Gifts

This page is not a gift shop. It is the short list of things that can go in the van alongside the flowers, and it is short deliberately.

What is on it

A personal note and envelope. The most undervalued thing we sell. A bouquet with nothing written on it is a delivery. A bouquet with four honest lines on the card is a gift. We write it out by hand from the text you give us, so give us the words you would actually say out loud rather than a greeting-card sentence.

Foil heart balloons in red, pink and silver. Helium, and they hold for a few days. They belong at a birthday, at a proposal that has to be visible across a restaurant, at a ward where a child is the point. They do not belong at a condolence, and in a professional office they read as a mistake.

What is not on it, and why

No chocolates, no bears, no hampers, no vase sold as a gift in its own right. Every florist gets offered these and most take them, because the margin on them is better than the margin on flowers. Our objection is narrower than principle: they turn a specific gift into a generic one. Somebody who receives a bouquet chosen for them plus a box of chocolates that could have gone to anyone has received one thoughtful gift and one piece of filler.

What to add instead

Put the extra into the flowers. The difference between a $109 bouquet and a $150 one is visible from across a room. The difference between a bouquet and a bouquet with a balloon tied to it is not. If you want the gift to feel bigger, move up a band to $110 to $190 or $190 to $290, or move up in format to something already in a vase, which removes the one chore a wrapped bouquet creates for the person receiving it.

If you want it to feel more personal, write more on the card. That costs nothing, and it is the only part of the whole transaction a stranger cannot do on your behalf. There is more on that in flowers for a shop are not flowers for a person.