Stephanie Stopka: Owner of Flowers by Stem

Stephanie Stopka founded Flowers by Stem in 2006 on the idea that the key to beautiful design is a personal, hand-crafted approach. Stephanie grew up camping and fishing with her family, instilling a deep love for nature. She brings this love of nature to all of her designs. 

She is committed to an eco-friendly approach to floral design (read more about their approach to sustainability here).  Stephanie is also the Vice President of the Green Wedding Alliance, a local organization of environmentally conscious wedding vendors based in and around Chicago.

Stephanie Stopka

I’d love to hear about the origins of Flowers by Stem. 

Coming out of college, I worked in advertising for about 10 years. My husband and I moved down to Charleston, South Carolina, so he could get his master's in architecture. I quickly realized there were no advertising agencies in Charleston, so I ended up working all these part time jobs. I met a guy from Chicago, my hometown, who owned a flower shop. And he hired me to do his marketing and website design.  And little by little I just started peeking around the design studio. I'm like, “This looks so fun.” He said, “Well, I need more help on that side, too, if you want to learn some of this…”

And so I ended up working for them as a floral designer for a year, and I totally fell in love with it. That was back in 2005. When we moved back to Chicago, I went to design school at night to learn the mechanics of floral design, and then just started very organically. I told people I did this on the side. I  started doing maybe 10 weddings a year. And about 11 years ago, I was doing so many weddings, I was able to quit my job and do this full time. And now we've got a staff of seven, and we do probably about 80 to 90 weddings and events every year. And I love it.

Floral brings such life to an event. 

It does. It can feel so luxurious, but also wasteful sometimes. So it's our job to help manage this, make it as impactful as possible, as long lasting as possible, and as memorable as possible. 

I’d love to hear more about how you incorporate sustainability as a floral designer.

It was always really important to me, so I started folding it into my business and learning, little by little, what I can do as a florist.  I just keep educating myself. One of the key tipping points was joining the Green Wedding Alliance.. I was able to surround myself with similar minded wedding and event planners and vendors. They shared a lot of information that I was able to put into practice.  They introduced me to the best composting company in the city, so now we compost all of our organic waste.  We also recycle everything, so we have very minimal waste.  And then we started working directly with local farmers.  The connections we've made with like minded vendors, is really, really helpful.

Does your compost company do night time pick up after the event?

No, unfortunately, not. There are a few venues that have on site composting because it's expensive, and they don't want to have to pay for our compost waste, which I understand. So we bag it up, and bring it back to our studio where our composter picks it up. And that's fine, it's no problem.  And then we do one of two things with our glassware: we either rent it to our couples (and we take it back, clean it and reuse it) or they can give it to their guests as a takeaway. So either way, it's not thrown away.

Are your couple excited about sustainability? 

Sometimes. More and more, little by little, we're seeing that couples are bringing up sustainability. I think that a lot of people care about sustainability. But they don't see the connection about how they can incorporate this into an event setting, which I understand, because it's a little bit of a disconnect.  They don’t know how a huge party could be sustainable, and they don't really understand how their vendors can be sustainable.

I have three groups of couples: one group of couples are very, very intent on building a sustainable event. They have sought out vendors that are specifically sustainable, that's really wonderful.  There's another group  who are sustainable in their own lives, but don't think about it for the day of their wedding, and that's fine. And then I have another large group of couples who have not thought about sustainability at all. And that's fine with me because we're still going to work in the exact same way on their behalf.  So for me, it doesn't really matter what their viewpoints are, they're still going to get the same benefit from us - the combination of beautiful design with a sustainable footprint. 

I understand.  If I wasn’t so into sustainability, there is a lot I wouldn’t know.  In fact, I didn’t know until more recently that throwing organic materials into a landfill created greenhouse gasses.

Our culture lacks education about sustainability, so it's not people's fault that they don't know.

When you start thinking through all the choices that you have to make to be as sustainable as possible, some people get overwhelmed, like, “there's no way I can do all this, so I'm not gonna do any of it.”  And I always encourage baby steps, I don't think it needs to be an “all or nothing”. I think that people can make smaller changes that feel happy, healthy, and workable.  I would rather more people do that than turn people off because they feel overwhelmed.

I completely agree. And the infrastructure isn’t alway available to make it easy for people.  And sometimes even I will throw away plastic in the trash.  It happens!

You have to accept some realities of society. For example, composting is difficult for homeowners here in Chicago, you have to pay for a private service. You know, there are some cities that already have composting built into the infrastructure, which makes that so easy to do.

I agree. New York City has a lot of composting drop off sites that are free and easy.  Like at all the city farmers markets.

Right, and it’s still work and dedication to save your composting all week, and then to bring it over to a farmer’s market location. So I always look for ways for sustainability to be not so much work for people, you know, it shouldn't have to be so much work for people.

I’d love to hear more about the relationships you have built with the local floral farmers.

Most of the farmers that we work with are in the tri-state area of Wisconsin, Michigan and Illinois, so they are within about a 100 mile radius. It’s our goal to use these flowers if and when possible.. And the flowers are so much more beautiful when they haven't traveled on an airplane across the world. The difference is unbelievable, you need to see it firsthand. And the money goes directly to the farmers, because you're not working with the flower market and in the wholesalers. 

