Daring designs and beautiful blossoms
Beyond Flowers finds a home on Corydon
Through a picture window at the front of Beyond Flowers on Corydon Avenue, passersby see buckets and buckets of fresh flowers in a walk-in cooler. A door immediately to the left inside the store leads into that cooler. Owners Deb Woloshyn and Gloria Sawatzky encourage customers to explore the flowers.
“We like our customers to be hands on with the flowers,” Woloshyn says.
Some customers put together their own bouquets with the flowers they choose. Others select stems for staff to arrange. “We do a lot of hand-tied bouquets.”
Sisters Woloshyn and Sawatzky started Beyond Flowers 23 years ago. Woloshyn had worked in the hospitality industry before that, and Sawatzky had always been a florist. They saw a gap in what was available in Winnipeg for special events and decided to fill it, starting with a small booth at the annual wedding show to see if they could drum up business.
“It went crazy,” Woloshyn says.
They worked out of her house for a year before opening a retail location on Lilac Street. Following Sawatzky’s vision for the store, they created a boutique-style shop with a European feel. Business grew quickly. They expanded three times on Lilac before buying their own space six blocks away on Corydon that they opened last year.
“Weddings are still a good portion of what we do, probably 40 percent. The rest is retail,” Woloshyn says.
Woloshyn says it is their designs and their service that are most important. “We stand behind our product. We encourage people to give us feedback, whether it is good or bad. If we can remedy a situation, where a flower hasn’t stood up the way it should, we will replace it or offer credit.”
What’s next for Beyond Flowers? Woloshyn says the business is still growing. She is working on developing online shopping. Beyond that she says, “We need to keep doing what we do. It’s worked so far.”
