Okay so, 2008. Recession. The transfer window I’d been counting on to get me from junior college to a Cal State just closed, because schools were furloughing teachers and there weren’t enough to go around. Which left me with a semester to fill and no plan, so I signed up for whatever sounded fun. Sign language, which I’d always wanted to do. Yoga. Ceramics. And a classic floral design class, honestly just to keep the routine of going to school.
Somewhere around then I became the only person to ever get 100% on the Cheesecake Factory’s 200-question exam. Which is embarrassing to say out loud; I’m not saying it to brag, I’m saying it because I literally studied for that test. That’s how deep in the golden handcuffs I was. My whole goal was to be the best cog in the wheel, and, you know. We all know how that pays off.
Then a friend at the restaurant was planning her wedding with a $500 floral budget, and we’re standing at the POS together, and she’s freaking out because she’s just done the math on what $500 actually gets you, which is not much, and her only other option is DIYing it, like everybody does when there’s no budget for a pro. I get it. And in classic Janelle fashion, I told her I could do it. Zero hesitation. I hadn’t finished one semester of floral design school.
Jumping into things with my whole ass and no idea what I’m doing is probably one of my best worst qualities.
Her wedding turned out beautiful, and I developed a literal eye twitch because I didn’t know how to produce a whole wedding, didn’t know how to condition flowers, and had no fridge, so nothing was staying cold. But it worked! And then word got around, and I did about ten weddings off nothing but Facebook posts and pure naive drive, which, looking back, was one helluva journey.
Anyone Can Paint This
Then in the middle of building my floral portfolio I left for a year to study painting and drawing in Italy. Afternoons where the whole town shut down. Food eaten like it mattered. An intensity for life that was bigger than the intensity for work, which I had never once seen anywhere.
And while I was there I brought a painting into critique that I’d put over a hundred hours into. Nervous. My professor had an accent so thick I could barely follow him, smoked in the classroom, sipped espresso the entire session, and looked like Jabba the Hutt crossed with a Professor of the Dark Arts at Hogwarts, so, intimidating.
He looks at it and goes, anyone can paint this. I don’t feel you in it.
And then he keeps going. Why did this need to become a painting instead of staying the photo you took? Which, fair. I’d painted it straight off a photo to fulfill a requirement. And then he said the thing I still carry around, which is that as artists we make art because we have to, not because we want to.
Bruised my ego. I’m grateful for it. I came home with a killer Bolognese recipe and a totally different idea about how I wanted to live, which sounds like a nice tidy takeaway and it wasn’t tidy at all, because having a lust for life is one thing and paying rent with it is another.
I Called About a Fridge
So I had no job and a negative bank account, and I went back to the Cheesecake Factory to beg for my serving job. Sat down. Waited for my old manager. And before he even got out to the table I got up and walked out, because every cell in my body was screaming at me for considering it.
That night, pocket full of passion, I’m on Craigslist looking for a used flower fridge. I wasn’t trying to sign up for a lifelong eye twitch, I just knew I needed cold storage before this went from hobby to job. And a listing comes up for an entire flower business. Van, desk, fridge, all of it. So I call the number planning to talk them into selling me the fridge on its own, and a man named Larry picks up.
I tell him the fridge alone is already a stretch, which was true. He says he’s not selling parts but I can come look anyway. So I go. And it’s a front office with an open warehouse out the back and I’m standing in it picturing a studio, like an art space and a flower space in the same room, and I genuinely did not know that was a job you could have. I thought if you were a florist you worked in a retail shop. That was it, that was the whole picture I had.
So I told him the truth. Banks said no, family couldn’t help. And he said his intuition told him that if I got the chance, I’d set the world on fire. Then he sold it to me privately, one payment a month for about five years, and that’s how I ended up the third owner of Lavenders Flowers.
Gritty and Feral
I finished my last semester running it at the same time. Stepping out of class to answer hello, this is Lavenders Flowers, how can I help you. Dropping arrangements off before lectures. On graduation day I delivered one wedding, set up another, ran across the stage with my cap barely on and went straight out to set up a third. I was also living in the warehouse for a while, bathing in a cement mixer I got at Home Depot. It was gritty, it was feral, I loved it.
But the switch actually flipped at my senior art show, where a professor saw my sculpture work and said how cool it was that I was already selling art, and I said nobody’s bought a piece yet, and she said, well sure, but aren’t you selling flower art? Atomic bomb. Because I could pour myself into floristry the exact same way I’d been pouring myself into my art practice, and it had honestly never landed on me before that sentence.
Then I moved out of the Fullerton warehouse into Logan Creative, an old staircase factory in Santa Ana that got turned into an artist commune. My neighbors were a metal fabricator, a glass caster, a bent metal sculptor named Brett Price who’s pretty well known, some painters, some ceramicists. I was the only florist in the building. Being around that much intuitive creativity pushed me way further into floristry than I’d have gone by myself.
More Is More Is More Is More
When I first went full time I was chasing the coolest luxury weddings I could book. I wanted the flowers my florist idols were using. I wanted no white folding chairs, which is the default at basically every venue, I wanted custom chairs. I wanted the best photographers in town. That was all ego and I got there, is the thing. Amazing photographers, beautiful venues, some of the best planners in the area. Full custom events were genuinely a gift and a beautiful stretch of my design career.
And then life got full in the best and worst ways. Big installs, a business actually booming, and in the middle of that I started a second one, Tono + Co, hand dyeing silk textiles and shipping them around the world.
