Linden Grove……..20 years old.

 

 

Wow, Linden Grove turns 20 years old!!!!

How did that happen?

Anne-Marie and I are thrilled to be celebrating 20 years of being in business together with our company Linden Grove.

Both of us worked for flowers shops in Toronto and sort of on a whim, thought, hmmm…..would you be interested in giving our own business a shot?

With no capital, no business plan and simply a couple of deposits for weddings, we shared a studio space in the King & Dufferin area for our first 3 years.

The rent was so reasonable, that to be honest, we thought we likely would not succeed being that we had no customers and are both really artsy, but not so aggressive as far as going after business.

We approached a few companies who we thought highly of and very slowly but surely started to build a nice clientele.

We struggled a lot in our first 10 years or so, but kept plugging along.

It feels like we more fell into this if that makes any sense. We both loved flowers and design, but no sense of who we really were.  We tried a bit too hard to accommodate everyone, so we really didn’t develop our look or branding until we moved to the East end of Toronto to the wonderful Corktown neighbourhood.

Our first 3 years on King Street East were incredibly difficult years. We had many issues with the building we were in, SARS hit and that hurt so many small businesses and let’s just say it was not easy at all.  Anne-Marie was going to have a baby which was a wonderful event about to happen and then much to our pleasure,  we rented a new location across the street from where we were to 356 King St. E, which has become our home and we hope to remain here as long as possible.

It suits us, it is beautiful and we really found our footing and began to really brand ourselves with the help of our graphic artist and webmaster Odette, who has done so much to give us our beautiful look.

Before we knew it, here we are at our 20 year mark which is still really hard to believe.

We would like to thank our wonderful clients for believing in us and appreciating our style.

We would like to thank our amazing family and friends who were and are always encouraging.

We especially would like to thank the lovely freelancers who have worked with us and continue to work with us, who provide us with beautiful design work and their friendship.