“A rose is a rose is a rose,” says Larry Walshe. And he should know — he’s a globally celebrated wedding and event florist and founder of the online sustainable floral company, Bloom. But still, he adds, there is a rub: “Everyone pays the same price for a rose — it’s how somebody wants to apply it and what they want to do with it, or how many of them they want to use.”
In a Larry Walshe Studios production, what he does with the flowers often seems as miraculous as nature’s rose itself. There very well could be thousands upon thousands of roses trucked in via multiple refrigerated busses, lying in wait before they find themselves climbing the walls of a French château or finding their way onto a carefully considered tabletop. His fantastical installations are, in short, a marriage of creative and engineering genius.
And we couldn’t wait to catch up with him and pull back the curtain on his floral magic. We found him, as it turns out, in his home country of England — where he popped up on a Zoom call in a simple meeting room in his London studio, ready to share his wedding tips, tricks, and advice. And it was actually surprisingly easy to catch him, even though he now has studios across many time zones in four countries — London, New York, Nice in the South of France, and Lake Como, Italy. Charming, chipper, and delightfully unguarded, it’s easy to see how his personality has joined with his talent to fuel his success.
From Dance School to Dining Table
And in this case, that fuel might as well have been rocket fuel. He launched Larry Walshe Studios a mere 12 years ago from his home. “I sat at my own dining room table,” he says, “with 500 pounds in my pocket and went, this is what I do now.”
He sat down at that table because he knew he could find a better way to make someone’s wedding dreams come true, he says. He came to that realization after having “Goldilocks’ed my way through a number of different possible options just to see what actually sat and what I resonated with and enjoyed.”
In his first chapter, he was in musical theater. “I went to dance school — and I had not danced a day in my life at 17. I was like, this is what I want to do,” he says, even though his mother cautioned him that at 6’2″ he was too tall to be a dancer. “I went down to London after having lived in the north of England my entire life. I went down for six weeks of dance instruction, and I did six classes a day, six days a week. And at the end of that I auditioned and got a full scholarship into one of Europe’s best dance schools, which somewhat starts to tell you what my mentality is like and my attitude to pretty much everything. If I’m doing it, I’m doing it.“
An unfortunate injury ended that professional chapter, which led Larry to find the next career fit. He gathered up his creative spirit and earned a degree in interior design and retail branding. He worked for a catering company in the UK, where he became disillusioned at the level of service the industry offered. “I was seeing a lot of people barely giving you any kind of context,” he remembers. “They were sending, for example, one or two photos, or at best you’d wait a week and get a rather half-hearted mood board, and then you would get quite a large invoice following that. I was struggling because clients would sit in front of me and I was finding that I was ultimately filling in all of the gaps. I was doodling and drawing and showing them what it would look like and then throwing that back and forth… and I thought, hold on a second. I’m doing all of this legwork. And I was sitting on a salary of $24,000 a year.”
Blind Determination
He turned in his resignation and after a two-week flower course and, with those 500 pounds, Larry was off and running. Within a few years he was creating floral abundance for the likes of the royals, Rihanna, and Stella McCartney and decorating beautiful wedding backdrops on an international stage and in some impressively remote locations. Talent aside, it’s clear grit might just be his true secret sauce. “I think it’s just kind of blind determination, to be honest,” he says. “I don’t really see hurdles in business in life. I don’t really see obstacles when other people try and present them. I don’t really understand what the problem is. I refuse to see that there is an obstacle in front of me. And equally, if there is something that has to be overcome, well, that’s fine. Let’s just break it down into smaller pieces and work through it.”
Determination to meet all challenges would seem a good attribute to have when the challenge is to make thousands of flowers looking perky and at the perfect stage of bloom to make a couple’s dream wedding come true — everything must be just right to bring Goldilocks back into the conversation.
And even then, everything is at the whim of Mother Nature in the end. But out of his comfort zone is where Larry likes to be most of all — even when the stress meter hits ‘DEFCON Five,’ in which case he deadpans, the solution to the stress is obvious, “medication.” “Really, I think also after the last 12 years,” he says, “I can prepare, I can have all the wheels in motion, and everything done, but ultimately you are coming down to Mother Nature delivering a fresh product that you have to ensure opens at the optimum moment, on the optimum day.”
And if fickle flowers don’t cooperate, well, that’s part of the creative puzzle. “When you’ve got some particularly pesky tulips that just don’t fancy playing along,” the designer says, “you pop them into a hotel bathroom and create a little steam haven and then suddenly your entire hotel room is just not livable — but they will open. So yeah, it’s a labor of love. Definitely. And it’s also one of those things that you become ever more experienced over a period of time when you’re doing these projects again and again and again. You become particularly robust at doing so.”
Photo: Danilo & Sharon
A Small Team, Big Magic
To pull off the extravagant and synchronized events, Larry has a surprisingly modest crew. “We actually have a really small team,” he says. “Our core team is only 16 people globally. Then, from there we expand based on the project. So, we work with a lot of different florists, artisans, drapers, carpenters, welders, painters, all the things, and we pull those in on a project basis dependent on what it is that we’re creating. But I’d say usually an average size job for us is anywhere between 40 to 60 crew and then some of the larger ones you’re looking like north of 200. My little black book is reasonably robust.“
The work is hard and during the high wedding season Larry might only find time for rest and self-pampering when on a long flight to some amazing destination. When we reached him, he had just worked out his travel plans for the 38 summer events he had “on the go.” His travel schedule, he concludes, “is a little gross.”
But the rewards are big. And for Larry, the monetary aspect is only part of it. It’s the look on people’s faces, the heartfelt thank you notes, and the happy tears that drive him. “What’s so incredibly special about the events that we do are the fact that they are only there for one moment in time,” he shares. “And then that entire infrastructure — which could be the size of a small village and take weeks to create by the time you finish building it for them to come and enjoy for one evening — and it all disappears. It never existed. So, as much as that can be really stressful, the reward of actually pulling that off in the timeline, then seeing somebody’s reaction to that, and also creating an environment where you realize that this person has gathered a group of people together for the first time ever that will never, ever, ever be together in the same way again, ever. There’s something very magical about that.”
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