A $35 billion holiday is built on the assumption that everyone is celebrating. A growing movement of florists around the world knows that isn’t true — and is doing something about it.
It was a Sunday in March 2019 when a British florist sent an email that broke the internet — not with a flash sale, not with a celebrity collaboration, but with an act of basic human decency.
The email was four sentences long. It came from Bloom & Wild, an online flower delivery company based in London. It acknowledged that Mother’s Day could be a hard time for some people. And it said: if you’d rather not hear from us about it, just click here. We won’t ask why.
Almost 18,000 customers clicked.
The responses that flooded back weren’t complaints. They were thank-you notes — from people who had lost their mothers, from women in the middle of IVF treatment, from people whose relationships with their mothers were too complicated for a promotional email to touch. “Thank you for seeing us,” many of them wrote, in different words, over and over again.
“I had no idea,” said Lucy, the copywriter who wrote the email. “I sent it on a Sunday because I thought people were more likely to look at their emails. I had no idea so many people would find it so touching.”
What happened next would ripple through the marketing world, reach the floor of the British parliament, and spread to florists on five continents. It would kick off a still-unfolding reckoning inside one of the world’s most sentimental industries — an industry that has spent more than a century telling people how to feel about their mothers, and is only now beginning to ask: what if not everyone feels that way?
The Holiday That Got Away From Its Founder
To understand where the floral industry finds itself today, it helps to go back to the beginning. To Anna Jarvis.
Jarvis was the woman who created Mother’s Day. She spent years lobbying Congress and the White House for a national holiday to honor mothers — she finally won in 1914, when President Woodrow Wilson signed the proclamation. Then she spent the next thirty years fighting to get rid of it.
She had wanted something quiet and personal: a handwritten letter. A visit home. A private acknowledgment of the work that mothers do. What she got instead was an industry. Florists marked up carnations. Greeting card companies printed millions of cards. By the 1920s, Mother’s Day had become one of the biggest commercial events of the year.
Jarvis was not amused. She filed lawsuits. She staged protests outside flower shops. She called the holiday she had created “a racket.” She wanted Mother’s Day “to be a day of sentiment, not profit.”
She lost. By 1948, when she died in a sanitarium in West Chester, Pennsylvania, she was penniless. The persistent legend — never proven, never fully disproven — is that some of her medical bills were paid by the very florists and greeting card companies she had spent her final years fighting.
Today, American consumers alone spend over $35 billion on Mother’s Day. Flowers are among the top three gifts purchased. The holiday is the second-biggest sales event of the year for most florists, beaten only by Valentine’s Day.
Anna Jarvis would not have been surprised. She wouldn’t have been pleased, either. But she might, just possibly, have found a small measure of satisfaction in what is happening now — in the growing number of people inside the flower trade who are asking a question the industry has long avoided: is the way we market this holiday actually hurting people?
An Email, a Movement, a Parliament
Aron Gelbard, the co-founder of Bloom & Wild, remembers the moment he realized the opt-out email had become something larger than a marketing campaign.
“Mother’s Day is really important to us and to many of our customers,” he said. “But it’s also a sensitive time for many. We wanted to make it just a little bit easier for some people.”
The response was overwhelming. On the day the opt-out launched, Bloom & Wild’s social media engagement quadrupled. Customers who had never contacted the company before wrote in to share their stories. The goodwill generated — the trust, the brand loyalty, the word-of-mouth — was worth more than the 18,000 customers who had removed themselves from the mailing list.
The company didn’t stop there. In 2020, Bloom & Wild launched the Thoughtful Marketing Movement, inviting other brands to adopt similar opt-out policies. Restaurant chain Wagamama signed up. Beauty brands joined. Retail giants followed. Over 100 companies eventually became part of the movement. By 2021, customers who opted out of Bloom & Wild’s Mother’s Day communications didn’t just stop receiving emails — they saw no mention of the holiday anywhere on the website when they were logged in. Not on the homepage. Not in the menus. Not on product pages.
