ve sent flowers to the wrong address, used the wrong vase, forgotten to strip leaves that floated in the water. When we do, we fix it and we don’t make excuses. We’ve also done things that made people remember us for years—arrangements that showed up at exactly the right moment, flowers that turned a bad day into proof that someone cares.

Community and Beyond

Every month, we set aside unsold flowers—usually there are some by Thursday or Friday—and Carmen delivers them to the women’s shelter three blocks from our shop. We’ve started supplying flowers for their community dinners. Last October, we worked with a local high school on their rooftop garden, teaching their sustainability club about native plants and how they change what we can actually ask growers for.

In 2026, we’re stronger than we’ve ever been, not because business is better, but because we’ve stopped measuring success by volume. We measure it by whether we can show up for our growers when they have a rough season, whether we can pay our team well enough to attract people who actually care, and whether the flowers leaving our shop are still making people feel seen.