Meet Hannah & Brian Sterling | Floral Entrepreneurs

We had the good fortune of connecting with Hannah & Brian Sterling and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Hannah & Brian, can you walk us through the thought-process of starting your business?
My husband and I got married right before the start of the pandemic. Literally the weekend before everything shut down. So our married life started shacked up together, without much to do. While most people made bread, or did TikTok challenges, my husband bought me flowers, and arranged them for me. After a few bouquets, we realized he wasn’t too bad at it. Before we were married, he would order me flowers online, and almost everything that was delivered was underwhelming for the price. Sure they were nice, but when you spend $150 on flowers, you expect to be wowed, and after doing our own arrangements for a while, we realized that those $150 bouquets were made with about $40 worth of flowers. From then on, we were only going to make our own arrangements.

So this spring, we decided to redesign our yard to have as many flowers as we could to pick from our own garden, and supplement it with cut flowers from flower markets around the city. We had joked for months that we should turn it into a side business, and since my husband began it, we joked that he was just a bro making bouquets. When he said he should make them for other bros to give to their partners, the name was born: Buds for Bros.

While it had just been a hobby to that point, I decided, heck, let’s just do it. Let’s make better, more affordable bouquets for our local community. We can deliver beautiful arrangements at a cheaper cost, so everyone can enjoy flowers as much as we do. Plus, it would help fund our increasingly addictive flower habit. So I set up the business, and got us into some local handmade markets, where we make most of our sales. Now, we spend our evenings together making arrangements. He makes the big ones, I make the smaller ones. The thing we love the most about our flowers, is that no two are the same. We scour around for unique, affordable vases, and design each bouquet based on style of the vase, and color preference.

Starting Buds for Bros was an avenue to express our creativity, be surrounded by beautiful flowers on a daily basis, and interact with our community in a fun, artistic way.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
No two arrangements at Buds for Bros are the same. We take a different creative approach to every new bouquet we start. I think that’s what sets us apart from others. We don’t have set designs to choose from, we don’t have a formula, we just take the creative approach that inspires us at each moment. It makes it harder, but it makes it more fun, more intriguing, and more artistic.

We’re still building the foundation of our business, but getting started just takes a leap of faith. You have to be willing to give it a shot, and not be afraid to fail. If we fail, so what? We will take away the experience and lessons from it, have some fun, and provide some joy to our friends and neighbors.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
My house. You get to come over and garden with us and hangout with our 2 dogs, Navi & Zelda.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
We’ve been inspired by friends and family along the way that have expressed their love and appreciation for flowers, and the arrangements we’ve made. My sister Eden who has made arrangements for years, my friend Nicole who said the arrangement we made for her birthday was the most incredible arrangement she’s ever received, and my husband’s parents who have an incredible display of wildflowers every summer.

Instagram: @budsforbros

Facebook: www.facebook.com/BudsForBros

Image Credits
Brian Sterling Hannah Sterling