The ripple reached Parliament. Matt Warman, a Conservative MP who had been orphaned at age 27, stood up in the House of Commons to describe the “dread” that many bereaved people feel as Mother’s Day approaches. He called for a voluntary advertising code that would allow people to opt out of holiday marketing. He cited Bloom & Wild as proof that it could work.
The idea crossed oceans. In Australia — where Mother’s Day falls in May, like the American version — a growing roster of brands began offering opt-outs. In Singapore. In Hong Kong. What had started as a four-sentence email from a copywriter in London had become something that looked, tentatively, like a shift in how the industry understood its obligations.
Who the Holiday Hurts
Walk through the numbers and the scale of the problem becomes clear.
One in six couples struggles with fertility issues at some point. Miscarriage affects roughly one in four pregnancies — making it the most common pregnancy complication, and one of the least discussed. Grief, according to bereavement researchers, does not follow a predictable schedule: a person who lost her mother four years ago may find year five harder than year two, as support from friends and family has faded and the permanence of the loss becomes impossible to deny. And those are just the categories that relate to biological motherhood.
There are also the structural exclusions baked into decades of floral marketing. The same-sex couple where both partners are mothers, rarely reflected in advertising imagery. The trans woman who is a mother but whose experience of motherhood goes unseen by most brands. The grandmother who has been the primary caregiver for years but is consistently depicted, if depicted at all, as a secondary figure. The father who raised his children alone. The aunt who stepped in.
“Recognize that Mother’s Day isn’t joyful for everyone,” reads a guide developed by Petal & Poem, a Singapore-based florist, for its industry peers. “Craft messaging that validates varied emotions and relationships.”
The guide goes further. Train staff to avoid assumptions, it says. Don’t ask “What are you getting for your mom?” Ask “Who are you celebrating today?” or simply “How can I help you?” For customers purchasing memorial flowers — buying blooms for a grave, or for an anniversary of a loss — ensure the interaction is handled with discretion and care.
These seem like small adjustments. They are, in practice, the difference between a customer who feels seen and one who walks out.
“Consider using inclusive language that acknowledges the diverse experiences of customers,” advises a similar guide from Bloom & Song, a floral studio in Hong Kong. “Promoting compassion and support can foster connection rather than reinforce feelings of loss.”
The language shift extends to the arrangements themselves. Some florists have stopped organizing their Mother’s Day collections around a single monolithic category and started building around different kinds of care: the Nurturer, the Teacher, the Grandmother, the Mentor. The logic is simple. Not everyone who needs flowers for Mother’s Day is buying them for their biological mother. And not everyone who should be honored on that day carries the title of “Mom.”
The Forget-Me-Not in the Window
Chelsey Hauge-Zavaleta had her first miscarriage in 2015. On the two-year anniversary of the loss, someone sent her flowers anonymously.
She still doesn’t know who it was. But she remembers exactly how it felt. “It made me feel so cared for,” she said. “So seen.”
In 2020, she founded Evermore Blooms, a nonprofit that sends flowers to mothers of miscarriage — on the anniversary of their loss, or on what would have been the baby’s due date. It operates through partnerships with local florists across the country, many of whom provide their services at cost, or donate their time entirely.
“These are dates a mother never forgets,” the organization explains on its website. “But when they come around, her initial support system has faded or unintentionally forgotten.”
The idea that flowers — the same flowers that flood shop windows every Mother’s Day — could serve grief as easily as celebration is not new. It is, in fact, one of the oldest functions of flowers. The forget-me-not takes its name from the message it carries. For the people for whom the holiday is primarily a day of absence, the bright pink carnations and cheerful yellow tulips in florists’ windows can feel like a kind of institutional denial.
Some florists are beginning to acknowledge this directly. They stock forget-me-nots prominently during the first two weeks of May. They offer “remembrance” arrangements — quieter, less exuberant, designed for a different kind of love. They post on social media: “This Mother’s Day, we’re here for celebrations, remembrances, and everything in between.”