At one point I had, like, seven employees. Seven. I don’t really know how that happened, it just snowballed, one thing into the next, and then I’m a person with an employee handbook. I had dental insurance. For other people. Which sounds like a brag when I say it and it isn’t, it’s more that I don’t think I ever sat down and decided to become that. Somewhere in there I’m doing the flowers, the accounts, the packaging, the copywriting, content, creative direction, event producing, across two businesses, and then HR got stacked on top of it. And the HR one, no. Everything else I was kind of into. Not that one.
And the engine underneath all of it was more is more is more is more. Yes is yes is yes is yes. Because if I don’t say yes then this all stops, right, and I go back to the Cheesecake Factory. That was genuinely the thought I was having, for years.
Then I booked six figures. Biggest thing I’d ever done, months of problem solving and coordinating, and it was invigorating right up until it was over, and then I’m standing in there afterwards sort of giggling to myself, like, wait. That’s it? Because that was the top of the mountain I’d been climbing since I was 25 and I got there and I didn’t want it. I don’t know how else to say it.
Which is where sustainability turned into an actual pillar of what I do. Not going green, although that’s in there too. I mean building a business that sustains the life I want, instead of someone asking me to jump and me going how high. I’d take the story and the connection to a client over the size of the budget now, every time.
Then My Body Started Eating Itself
I missed a lot in those years. Family trips, birthdays, occasions, because I was working most weekends, and at the time that just felt like the deal. Late nights, early mornings, endless list. And in the eye of that tornado it was truly exhilarating and my cup was full, so it’s not like I was suffering through it. Until I was.
And I kept pushing anyway, until my body quite literally started eating itself. Autoimmune stuff, biopsies, appointments I couldn’t predict or plan around. That’s what it took to shake me out of the mad scientist, coma induced businesswoman energy I’d gotten way too comfortable in. And then I finally saw the problem, which was that everything about my business lived in my head. I had a team. I’d never built one system that let them run anything without me standing in the middle of it.
The Thing That Let Me Put It Down
Which is the actual reason À La Carte Made Easy exists.
At the height of the madness I was only taking budgets of $10k and up, and turning away an inbox full of people at half that. I had no way to serve them without putting that same whole-ass energy into something with no labor budget to support it. Seems obvious now. At the time low budget just meant not worth it, which, in a world where most people getting married are spending less than my minimum, is a lot of people to be shutting out on purpose.
It took me years to build real boundaries and a real framework, and when I finally launched Gathered by Lavenders, my à la carte service, it opened the door to all these small sweet events I’d been excluding. And once that wheel was spinning, greased up, working like a charm, I could step back off it. I wasn’t doing consults. Wasn’t making mood boards. Wasn’t ordering flowers. Other than setting the systems up with my team ahead of time it ran completely hands off, and the part that got me was that clients didn’t expect me to show up at their wedding. They just wanted the Lavenders vibe. That’s when I knew it worked.
Then COVID slowed it all down, and when weddings came back they were smaller, which suited à la carte perfectly, especially once I had my first son in 2022. I could design something beautiful and be back to momming the same day.
The Goal I Had at 25
Now I’ve got two small kids and I want more than to be a successful businesswoman. I want to be home for bath. I want to do drop off. I want contact naps without my inbox sitting in my head. I want to eat food made with real ingredients instead of eating like a trash panda, forgetting to drink water, running on five coffees. I want time to go on a walk with my friends, to meet my bestie for coffee, to have a life outside of floral design. I want a job that offers stability and consistency, not the accordion that seasonal work becomes, the kind that eventually leads to burnout. I want to leave the studio early enough to feel like a normal person.
The goal I had at 25 isn’t the goal I have at almost 40, and I think that’s just the undulation of life. But in entrepreneur circles especially, the packed calendar and the saying yes to everything gets treated as par for the course, and I was so far inside the snowball of two businesses that I didn’t hear one of the fire alarms going off inside me. Anyway. It’s okay if what fills your cup changes. Mine did. From the outside a pivot can look like a downgrade and it wasn’t one.
I do still take full scale luxury weddings, to be clear. Anyone who knows me knows I love whole-ass, detail obsessed design when I’ve got the capacity for it and the client actually wants that level of thought. I’ve spent years sharpening that and I like getting to break it out and be somebody’s flower fairy godmother, put a color at their wedding they’d never have picked themselves, watch it become the thing everyone remembers.
What I don’t do is fill every weekend. I don’t take big productions because the budget’s big. I’m not afraid to say no. I’m not a serial yes girl anymore. Most of what I make now is in the à la carte space and it’s some of my favorite work I’ve ever done, because I get to the flower market, I delight in whatever’s just come into season, I make something with my hands, and I leave with hours left in the day.
Making Room for the Sparkle
Teaching’s always been part of this. But I had my second son at the end of 2025, and I came out of the postpartum cocoon with new eyes and a pretty clear sense of what I didn’t want anymore, which was everything living in my head.
So I started building myself a hive. A little team of AI bees, each with one job. One plans our dinners and builds the grocery order. One drafts my client emails in my voice. One turns my voice memos into posts. They draft, and I say yes. That’s the whole deal.
And what came back wasn’t just hours. It was room. I can go to sleep now without that constant chatter.
That’s what I teach now. Sometimes it’s a flower lesson. Sometimes it’s helping you build your own hive. If you’re carrying it all and quietly wondering where your sparkle went, it didn’t go anywhere. It just needs some room.
