From the Top
Hi! It's Nicole. The owner and lead designer at Sweet Pea Designs. Thanks for stopping by the blog. This is a new channel for me so please bear with me. My mind seems to always be racing and full of ideas, projects, to do lists and more. It can be overwhelming and honestly cause a good amount of anxiety. I have searched for many ways to help clear and calm my mind, so here goes another attempt, this blog. My hope is that this is a place where I can organize my thoughts to be able to better serve my clients and customers. I often have a notebook, google note or random post-it notes scattered around with my ideas, so let's try to organize them together. While I am no English major or writer and I haven’t taken an English class since high school, I hope you may walk away with something from this blog.
So let's take it from the top, from where it all began. The year was 1996, a cold blustery day in December… just kidding. We won’t go that far back, but my childhood did play a key role in what I do today. I grew up in a small family greenhouse business. Flowers were always around me from essentially the time I was born. Growing up, any flowers that were on the ground of my family’s greenhouse, I would collect to arrange them in a vase for the kitchen table. And while my “designs” weren’t much better than a handful of dandelions from the back yard, my mom always left them on the table for a couple days. The older I got, the more I loved and had a passion for arranging flowers. I graduated from picking flowers off the floor to grabbing a pair of scissors to cut better, fresher blooms from the plants (sorry Dad). People watching me told me to be a florist and to open up the florist side of the greenhouse business. I told my dad that he should open up the florist side of the business and I would be the florist. He just smiled and nodded his head as I was like 10 years old at the time.
Fast forward, I met my now husband in 2016, the year the Chicago Cubs won the World Series, which is the only reason how Luke remembers when we met. We got married in 2018 and had our first kiddo almost exactly a year later in 2019. I was still working at the greenhouse a day or two a week to keep my sanity and be around adults. While living in Munster and commuting down to Grant Park wasn’t convenient, I wanted something else that was mine. Something I could do during nap time but also something that wasn’t a huge commitment that also brought in some money. In comes Pampered Chef. I was a Pampered Chef Consultant for 8 months and then Covid hit. Oh, and I was also 3 months pregnant with our second. So while the world was upside down and pregnancy and a 1 year old left me with very little energy, I stopped selling Pampered Chef.
Alright here comes the vulnerable stuff. After having my son in the late summer of 2020 and the world being in such disarray, I fell into a deep postpartum depression. With my faith grounding me, I was still looking for a calling that was mine, could be done while also being a mom and bring in a little income. I got a glimpse of that calling when my best friend was pregnant in the summer of 2021 and we threw her a baby shower. I made flower centerpieces for the shower that was held in my backyard. The blooms were simple that I cut from my yard and the greenhouse (sorry again Dad). After the shower, I looked at my husband and said that I wanted to design flowers out of the spare bedroom in the basement. With my husband always supporting my wild ideas, we cleaned out the basement spare bedroom and turned it into a studio to design flowers. My 2 year old and 1 year old could be in the basement playroom right outside of the studio while I worked and I would get a majority of the work done during naptime and after the kiddos went to bed.
My business started to grow with a few weddings and a lot of Prom and Homecoming flowers. I had about a half acre of flowers growing behind my family’s greenhouse in 2022. That was when I found that flower farming was not for me. Only being able to be in the flower field once a week since we lived 30 minutes away in Cedar Lake. It was a good trial year to practice my skill and learn what works for me. With more weddings and more Prom and Homecoming flowers and busier kiddos, it was good for me to see what didn’t work for our family.
In my head, my plan was to scale the business as my kids grew up. When the kiddos were in school full time, I would do flowers more full time. But for the time being, I was just going to keep slinging flowers out of the basement spare bedroom. In the spring of 2023, I was 6 months pregnant with our third. Luke and I were having many conversations about his next career move. He was a cardiac ICU nurse. The options for the next career move for him didn’t excite him or myself much. They either required more schooling or more time away from the family, neither of which we wanted to navigate. After a lot of praying and encouragement from family, we decided we wanted to look more into growing my floral business.
The perfect location to grow our floral business was providentially for sale. The busy corner of 133rd and Parrish was an auto repair shop that after many, many renovations became the home of Sweet Pea Designs.
If you’re new to us, we specialize in modern floral designs for all of life's events. We are a full service florist with a contemporary boutique gift shop. Our gift shop has an emphasis on small businesses local to the Midwest. We have curated a line of valued gifts that would be great for anyone to enjoy. Can’t wait to see you in the shop soon!
Talk soon! NK
