Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life, or so Mark Twain and assorted influencers would have you believe. “That is fucking bullshit,” Maurice Harris, the L.A. florist, said the other day. “I do something I love, and I hate it, because it’s work anytime money gets exchanged. It takes away the purity.” Harris was seated at a table inside Bloom & Plume, his flower shop in Echo Park. His clients include Beyoncé, Louis Vuitton, and the Row, the fashion label owned by Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen.
“They have a lot of rules,” he said of the Row, which displays his arrangements at its West Hollywood boutique. “White and green—they don’t like a lot of color,” he said.
An employee trimming alliums added, “Nothing too tropical.”
“They complain about things dropping on the floor,” Harris said.
“They like something that looks fragile, but that lasts,” the employee said.
“You’ve got to talk to God about that!”
Harris, who had on fuchsia loafers and a shirt printed with neon swirls, grew up in the San Joaquin Valley, with a grandmother who arranged artificial flowers and a mother who sewed. “I was always trying to negotiate a way to be creative but have a sustainable life,” he said. “I didn’t want to be poor.” An early notion: “Maybe I’ll just become the next Oprah.” Then: “Maybe I’ll work at the Gap.” He ended up studying fine art at Otis College of Art and Design, and then worked doing window displays for Barneys and Juicy Couture. Having discovered the downtown L.A. flower market, he became the go-to guy for office-party arrangements. “I was doing flowers for a co-worker’s baby shower, and I was just humming like the birds that dress Cinderella,” he recalled. “I had this out-of-body experience: ‘Oh, my God, you’re really enjoying yourself right now.’ ” He realized, “I want to do this more.”
In 2010, he opened Bloom & Plume on the east side of L.A. The Cinderella birds have since scattered. “People often romanticize what I do,” he said. “Flowers are gross. They stink. It’s a lot of hauling shit around. It’s a lot of logistics. Like, twenty per cent of it is pretty; the rest is just annoying.”
The same could be said of Hollywood. In 2019, Harris sold a TV series called “Centerpiece,” in which he interviews Black creative types (Rashida Jones, Maya Rudolph), to Quibi, Jeffrey Katzenberg’s short-form video service. “I told them, ‘Black people are dying at the hands of the police, and you’re putting up a black square that says nothing,’ ” Harris said. “ ‘Why don’t you put more money into this show about Black joy, this show that’s not trauma porn?’ ” Executives told him to make it shorter. Quibi folded in October; “Centerpiece” is now on Roku.
In 2019, Harris and his brother Moses, wanting to provide an aesthetically pleasing place for the people in their community to gather, opened a coffee shop next to the flower studio. “We wanted it to be a space for queer people, trans people, Black people,” Harris said. But retail was tough. Yelpers were unhappy. A staff exodus followed.
By 2020, the shop had found its feet. “We reopened right before George Floyd,” Harris said. “We went from thirty customers a day to three hundred.” The store’s success prevented it from qualifying for a second P.P.P. loan. “I found the support really strange,” Harris said. “It felt very performative. We had to reëvaluate how we did everything to keep up with the volume,” which, after a few weeks, plummeted. “We got support when it was trendy to support Black businesses. We’re in a time when people think that a double tap, a share, and a visit solves the problem, when, No. It’s still pretty systemic.”
The shop now serves around seventy-five customers a day and is a hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars in debt. Moses walked through the door, for a meeting about cost cutting.
“About our matcha,” Moses said, opening his laptop. “Our current provider, he’s a lunatic.” Moses had found a shop down the street that sourced matcha at three cents less a gram. “If you extrapolate that per gram per year, that’s two thousand dollars we’d be saving.”
“Margin Moses over here,” Harris said. “It’s like when you were trying to save on oat milk” and switched to a new brand, which Harris found watery. “It’s about taste,” he said.
Harris is more optimistic about MasterClass, for which he recently filmed a course on flower arranging (“I got compensated really, really well,” he said), and “Full Bloom,” a reality competition series shown on HBO Max.
“I would never do a flower competition,” he said. “Hell no.” But being a judge “is my favorite thing on the planet. I love judging people. It’s so awful.” ♦
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Maurice Harris Knows What Roses Really Smell Like - The New Yorker
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