Flowers for Dreams Turns Your Bouquet Into a Charitable Donation
Like a modern day fairytale, Flowers for Dreams creates bespoke, locally-crafted bouquets and donates a portion from the proceeds of each to their charity of the month. (They’ve donated $194,716 to date, adding a little more every day.) Based out of Chicago, the business began as resourceful college student project selling roses at a local high school graduation to earn a few extra bucks both for themselves and to donate backpacks to low-income kids they had tutored that summer. Co-founders Steven Dyme and Joseph Dickstein’s small scale enterprise was an immediate success; they were soon asked to sell roses at other graduations. At that moment, Flowers for Dreams was born.
Though he now spends each day living and breathing the many iterations and seasons of flowers, Dyme had no particular draw to the world of florals when he started out. “It was an opportunity really,” Dymes explains to GC. “My college roommate had come from a sort of lineage of florists and floral wholesalers– his dad was a big one in New England. He and his brother would sell his dad’s leftover product in high school (and make lots of money!) so we thought it’d be neat to try that in Chicago. Dyme admits, “I never thought this is where I’d end up but [I] always had an appreciation for well-designed things, art, and I look at what we’re doing more as designing a beautiful product and an aspirational experience, rather than simply floriculture.”
Today, the business has grown into an establishment that is already looking to expand its horizons. “There were about six guys who were part of the crew when we first started peddling flowers in college,” Dyme told GC. “Now we have close to 30 employees…We’re launching in Milwaukee, and delivering to many surrounding areas in southeast Wisconsin for Valentine’s Day. It’s our first major metro outside Chicago– very exciting!”
Between its fresh arrangements and its do-good mission, the success of Flowers for Dreams is unsurprising. Far from other floral services (which tend to pair stale bouquets with cheesy teddy bears and plastic balloons), Flowers for Dreams’ daily arrangements are light and modern, and can be hand-delivered (for free!) in simple, outdoorsy containers like burlap, bark, or tin. Their wedding services cater to a variety of moods— farm, Victorian, industrial, posh, enchanted– but are all similarly infused with a bright, seasonal flare that makes Flowers for Dreams so charming. And at an affordable price ($35 for a daily arrangement!), Flowers for Dreams makes donating to meaningful charities like the Chicago Women’s Health Center not only easy, but beautiful as well.
To learn more about Flowers for Dreams, visit their website.