These aren’t large gestures. But for the customer who has spent years feeling like an afterthought of the holiday, they can be everything.
The 80% Problem
The emotional reckoning happening inside floristry sits alongside an environmental one that is just as urgent — and in some ways, even harder to solve.
Here is a number that surprises most people: nearly 80% of cut flowers sold in the United States are imported. The majority come from Colombia, Ecuador, Kenya, and Ethiopia. They travel by air freight — one of the most carbon-intensive forms of transport that exists — in refrigerated cargo holds, to distribution hubs, to wholesalers, to shops, to doorsteps. The environmental cost of a bouquet of roses delivered to an American home for Mother’s Day is substantially higher than its price tag suggests.
The social costs are equally uncomfortable. Large-scale cut-flower farms in the Global South have faced decades of scrutiny over labor practices. The pesticide regimes that produce perfect, blemish-free blooms have contaminated local waterways and caused documented health problems among workers applying them without adequate protection. Certification programs — Fair Trade, Rainforest Alliance, Veriflora — exist, and some florists source exclusively from certified farms. But the market penetration of genuinely ethical supply chains remains limited.
Into this picture stepped Debra Prinzing, a writer and advocate based in Seattle who founded the Slow Flowers movement in 2013. The name was deliberate — a direct reference to the Slow Food movement that had spent a generation pushing back against industrial agriculture. The philosophy fit on a bumper sticker: “Grown not flown.”
The Slow Flowers Society launched an online directory in 2014 — just before Mother’s Day — listing florists and farms committed to local, seasonal, and sustainable sourcing. A decade later, it has nearly 700 members. They are predominantly small-scale growers and independent designers who have decided that what the industrial flower market offers is not, in fact, what they want to sell.
The tradeoff is real. Amber Flack, owner of Little Acre Flowers in Washington, D.C., works almost exclusively with local farms. “The closer to the source, the less distance there is to travel,” she says. “That’s going to be a more sustainable option.” But local sourcing means seasonal sourcing. Laura Beth Resnick, of Butterbee Farm in Baltimore, is straightforward about it: “I can’t really grow roses in the mid-Atlantic so I don’t try.”
For Mother’s Day — which falls in early May — that means leaning into what’s actually blooming: peonies, sweet peas, ranunculus, tulips in their final weeks. The arrangements look different from what the industrial supply chain produces. They also, according to the florists offering them, sell faster and inspire more loyalty than anything flown in from Ecuador.
“One of the ideas of sustainability,” says Debra Prinzing, “is sustaining the family farm and the microfarm. That means earning a living from your land and making a sustainable living wage.”
The Green Brick Nobody Talks About
There is one more piece of this story, and it lives at the bottom of almost every commercial flower arrangement in the world.
Floral foam — the dense green brick that florists use to hold stems in place — was invented in 1954. For seventy years, it has been a staple of the trade. It absorbs water. It holds stems at any angle. It makes the kinds of precise, architectural arrangements that define the commercial floral aesthetic. It is also, researchers have concluded, an environmental disaster.
A single block of floral foam contains the plastic equivalent of ten shopping bags. It doesn’t biodegrade. It crumbles over time into microplastics that contaminate waterways and are ingested by aquatic animals. An Australian study published in Science of the Total Environment found that the chemicals leaching from floral foam microplastics were more toxic to freshwater invertebrates than those from most other plastic materials. The florists who use it every day are exposed to formaldehyde, barium sulfates, and carbon black — all potentially hazardous — as an ordinary part of their job.
“I realized that in crushing these floral foam blocks, we are creating countless numbers of microplastics that entered into the environment,” said researcher Dr. Dionne Bremner of RMIT University, who helped lead the first major study into its effects.
The industry has begun to respond. Since 2023, floral foam has been banned at RHS shows, including the Chelsea Flower Show. Blooming Haus, a London florist that became the world’s first to hold both Planet Mark and B Corp certification, has replaced foam entirely with kenzans, chicken wire, moss, and reusable water vessels. New plastic-free alternatives are entering the market.
