For Nashville native Rachel Penn, there is a perfect gift to commemorate life’s most important moments: flowers.
Whether it be in show of sympathy or celebration, Penn believes flowers can express any emotion we wish to convey. She discovered her passion for floral design could be much more than a hobby after the loss of her daughter, Lillian Grace Penn, who passed away moments after her birth in the spring of 2020. Amid the heartbreak, Penn found solace in creating floral arrangements every week for her daughter. Empowered by the need to honor her daughter’s life, Penn created Lillian’s Floral Studio, a sustainable boutique flower shop and creative studio providing beautiful blooms to support others as they navigate the important moments in their lives.
Corporate meets Creative:
My background has always been on the technology and business side of things. I was based in Singapore and it really pushed my work life balance completely askew. I would be on a ton of evening phone calls and a ton of morning conference calls just to accommodate for all those time zones and I was really burning out. My manager suggested that I take two nights a week and block those off for just me, and maybe sign up for a class that would physically take me away from my computer. I ended up taking a floral design class and really grew to love it. I started moonlighting and freelancing for other florists and doing events. It got to a point where my husband and I looked at each other and said, “This is what I should be doing full-time.”
Love and Loss:
When we lost Lillian it was smack dab in the middle of the pandemic, so the support that you would normally come to expect— whether it be your family in the hospital with you, or your friends and family with you for a funeral— all the things that are very critical in supporting someone going through a loss just weren’t possible. COVID was so isolating and lonely for so many people and then you couple that with loss and it’s a new degree of loneliness and isolation. I had not actually touched flowers in a while because we had just moved back to the U.S. Flower arranging gave me a routine. I could go to the wholesalers, pick out flowers that I wanted to use, and create an arrangement that I’d bring to Lillian every single week and that really was very healing for me. I knew I needed to create something that would honor Lillian and have a way to connect with the community and invite people to come in who want to talk about loss or share their stories of joy. All this love and parenting energy I had that kind of stopped short for Lillian had to come out somewhere, and it came out in a very physical form. That’s what’s in this building: she’s here, I’m here, my parenting energy and love for her are here. It’s wonderful to be able to express that.
What’s Inside:
We’re known for our daily deliveries. We offer flowers to be delivered across Nashville locally in a vase arrangement or in a hand-tied bouquet, which we’ve custom created. We also do centerpieces and floral subscriptions for the home. If you need something quick you can pop in, give us a budget and a color palette, and we’ll wrap something in a beautiful bouquet you can take out the door. In the shop itself I’ve curated a number of different brands and gifts. We have all sorts of vases and vessels in here. We’ve got some great beauty and candle products for the home, a bit of gardening and plants, cards, and candies.
Local and Sustainable:
We’re a Nashville business. I’m from here, I want to support this community, and I want to work with people who are based here. We will always order flowers from our wholesalers who are based here. (We can’t get things like roses from local farmers.) But being able to support what local farmers do grow in season means that we’re supporting farming, the environment, and sustainability. It helps our creativity as well because if we don’t try to use new things then we stop being creative. Another huge element is sustainability. I was trained on very traditional methods of floral and event design, which means using a lot of plastic and flower foam. Flower foam is incredibly toxic to the environment and to people, yet it’s widely used. We’ve decided to be a completely foam-free studio. Instead, we use chicken wire, we use moss, we use other living mechanics or design techniques so we don’t have to use foam. The last piece is that recycling piece, so we compost everything with Compost Nashville. All our event fees include breakdown and composting, or repurposing in terms of taking the flowers from your event and either giving them back to guests or giving them to hospitals, community homes, etc. We have a vase recycling program which I really love. If you receive a vase from us you can wash it out, clean it, bring it back to us, and we’ll give you a credit towards your next arrangement. We use craft paper, and I’ve invested in biodegradable plastic wrap as well as eco wrap, so everything that we use in terms of packaging and wrapping can be reused, composted, or recycled.
Giving Back:
A percentage of our profits every year are going to be donated to local [nonprofit] organizations and a national [nonprofit] called Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep. [My husband and I] were direct recipients of their service. They match professional photographers to families that are in the hospital who just had a stillbirth or had a baby that didn’t survive and they take professional photos free of charge, touch them up, and send them to the family so they have newborn photos of the child they lost. It’s a wonderful organization. We had a photographer come from Bell Buckle, Tennessee on a Saturday afternoon to come and take our photos of Lillian, and they are my most prized possession: just being able to see a photo of her every day. Hopes for the Future: We’re trying to build a great business that makes money to be able to steward that money to give back to the community. I will be very proud in 10 years if we’ve changed the conversation locally in Nashville around what loss means and how we can support loss much better across the community. That’s why I’m here—it’s really to support the community, change the conversation, and create more resources to support that community. We need to connect more with each other; that’s why we buy gifts, that’s why we buy flowers. That’s what would make me really proud—people knowing that we get it, we understand what you’re talking about, and we send the perfect flowers or gift for you.
(2807 Bransford Ave., Suite A, 629-203-7160; lilliansfloralstudio.com)