Tucked away in Brunswick East is a bustling studio filled to the brim with flowers. Inside this unique florist, a team of women heal their souls and build their economic futures one beautiful bunch at a time.
It’s a Thursday morning in a Melbourne thinking about spring. I’m savouring the rare sunlight as I wander down a quiet street framed by Victorian worker cottages in Brunswick East towards a bustling hive of activity that is the Beautiful Bunch’s Studio. Music drifts out of the open doors and young women flit around tables crowded with flowers of all shapes and sorts, loading up waiting delivery vans with gorgeous bouquets that glow in the sunshine.
The Beautiful Bunch, an online not-for-profit florist training and employing women from refugee backgrounds, lives up to its name. Perhaps it’s the sun, but there’s something about the welcoming energy and laughter filtering across the air as I poke my head inside that shouts joy.
Jane Marx, the founder of the Beautiful Bunch (referenced casually as BB), started the social enterprise at the tail end of 2020 mere months after giving birth to her second daughter. In a small office sectioned off from the main warehouse, we sat down to speak about how BB came to be.
Riana, Director of Social Impact, hurries in and out, fielding phone calls and shooting off emails. When I remark on the good weather, Jane tells me they’re all hoping it will last for Riana’s wedding, scheduled for the following week.
The office wall ends halfway towards the ceiling, so as we talk the music from the warehouse rises behind us, accompanied by laughter and rapid chatter in time with the constant snip snip of flower stalks being cut down to size.
For Missing Perspectives’ high agency women series, I wanted to spotlight businesses fighting the good fight, and for Jane, who has founded three social enterprises over the last decade, this is her bread and butter.
We settle in over coffee to discuss Jane’s latest venture, what the Beautiful Bunch is, and how the florist stands out in a competitive industry.
Jane started the Beautiful Bunch after her former social enterprise, an events catering company, was nixed overnight by the arrival of COVID-19. Jane speaks candidly about the difficulty she had calling the women she had employed for the events season and having to tell them that there was no work. “They were calling me asking for cleaning shifts,” she explains, pointing out that for those with privilege the lockdown provided an opportunity for a tree-change, whereas the women she had employed were experiencing a very different economic reality.
“That really stayed with me throughout my pregnancy, the need to provide employment for these women that were expecting a full events season and now had nothing.” The Beautiful Bunch’s origins were then two-fold; on the one hand, Jane was very clear that her next venture must cater to the women with refugee backgrounds facing extensive barriers to traditional employment; and on the other, to provide a foolproof and much-needed product to the public.
“In the early days of the pandemic, there was a huge spike in demand for online floristry. Once I had my daughter, I was sitting around the living room looking at all these flowers I had been sent – no shade to my well-meaning friends and family, but I was looking at some of the bunches thinking the girls and I can do better than this.” Months after Claudette was born in July, the Beautiful Bunch launched in October 2020. I express my amazement at Jane’s agility in giving birth and looking after a newborn while also launching a business in one of the most trying economic landscapes in recent memory.
She laughs, but I can hear real steel in her voice as she answers, “I was confident we could produce a superior product. From the outset it was about having something that was both commercially competitive and commercially of value.”
But it wasn’t just the product that drove Jane to found the Beautiful Bunch. “We didn’t have funding for the first twelve months, but that didn’t matter – I was able to call these women up and ask them to come on board, even though it wasn’t a well-developed program.”
Some startups take money from outside investors. Jane started the Beautiful Bunch with money from her maternity leave wages, which she used to pay the first women who came to help her build the Beautiful Bunch.“It was a collaborative process – they helped me to figure out the courier routes, how to wrap bouquets properly, how to develop a template on how to interact with customers; and I think that’s what makes BB so special.”
The Beautiful Bunch differs from Jane’s previous two social enterprises, in that beyond the product and business model, she has also thought very carefully about designing a work system amenable to the women it aims to empower. The workday is scheduled around school drop off and pickup time; the workforce is exclusively made up of women; and crucially, Jane points out that there is no handling of non-halal products such as alcohol and certain meats.
