Stories of Resilience: How a Flower Shop in Texas Helped Their Customers and Healthcare Workers Simultaneously

On a standard day at Lizzie Bee’s Flower Shoppe outside of Dallas, Texas, you can find a team of people working side by side, laughing and celebrating each other while designing beautiful arrangements for their customers. When the COVID-19 crisis hit, the team at Lizzie Bee’s Flower Shoppe knew that “our normal was coming to a screeching halt, but we couldn’t shake the need to feel a sense of togetherness, and to serve our community.”

With mandates being rolled out across the country, and large gatherings cancelled, Lizzie Bee’s was preparing for an inventory of wedding flowers with nowhere to go. That’s when the team thought of an idea: the weddings might be cancelled, but joy can still come from these flowers.

Once a flower shop has placed an order – a perishable good – they can’t simply send them back. Their choices were to eat the cost and let the flowers die, while still having to charge their clients (in this case twice, once for their original order and a second time for when they reschedule their weddings) or, they could help their clients get a refund on their payments while Lizzie Bee’s used the flowers for good.

“We devised a mission to have people call in with a small donation to defray these clients’ balances, and with every donation we would make an arrangement for a local hospital worker using the wedding flowers. With all the donations that came in, we designed and dropped off 200 gorgeous arrangements to be distributed around one of our local hospital’s ER staff and to a Texas Masonic nursing home. We believe in Flower Power here at Lizzie Bee’s – the power to bring love to someone even in the darkest of times.”

This story is part of our Stories of Resilience series, showcasing small businesses in the ICIC network who are pivoting their focus during the COVID-19 crisis to accomplish good in their communities. If you are a small business doing the same, we would love to hear your story. Please email info@icic.org.