But giving up floral foam is not simple. It changes how arrangements are built from scratch. For small shops facing the highest-volume weekend of the year, the switch requires new training, new supplies, and new techniques — at the moment when there is least time for any of them.
That is exactly what makes the florists who are making this switch worth paying attention to. They are choosing to do the harder thing, at the hardest time, because they have decided it is the right thing. And in doing so, they are communicating something about their values that no advertisement could convey.
The Business Case for Being Human
Here is what the data shows, for anyone who needs convincing.
Bloom & Wild’s opt-out campaign didn’t cost the company revenue. It quadrupled engagement. It generated the kind of brand loyalty that can’t be bought. Florists aligned with the Slow Flowers movement charge more for their arrangements — and their customers are more likely to return, and to recommend them to friends, than those who buy from conventional suppliers. The florists who have expanded their definition of motherhood — who market to grandmothers and mentors and chosen family alongside biological moms — report bigger markets, not smaller ones.
The average amount spent per transaction by consumers who bought from local florists hit an all-time high in 2025. The Slow Flowers directory recorded its highest-ever traffic around Mother’s Day. The opt-out model has spread to over 100 brands across multiple countries.
“Tearing up the rule book is always risky,” notes a report from UK communications agency PHA Group. “But a trailblazing approach to Mother’s Day could help florists win much more valuable advocates for the remaining 364 days of the year.”
This is not a story about sacrifice. It is a story about a better business model — one that treats customers as human beings with complex emotional lives, rather than conversion targets. The surprising discovery that the florists making this shift are making is not that it costs them. It is that it pays them.
None of this means the movement is beyond criticism. Greenwashing is real: some farms market imported flowers as locally grown. Some brands adopt opt-out campaigns as a PR exercise without any of the substance. Customers, increasingly, can tell the difference. The florists building lasting businesses on these foundations are distinguished by the fact that their values show up in their practices — in the absence of foam on their workbench, in the name of the farm on their price tag, in the training of the staff member at the counter who says “How can I help you?” and means it.
What Would Anna Jarvis Say?
Anna Jarvis wanted one thing: for Mother’s Day to belong to the people it was supposed to honor, not to the industries that had claimed it.
She didn’t get it. The commercial event exists, generates billions of dollars, and shows no sign of diminishing. But something is happening inside that commercial event that Jarvis might have recognized, and might even, cautiously, have approved.
A florist in London lets grieving people opt out. A florist in Washington tells you where your peonies were grown and who grew them. A nonprofit in South Dakota sends flowers to women on the anniversary of their miscarriages. A florist in Singapore trains her staff to say “How can I help you?” instead of “What are you getting for your mom?”
These are not transformations. They are adjustments — small, practical, incremental adjustments made by individual business owners who noticed that the industry’s standard approach was leaving people behind and decided to try something different.
But adjustments accumulate. The opt-out campaign that started as four sentences in a Sunday email is now a parliamentary debate and a 100-brand movement and a design principle that florists on five continents are adopting. The Slow Flowers directory that launched with 200 listings the week before Mother’s Day in 2014 now has nearly 700 members and growing.
Jarvis protested outside florists because she believed they were selling the gesture without the meaning — that the mass-produced carnation was a substitute for the kind of love and attention she had wanted the holiday to honor. She was right about that. She was not right about the remedy. She thought the holiday needed to be dismantled. What it needed — what it is slowly, imperfectly, commercially beginning to get — was to be humanized.
A hundred and ten years ago, a woman in West Virginia spent her savings lobbying for a holiday that would honor the work of mothers. The industry took it, claimed it, and eventually outlasted her.
It is still here. But it is, in small and meaningful ways, beginning to change. Beginning to ask who it has been excluding. Beginning to ask what the flowers are actually for.
Those are the right questions. They are, in fact, the only questions that matter.