SM IMPACT 2022: QUARTER 2
Halfway There!
We’re more than halfway through the year now, wrapping up one of the busiest Spring seasons our studio has ever seen. The abundance of the season shows in our numbers – you’ll see a noticeable uptick in the amount of flowers we were able to source locally. Truth be told, it’s pure indulgence to work this way – the market is brimming with incredible texture and color this time of year.
On indulgence. Shortly after we released our 2021 Impact Report, I conducted an intake call with a prospective client who shared our vision of a ‘new’ luxury – one that’s traceable, circular, and deeply personal. They challenged us to use as many flowers as we could source from Mendocino, where they would be wed, and provided little other direction than the sensations they hoped to evoke for their guests – feelings of love, destiny, and home. The bride wore a custom Brock Collection gown made of upcycled materials, and her infant son wore a boutonnière made with larkspur cloud, grown at Bay Area local Borrowed Garden farm. All of the vessels and mechanics employed for their celebration were cleaned and sorted back into our studio, and are awaiting their next deployment. The crape myrtle trees that escort cards hung from now live in our yard, providing nectar to bees and hummingbirds.
2023 consultations are underway. Perhaps the most wonderful part of these new conversations are the thoughtful questions from our prospective clients and their planning teams. Questions such as, “where are the flowers coming from?”, “if you’re completely foam-free in your practice, what kind of mechanics will you use in the arbor?”, and “what happens to the flowers after our wedding?”. They’re the greatest indicator to us that the work is working.
Sustainability Goals:
Use 50% or more of the hard goods in our inventory supplementing with rentals for our events by 2024.
Source 40% locally grown flowers across our events by 2024
Compost a minimum of 50% of our floral waste across our destination events by 2024.
For California events, in accordance with state legislation, we will compost 100% of floral material from our events effective immediately.
By the Numbers:
As we collect more data, we are able to compare our values from multiple time periods. For this analysis, we are comparing 2021 aggregate numbers with 2022 Q1 and Q2 averages.
Sourcing: Local Flowers
Figure 1. Compared to Quarter 1 (2022) and 2021 in sum, Quarter 2 (2022) saw a higher percentage of local flowers used per event. Per our first impact report, we define local flowers as ones that are grown in-state, wherever our event location may be. We were lucky to work with a few local flower vendors including Gather Flora, Front Porch Farms, Rose Story Farm, and Velvet curation Co..We were even lucky to work with Puscina flowers, a local flower farm in Tuscany, while working on an event nearby. With both the LA and SF flower markets full of spring and summer flowers our choices of local product were seemingly endless.
Sourcing: Hardgoods
Figure 2. Compared to Quarter 1 (2022), we reused or repurposed more of our hard goods inventory rather than purchase new vessels during Quarter 2. As a team, we referenced our organized digital inventory to assess our options and sought out rental resources to supplement.
End of Life: Landfill Diversion
Figure 3. Compared to Quarter 1 of 2022, we’re making major strides in diverting waste material from landfill. In practice, we dedicate ample time to discover compost resources, assess our live & dried plant inventory, and search for plant-rental options. For all of our Q2 events, we were able to compost 77% of our eligible floral compost, saved product such as wild scabiosa and statice for future designs, and planted live plants in our Studio garden!
Additional Metrics:
We’re also sharing the additional metrics of: personnel miles traveled, waste generated, estimated flower travel mileage and carbon emissions generated from the second quarter of 2022.
Miles Traveled:
From April 1 - Jun 30, 2022 our team traveled 33,421.1 miles! This includes our staff’s travel to events and the trucking required for our events. We’ve also tightened up our methodology for estimating the travel of imported flowers and have included some estimates in this quarter’s report. While most of our events this reporting period occurred in the Bay Area, close to our home studio, we also traveled to Tuscany for a destination celebration (a Covid-19 rescheduling from 2020!). This greatly increased our miles traveled, as you’ll see in our numbers.
This second quarter’s event travel generated 16.6 tons of CO2, a dramatic increase when compared with first quarter travel’s CO2 emissions. Transatlantic travel, as well as the larger scale and complexity of our events requiring more personnel both contribute to this figure.
Composted Material:
In this second quarter, our event productions produced 1,252 total lbs of waste. We were able to divert 1,122 lbs (roughly 90%) through composting, reusing, and upcycling materials by drying. We were able to compost at least a portion of all our events this past quarter with our compost partners. In our quest to make composting frictionless, we’ve compiled our composting resources into an open compost directory–and we invite you to add to this shared resource! We were particularly happy to donate our floral waste (19% of which was local to Mendocino farms) to the Mendocino Botanical Garden, shortly after an event on the Mendocino coast, getting that much closer to a closed loop.
Estimated Travel Mileage:
Like many of you, we’re eager to learn more about exactly how far and wide our flowers come from. As we continue fine-tuning our methodology for calculating the estimated flower travel mileage, we’re doing our best to provide our best (and heavily researched) guess. Relying on self-reported flower vendor data and backed by published studies on the environmental impact of the cut flower industry, we have set the average mileage of a bunch of flowers from its growing location to its final destination (venue, market, our studio etc.) as approximately 13,201 miles.
As many indoor flower farms are located in Bogota, Colombia, we’ve now defaulted our “starting location” for each imported stem here.
The final destination, we’ve adjusted for each of our celebrations based on the location of the venue.
In some cases when this information is known, we also include a stop at the Holland Flower auction where many flowers pass through on their sales and inspection processing. In comparison, flowers sourced through local flower hubs travel a mere 50 miles on average between growing location and flower market.
While this estimate does provide helpful insight, we are still operating under a few big assumptions.
We assume that the flowers within our order are ‘carpooling’ and thus only making 1 flight from the growing location(s).
We have no information about the growing conditions, water and energy usage at these farms, nor do we have information about the commute the farm workers themselves make
Considering the missing information and the assumptions we must make, we accept that the true impact of importing cut flowers is far more extensive. With our goal to include more local flowers in our designs, our hope is that the required travel mileage for flowers reduces significantly, and we gain more insight into how they are grown.
Progress, Not Perfection
Looking at the data from last quarter in sum, it’s evident that we’re making slow and steady progress toward our sustainability goals– none of which would be possible without the support of:
Our Clients – We are fortunate to work with clients who champion sustainability, and are enthusiastic to see in-season, local botanicals in their designs
Our Creative Partners – We benefit directly from our creative partners, including event planners, venue coordinators, and catering colleagues, who relay our mission and values to clients on our behalf
Our Floral Vendors – The abundance and diversity of material we enjoy in our design work is directly tied to the work that our floral vendors do, whether they be farmers or wholesalers.
Our Freelance Team Members – We are thankful to our team of freelancers for living out our Studio values on event production and installation days
Buoyed by the support of our community, we continue working with intention, one event at a time. With this new transparency is a newfound freedom that allows us to reimagine our work. The reminder for ourselves is that it’s progress, not perfection that we seek and celebrate.