And the really cool thing is, once you have those relationships, they'll grow specific blooms for you. For example, I have a flower farmer this year growing a specific variety of phlox that I love. This variety is rare and doesn’t ship well, so you can't get them unless it’s grown locally for you. I love it because it's so beautiful, and it's been grown just for us, so we’ll be weaving them into all of our summer designs.

I love that. It makes something so unique and beautiful for your clients, and sustainable too.

I'm excited for June to see the blooms. It'll be good.

What is the growing season in your tri-state area?

I would say April through October. We've got some beautiful spring blooms like ranunculus, anemones, daffodils, and tulips are coming in. Then they'll go into peonies late spring/early summer before we get into late summer blooms like zinnias, dahlias and cosmos, and all these beautiful fall flowers.

Is there a wedding that comes to mind for you that has a special, sustainability story?

One of my best memories is doing one of my sister's weddings, a May wedding. We worked directly with a lot of local flower farmers. My sister was part of a community garden and she grew anemones for her own wedding. And then our grandma, who lives in Seattle, grew peonies, and brought those with her to the wedding.  So the vast majority of her flowers were grown by either local flower farmers, my sister herself, or our grandmother, which was really special and beautiful. My sister also chose a really sustainable caterer, so they had a lot of locally grown food to serve. It was a really beautiful event, made all the better by the sustainable choices.

What words of wisdom would you give to a florist that are starting their sustainability journey? I know, we just talked about baby steps, what are specifically like baby steps or bigger steps that people can take?

Number one, eliminate the use of floral foam. (Learn about floral foam here). I think floral foam is something people use because that's how they were trained to design. It’s easy, but not necessarily better.  We haven't been using flower foam now for at least eight years.  And I don't miss it at all. Instead, we use things like chicken wire and other mechanics that work just as well. So making the choice not to use flour foam is a big thing. Making the choice to compost all your floral scraps is another thing. Once you get it set up for your business, it's really easy to do. And then start reaching out to some local floral farmers, so you can start getting some really beautiful blooms.  It's good for minimizing your carbon footprint, also great for getting a beautiful product. So it's really a win-win.

How did you become aware of the negative impacts of floral foam?

I’d been working as a designer for probably six years or so, and had been using floral foam. Sustainability had always been important to me, but I was still learning how to incorporate that into my business. We had already started reaching out, and working with some local floral farmers. And then someone told me, “Hey, did you know that flower foam was toxic? It's not biodegradable, it's bad for the environment, and it’s carcinogenic.”  I had no idea. So then I did some research, and right then and there, we decided not to use it anymore.

That’s wonderful.  And thank you for these words of wisdom about the journey to becoming sustainable.  It doesn’t happen overnight, but the rewards are amazing.

That takes time, but those steps can be transformative. But once you make the decision to do some things, it starts to add up.

Have you found any cost savings throughout this journey?

Absolutely. We find that we're able to reuse greenery for several weeks at a time. There's a lot of long lasting greenery that you can bring back from your event. Your team can go through everything, and you can have several buckets of flowers and greenery that still look amazing, and ready to be incorporated into the next week's events. So looking for ways to reuse your product is something that's a cost saver, and also sustainable.

Incredible.  What else have you saved or reused?

We try to always use as many natural products as we can, including candles (wherever possible, we use real candles instead of LED lights). Much to the chagrin of my team, we reuse our candles time and time again.  We buy and invest in slow burning candles that we reuse for multiple events. But we always want them to look beautiful for each client. So in between each event our team is cleaning and carving, and reworking these candles so we can get another use out of them. It’s extra work, but we don't just buy and toss ever.

Nice.  What is the trick to cleaning vases that have candle wax on them?

We’ve got a great one. We use a type of heat gun, and a razor tool like an Exacto knife. We use the heat gun to melt the wax, and then we wipe it out.  You never want to wash out the wax into your water system.  The wax will ruin your pipes - although it's melted wax when it's going down the drain with hot water, it'll quickly coagulate and just coat your water pipes with wax. So you never want to rinse vases if they still have wax in them, because it will really damage your pipes.

Thanks for the tip!

And don’t forget there’s another way to reuse flowers, and that is passing on the flowers via flower donations. We do that a lot. We work with several different donation agencies to help us, and one really nice thing that we do is with the local nursing homes: instead of bringing vase arrangements, we bring the flowers loose. So the residents can come to one of the communal rooms, where they have a huge table spread out with loose blooms. Since they all have vases back in their residences, they can pick the blooms they want, and then make their own arrangement. So it's a nice little activity that’s creative and interactive that the residents have to look forward to.

Great idea.  And I’m sure it’s easier to transport just the loose flowers instead of all the heavy vases.  Are there other types of flower donations that you have done?

Yes, hospital donations.  Of course this was affected by COVID, but hopefully it’s opening back up.  My advice is to look at your local market and see what the best opportunities are.  I would try to stay as local as possible. Find something near you that resonates with you. And that's where you can feel good about donating the flowers after your event.

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