“We wanted this to be built for them, around their needs, to really make sure there were no barriers for them coming into this.” While pointing out that there were crucial times during her own career when employers took a chance on her regardless of her experience, she emphasises that there are only two requirements for women wanting to come and train at the Beautiful Bunch’s aptly named Bud to Bloom Program. “All we ask is that they want to be there, and that they love flowers.”
I ask what the BB’s customer expects and where the drive to purchase from the enterprise comes from and Jane reiterates that the BB customers have high expectations of the end product. “I would say that I know our customer – if there is any compromise on the quality of our product because someone involved in the production of our product is in training, our customer will not purchase from us.”
When the Beautiful Bunch first launched, Jane leveraged her existing customer database from her prior social enterprise and requested that each customer tell three of their family members or friends. “I went really hard on our existing database to connect our new enterprise with our existing mission. We got seven orders the first day, and I think five of them were from previous customers.”
The BB’s website states that it is the only Victorian not-for-profit exclusively targeting women from refugee backgrounds who are facing barriers to employment. Jane’s particularly passionate about this, pointing out that “we know that getting a job is a crucial determinant of overall health and wellbeing, but for the young women we work with, employment is more than a job.”
The women who are eligible for the Bud to Bloom eight-month training program come from across the spectrum of this category. “You might get someone who was born here, speaks English, understands the systems and operations of employment in Australia but might be the first woman to work in her family and faces pressure to remain in a caregiver role in the home; or on the other end of the scale you’ll have a woman who’s been in the country for eight weeks, who has come from the camps or has arrived in the country as an unaccompanied humanitarian minor.”
“All by themselves?”
“Yes, all by themselves.”
The Beautiful Bunch is more than just a company selling flowers – the Bud to Bloom program welcomes these women into a “safe, supportive sisterhood.” The program is funded from revenue generated by BB’s flower subscription packages offered to businesses and homemakers prepared to sign up for more regular floral deliveries. Currently, the program has fifteen trainees, although demand is high and Jane says ideally, they’d like to offer more places in the future. It’s split into three parts; firstly, a thorough grounding in floristry which started to evolve when the Beautiful Bunch received funding to employ their first professional florist Kodi, who streamlined the process.
“Things like understanding flowers, botanical basics, floristry fundamentals. This is how you care for flowers, these are the techniques. At the heart of what we do is a creative practice.”
The second component originally involved Jane personally sitting down with the trainees to coach them through business administration and work ready skills. “We covered topics like why we rock up on time, making small talk, this is how you write an email.” Things changed, Jane says, when Riana came on board, and the BB received further funding.
Riana, who has a background in both floristry and social work, helped to transform what had been a semi-informal training program into the Bud to Bloom program. This now involves online modules that the trainees work through and provides an operational knowledge of administrative skills. “It’s something that people with privilege take for granted that you’ll know how to write an email by the time you’re twenty – this isn’t the case with our trainees and it’s so crucial that those skills are taught.”
The third and final component focuses exclusively on financial literacy, which is something that Jane realised was crucial after she started receiving phone calls from her graduated trainees who had entered the workforce asking her for their tax back, or their superannuation.
“I would say I can’t give that to you – and I realised that we really had to operate with the idea that there should be no assumed knowledge.”
Jane is particularly focused on improving financial literacy, for several reasons. The Bud to Bloom program is a paid training program, which is a point of difference to some other social enterprises that operate on a voluntary basis.
“This is the first time that the women in the program have earned an income. So, we’re teaching the importance of having a bank account in your name, how to save; how to send money back to your family but still keep enough for yourself to live on.”
When Jane finishes explaining the training program, I have to tell her that I’d like to join up.
“When I look at the program that we’ve developed I think this would be so great for all the young women in this country – we really want to give our girls the best.”
Jane’s hoping to get to a point where they can maintain more of these graduates to help with events, but the Beautiful Bunch isn’t at a point yet where they can feasibly absorb fifteen workers and then train fifteen more. Instead, the women go on to get their foot in the door by taking jobs in hospitality, retail, business administration and warehouse work.
