Not Your Traditional Flowers

The little things in life are what often inspire life-changing thoughts and actions. For Jackie, it was a bouquet of flowers.

It all started in 2011 when Jackie was asked to create flower arrangements for a salon she worked at in New York. Her arrangements evolved and became more elevated when she graduated from buying Trader Joe’s roses to the wide assortments, she found in the wholesale flower markets.

People took notice of Jackie’s talent and that’s when she took it beyond the salon. With friends and clients of the salon getting married, she booked 12 weddings in one year. Today, she single-handedly owns and operates Darlington Flowers.

Weddings are notoriously expensive, and wedding markups don’t help. According to Consumer Reports , about 28 percent of screened vendors marked up their prices when giving quotes for weddings. Darlington Flowers breaks that stereotype with a non-traditional approach to pricing.

Rather than going with a standard list of options and prices, Jackie starts by getting to know her clients and their vision. Then she figures out what she can accomplish within their budget and meets their desires from there.

“Florals are considered a luxury item,” Jackie says. “I want to be able to provide flowers that are accessible to everybody, but in a new way. Those everyday flowers are very traditional and in-the-box.”

Jackie wants to take her non-traditional outlook on flowers even further with her own specialized flower shop. Her vision is to create a budget-friendly, beautiful space where she will sell her own arrangements alongside an open studio area where people can be hands-on and create their own individualized arrangements.

“It’s more meaningful when you can bring a really beautiful arrangement to a friend and say, I made this for you.”

Jackie is mostly self-taught, picking up tricks here and there along the way. She practiced by looking at photos and trying to recreate them and by working with bigger florists on a few events.

Darlington flower arrangements are unconventional, vintage-inspired botanical arrangements. “I like for each flower to have its own little space, with a lot of movement and shape,” Jackie says. To fully understand the beauty and feel of her arrangements, visit her website or her Instagram @darlingtonflowers.