When we reached out to Gather Flora and asked Hannah if she could describe her work in a few words she effortlessly answered: “a local flower sourcing revolution” & she hit the nail on the head. Gather Flora aims to create a floral community that embodies sustainability and ethics surrounding the flower industry, sharing, and beauty. We are always so delighted when we get to visit Hannah and the team at the SF Flower Mart and incorporate their local blooms into our work. More from Hannah:

“I used to feel like I switched career tracks near-aimlessly every few years. Now, as I focus on Gather Flora, this company benefits all the more from the inspirations and learnings as all those separate career tracks converge. Specialty coffee was my first professional fascination and remains a major inspiration for my work today. As a sector, specialty coffee is quite new. The foundation of the sector is widely credited to Erna Knutsen’s pioneering work in the 1970s. Working for importers here in San Francisco, Knutsen recognized the opportunity to sell high quality small lots of coffee in bags rather than exclusively in the much larger containers standard to the industry. At the time, she was the only person willing to stake a claim that there was an effective business model in selling small batches of high quality coffee for befitting higher prices. Knutsen’s “small trade” “specialty” coffee took off, swept the industry, and now occupies 60%+ of coffee’s marketshare. Today the concept of “specialty coffee” is carried forward in ways large and small by coffee professionals across the world (special shout out to the brilliant Kim Elena Ionescu, and the wonderful trade organization, the SCAA). The rules of the specialty coffee trade do not focus on coffee quality alone but also on fair, sustainable, ethical, and equitable practices at each step of coffee sourcing. It’s easy to recognize parallels to the potential of specialty local flowers, and the closer you look, the more there is to learn. Specialty Coffee is a constant inspiration for the way I hope to see Gather Flora interact in our sector.

One of my other past career tracks from which I pull inspiration is Non-Profit Development and Emergency Response. My experiences in that sector viscerally taught me that even small “local” decisions have community-wide and even global ramifications. For Gather Flora, I pull inspiration from this mostly in terms of corporate structuring and corporate impact. Lately, it seems that the UN’s focus on corporate social responsibility (CSR) has shifted increasing focus into supply chain sustainability. I interpret this as the idea that our companies’ practices have impact at each step of the supply chain and don’t fit neatly into any one nation’s borders. In an increasingly connected and migratory globe, companies have the responsibility to think about impact to workers, workers’ surrounding communities, and the planet at each step of our supply chains whether regulations compel them to think about this or not. These are complicated and lofty goals, but they are endlessly inspiring. I strive to listen, respond, and hold Gather Flora responsible to these high standards whenever I can. To me, this means that though we are a small, we try to hold the company accountable for making strides in fair labor, diversity, equity and inclusion, and ethical sourcing — whether or not anyone is monitoring what we are doing.

My most recent career has been in Software Engineering. This feeds Gather Flora with inspiration because it means that we are constantly searching for difficult problems or unwieldy processes that technology could unlock a long-sought solution for. There is so much latent potential. If we’re looking at the reality of slim margins or high startup costs in establishing a local sourcing market, we can search out ways to repeat and scale. If florists struggle to find time to source the best, sustainable flowers because they are available only from far-flung, disconnected, individually-small farms, we can use our inclusive web platform to cohere these decentralized networks. There are so many interesting, high-leverage features that hold great potential to positively serve this community and sector. We’ve just begun to build our Engineeringteam, and I’m so excited to to see how we can make tech serve this incredible, passionate, hard-working floral industry.

From these other sources of inspiration, you can probably tell my thoughts and plans can get crowded. So, perhaps the most important inspiration that anchors me in local flowers is that the sharing flowers, the sharing of natural beauty is a calm, clear, and simple good. Sharing an incredible flower, to me, is a deep breath in a crowded, busy, demanding, constantly changing world. In my life, I’ve seen flowers hold power to refocus the most joyous, most mundane, and most difficult of moments. It’s an inspiration and an honor to have work like with something like that, and it makes choosing work in flowers simple.”