As if on queue, Riana, who had left the office to take a call, comes back in beaming and interrupts our conversation to tell us that one of their recent graduates had just received a job offer.
Jane breaks off from the interview to inquire more about the position, and I’m struck that the Bud to Bloom program provides much more than just administrative skills; it’s community and togetherness that continues beyond the point of graduation.
In terms of corporate structure, The Beautiful Bunch is a registered charity and can receive tax deductible donations, however their point of difference is that they trade to fulfill their social mission.
The work is funded by goods and services (the pre-ordering and daily sale of flowers, subscriptions and now events), and donations from philanthropy. The aim is to cover BB’s core operations with the revenue generated from sales.
Philanthropy comes in when the business scales – for example, in response to increasing enquiries about running events, Jane reached out to a Victorian-based funder to request enough funding to cover two years of events spearheaded by a professional florist to do some business development and build out the required infrastructure. Now, the events component pays for itself and is a crucial part of the business.
“It’s very difficult to start a small business if you don’t have some means of personal wealth, or connections to get something off the ground. I’ll be forever grateful to those people in the beginning who took my calls to have funder meetings and sat with me while I was sleep deprived and quite literally nursing a newborn in our thirty-five square metre tiny little studio and took a chance on me – this was while I was still delivering the flowers from my old beat-up four-wheel drive.”
There’s this implacable energy about Jane, and again the extensive challenges that she faced in starting the Beautiful Bunch have me asking, feeling somewhat rueful at the stereotype, just how she does it all.
“I’m very driven, but it was really hard. I had my newborn, I was going to the market three times a week at three am to get fresh flowers, I was writing grants, organising funder meetings. What drives me is the genuine belief in what we’re doing. I want to ensure that every young woman had the opportunities that I always had; and on a personal level I have two little girls who are four and eight who are very smart and they’re always asking me questions about the world. I would like to make them proud of what it is that I do.”
She points out that there are no shortcuts to doing something like this – just hard work.
“There are two things you need, especially if you’re starting with very little. Firstly, you need something that you can do particularly well – for me, I knew we could produce beautiful floral arrangements that would rival any other florists. And secondly, you need to find something that you can do that other people can’t. I have more energy than the average person. I knew I would work harder, and I would be the last one standing. Starting with such few resources means you need to look inward and find your strength there.”
I want to touch on the social aspect of the Beautiful Bunch, particularly in a world that seems intent on division and violence. Do businesses have a responsibility to respond to the world around them? To contribute to their community?
One of the subscriptions that the Beautiful Bunch offers is the Girls from Gaza Subscription, which goes directly to funding the training of newly arrived refugees from Palestine. These trainees are working in the warehouse as we speak, the direct impact of this subscription clear in the gentle laughter that keeps wafting across the half-wall into the office.
“I think we’re entering the next stage where business as usual is just not good enough. It has to be consumer led, but the consumer is demanding more. I feel like, just based on the amount of businesses wanting to collaborate with us because of our vision and values, there is a significant movement towards businesses having better social and environmental principles and wanting to build a genuine sense of community.”
Bringing it down to its essence, I want to know how working with flowers can be transformative, whether it is as healing as it sounds.
“It is healing, we talk about that a lot. The healing nature of the botanical world is central to what we do and central to having some sense of wellness. One of our girls was carrying a bucket of Amy Lous, which are these beautiful big roses, and she was smelling them and saying that she has those flowers in her home, where she’s from. It is about connection and healing. Flowers make people feel things. We know that from our customers, and from our team. It is a universal language. I think flowers can speak where words can’t.”
I’m curious about the name, the Beautiful Bunch. Jane tells me this was something she obsessed on.
“I wanted it to be something that had an alliteration – we call ourselves the BB Bunch. And I wanted it to be something people could remember. I tested it out on a lot of people and everyone except my mum thought I was in some sort of post-natal haze. But people could remember it! The intent was that it had a double meaning – it’s a beautiful bunch of flowers and we’re a beautiful bunch of girls. We are the Beautiful Bunch!”
All the photos that appear throughout this piece were taken by Jane’s husband, Francois Marx.
