Family Ties Bind Oakdale Flower Shop's Owners

is owned by brother and sister Tony and Tricia Kauck and their mom Liz Kauck. The Kaucks have owned the small shop along Century Avenue just north of 10^th Street for the past six years. The shop’s been around since 1987.

Oakdale Patch: How old were you when you first got involved in the floral business?

Tricia Kauck: I took classes in high school and did competitions in floral when they still had a floral class. I started my junior year and I’ve just been doing it ever since.

Oakdale Patch: How were you involved in the industry before buying this shop?

Kauck: I actually worked in another flower shop and the previous owner that owned this shop sold it and came and worked for me part time. She got it back and came to me and said, “Hey, I got my shop back, and if I had known you, I would have loved to have sold it to you, but I have it again,” so it kind of fell in my lap.

Oakdale Patch: What made you interested in flower arrangement?

Kauck: It just kind of runs in the family—we’re all kind of artsy and I guess floral was just my subject. I’ve done painting and other things just for fun, and it just kind of stuck.

Oakdale Patch: Did you get the rest of the family into it?

Kauck: Yes, my mom decided to help me out, so she’s been here with me for the last six years and she’s been wanting to step back and retire a little bit more and spend time with the grandkids, so Tony stepped in last year.

Oakdale Patch: What were your mom and brother doing before?

Kauck: My brother was a bartender and he did that for 15 years and my mom’s background, she was a nurse, but there’s five of us in my family so she was a stay-at-home-mom for a while.

Oakdale Patch: Have there been any trends or changes in what people are looking for in the past six years?

Kauck: Yes and no. Roses are always classic, and probably will be the No. 1 seller as far as any single flower goes, but in general the floral industry has changed quite a bit as far as in the past 10 years. Ten years ago, everybody would go to a florist to get their poinsettias, for example, and now you can get one at the grocery store and Menards and so the floral industry really has taken a hit from that. In the Oakdale area there used to be four of us and now we’re the last one. That’s really changed a lot. That’s why we’re striving to do more special ordering and things like that rather than—we do have our walk-ins, we do have some specials going on here and there, but we generally strive to do more weddings, funerals, anniversaries, more specialty things like that.

Oakdale Patch: How do you manage the Valentine’s Day rush?

Kauck: You don’t. You don’t. It’s just chaos for a whole week. You can prep as much as you can, but there’s no controlling it. There’re lines out the door. It’s kind of a love-hate relationship that day. It’s nice and busy—it helps us through some of the slower times—but it’s a lot of work. We have some extra drivers for deliveries, and we do have more family members that we recruit and friends that come and help out as much as they can, but it’s a little hectic.

Oakdale Patch: Do you run out of flowers? 

Kauck: Generally yeah. Not necessarily run out of flowers, but red roses we’ll run out of. I think we go through probably about 2,000 roses that one day. Yeah, I think last year we ran out at about 1 or 2 o’clock of red roses. We get as much in as we can, but you never know.

Oakdale Patch: From where do you get your flowers?

Kauck: We have a couple wholesalers in the Twin Cities area that we purchase through, but we do also do farm direct from farmers out in Ecuador where generally the roses come from. It depends on the time of year, sometimes they get shipped in from Europe as far as tulips and things go.

Oakdale Patch: What is the strangest request you’ve ever had?

Kauck: Somebody wanted to send out an arrangement for a gag gift and it was somebody’s 40^th birthday and they wanted to do a funeral arrangement with dead flowers. That was one that we put together and we’re like, “OK we’re going to keep that in back,” because it was not pretty. And then they did a black ribbon on it that said, "Rest in Peace," or something like that. I think that was the most unusual thing I’ve ever done.

Oakdale Patch: Did you have to just leave the flowers sitting out for like a week and dry them out?

Kauck: Well, that’s something where, we don’t actually throw out that much stuff. For a perishable product, we throw out probably 1 to 2 percent. They called a couple weeks before they needed it, so we just kind of collected flowers for a while and were able to make that up, because otherwise it’s almost a waste of flowers.

Oakdale Patch: Why do you think this shop has lasted when all the others have closed?

Kauck: We try to have good customer service. We try to have a wide variety of flowers on hand. I think in general we’ve kind of just stuck it out. With the economy being the way it is right now, it’s hard, because flowers are kind of a luxury, it’s not a necessity. A lot of the other shops were the size of us if not smaller, so being one of the larger shops in the area, that helped too.

Oakdale Patch: What are your future plans?

Kauck: We’re looking to expand and grow. 

Editor’s Note: This article is part of a series on locally owned, independent Oakdale businesses. We’re doing this series in conjunction with Oakdale’s , a campaign to encourage residents to choose three local businesses they’d hate to lose and pledge to spend $50 total at those businesses each month. If you have a shop you would like to see us feature, email patty.busse@patch.com.