KW Flowers

Our Story Starts Young
I was 10 years old when I started selling flowers. My parents owned a flower shop, and at that young age, during Mother's Day and Easter, I was already in the business. That's 51 years now.

My wife and I bought the business from my parents, and it didn't last very long before we expanded to a second shop because we were so busy. We have one in Kitchener and one in Waterloo, and that's why we're called KW Flowers. The Kitchener location has been around for at least 45 years at 460 Frederick. The Waterloo shop has been here for 28 years at 36 Devitt Ave North.

Why Two Stores Matter
Having two locations isn't just about being in two places. When it's Valentine's Day and people are calling everywhere in the city for flowers, other shops might have three bunches left. We can offer 10, 15, whatever you need. We're a bigger shop, so we get tons of flowers and have access to lots of suppliers. Not too often we have to substitute something.

Our team makes the difference. Linda Mink is here, and Kim's here. Different times of the year, we have other people. When it's super busy, there's lots of people working. Linda and Kim are designers their whole life—they were born with a flower in their hand.

The Orders We'll Never Forget
The 63-Rose Anniversary: We have a customer who's on his 63-year anniversary. Forever we've been doing one more rose in the vase each year. He had to split into two vases, and now it's 63 red roses for his 63rd anniversary. He's been married that long, he's 91, his wife's 89. He's been with us forever—a loyal customer.

The 1001 Roses International Order: Over 20 years ago, a guy called from China at 4:30 in the afternoon. He wanted to send 1,001 roses to a house in Kitchener-Waterloo. The credit card merchant service said it was totally fraud, but I kept working with them. The guy was traveling—China, then England, then Russia—all within five days. After 10 phone calls with merchant service, checking his Moscow address (26 letters long!), they finally said the odds of getting paid went from 0.001% to 50-50.

I delivered them myself at 6 in the morning in big vases with 160 roses each. Used local roses too, because they were beautiful and fragrant. The wife came to the door, signed for them, and we got paid. No one else had ever done an order like that before—1001 roses to one house.

Valentine's Day Scale: I've done 500 orders in one day about 12-13 times. 600 orders in one day has happened 8 to 10 times. Our biggest was almost 700 orders in one day. That takes tons of delivery people, tons of employees, but we make it happen. Those days, it's like sleeping 3 hours a night, two and a half days working night and day just to get everything done.

How We Work
We come in, check the orders off the computer. If it's a time delivery, we do those first. If it's a funeral or something important, or a business where people are only there in the morning, we get those out. We line up delivery people depending on where they are—if there's lots out of town, we do that. If it's local, we've got a bunch of drivers.
We're open when others aren't. We open early at 7:30—nobody else opens that early.

Nobody stays late like we do. We're one of the only flower shops in town that opens on Sundays. If somebody needs flowers and they're gonna be there at 6:30 but we close at 6, I'll wait for them. We try to help people, and in the end, those people come back to us.

We do weddings. We've had regular customers whose weddings fell through with other florists, and even though we already had three weddings going, my wife said it's a regular customer, we have to fix it. We made it happen, even though it wasn't through us to begin with.

We do flowers, gift baskets, balloons, planters. Everything's seasonal in Canada but we do our best to fill orders with what we have.

After 51 years, we're still here. Still family-owned. Still opening early, staying late, and making sure people get the flowers they need when they need them.