LA Flower District Wholesalers

While Eyjafjallajokull’s volcanic ash cloud paralyzed European airspace, sending the floral industry supply chain scrambling across the globe for alternatives, the LA Flower District California Flower Mall continued to source wedding, and Mother’s Day flowers without a hiccup said President, Mark Chatoff. “The East and Mid-West felt it more than we did. In fact, the volcano’s eruption had a beneficial ripple effect for some of our sources in California, and Latin America — where a 25 percent up tick in business was reported due to demand for alternative flower sources. We’re optimistic that the volcano’s impact will not affect Mother’s Day discount and wholesale flower orders. There will be plenty of gorgeous flowers for Mom’s this year.” He added, “Mother’s Day is the biggest flower holiday of the year accounting for more than 60 percent of annual revenue for wholesale floral suppliers.”

According to the Society of American Florists, even Oprah couldn’t avoid Eyjafjallajokull’s fallout. When the talk show host was left without hundreds of flowers needed before TLC’s rock-n-roll florist Jeff Leatham was to appear on Oprah’s “Glamorous, High-Flying, Action-Packed Dream Jobs” episode Wednesday, April 21, her staff did what thousands of florists did: relied on a fast-acting, quick-thinking wholesaler to find alternatives for the volcano-grounded blooms.

The volcano underscores how global the floral industry is. A representative of Holex, an Amsterdam flower exporter, told Reuters it expected to lose at least 25 percent of its business as a result of the volcanic disaster. And Kenyan growers — who were responsible for about one-third of Europe’s imported flowers before their crops were grounded by the volcano — had been losing about $2 million a day, according to an article in Time.