When Jessika Mazure first turned her hobby of flower arranging into a business, she chose the name House of Posie for a variety of reasons, chiefly that posies are simple, petite arrangements – and at the time she was making them from her own house. While, as a business, she takes on everything from single gift arrangements to many-hundred person events, she still loves the idea of making bouquets of posies – just a little something special for oneself, nothing huge and elaborate. While she’s expanded from her home, that ethos of personalization drives her as she creates custom bouquets and arrangements for her clients.
“Sometimes you can’t say something in words,” she says, of what drew her to working with flowers, “Flowers have their own language.” Mazure not only speaks that language fluently, but acts as a translator, helping other people use the plants to express joy, sorrow, and other emotions in heartfelt and visually impressive ways.
Working from her studio as a personal florist, rather than from a storefront with pre-made products, Mazure found a niche in bringing together her own love of flowers with her ability to execute other people’s visions or aesthetics. She finds the key to her designs comes not from the flowers – the obvious focal point – but from the greens that support them. “I let them be the guide,” she says. “Greens have so much texture, the shapes and lines, that you can’t manipulate.”
Finding the beauty around the edges and understanding what structures she could and couldn’t move helped her last year when the pandemic canceled events. “All florists had to put down their shears for a few months,” she says. But when it came time to re-open, about a month before Mother’s Day, one of the biggest flower holidays, flowers were scarce because of shutdowns in the supply chain and she needed to figure out a strategy that would allow her to meet her clients needs in an unpredictable time. “I went with succulents,” she says. The pivot allowed her to keep her clients happy with beautiful plant-based gifts while supporting growers, but didn’t require hedging bets on pre-purchasing flowers or chasing what little product was available.
This year, as she dives into the January bounty of budding and flowering branches that come with the turning of the seasons, she plans to continue working to bring her clients what she calls “That special joy through nature.” But she also looks for other creative ways to keep her business – and that of her industry and community – afloat while so much is still shut down, including hoping to partner with local chocolatiers and small businesses on Mercer Island. And further in the future, she hopes to expand into teach classes. But whatever she does, she keeps her original mission in mind: “I want to maintain my personal connection to clients as I grow.”
Find the Mercer Island-based House of Posie online at HouseofPosie.com and preview her work on her Instagram account at house.of.posie.
