Interview: Nick Priestly, florist
Published on Tuesday 20 December 2011 00:00
When Rihanna needs roses or Keira Knightley has an urgent Valentine’s delivery of fritillaria, they call in Nick Priestly, a man who’s perfectly proud to call himself a florist
EVEN today, in these enlightened days of equal opportunities, male florists are about as common as popular Liberal Democrats. It has taken Nick Priestly, one of the most successful of the species, a long time to own the title. “If you’d asked me seven years ago what I did, I would have said, ‘My wife and I have a business. A flower business.’ Ask me now and I’m a florist.”
Priestly, 37, who grew up in Lanark-shire without knowing one end of a daisy from another, has grown into it. “Lots of gardeners are men. They have beautiful flower beds and rose gardens, but once you put them in a vase they’re not masculine any more.” He dismisses this as crazily illogical. “Initially it did feel a little bit strange because I hadn’t planned to do it.”
Now, having got used to it, he can certainly empathise with male customers. “I know the pain men suffer when they go into a flower shop. They know they have to buy something but they want to buy it and leave. They don’t want to be seen in a flower shop, they don’t want to be seen carrying flowers. It is worse than lingerie.”
Unlike many florists, who start fiddling about with carnations when they are 16 because they don’t fancy hairdressing, Priestly has a degree in international business and languages. He worked in London for five years, advising millionaires on their tax affairs and recruiting accountants to top jobs. From the start, he was uncomfortable on the fast track. “I thought I wanted to be in that environment but I didn’t really know what I was doing there, sitting at a desk, punching these numbers into a computer.”
When he moved back to Glasgow in 2002, his wife Vivienne had already abandoned suit life to retrain as a florist. He continued head-hunting bean counters while she worked in a flower shop, learned everything they could teach her and then opened Mood Flowers. One month in, Priestly went part-time so he could help out. “But I still wasn’t going to be a florist.”
After their first, busy Christmas, he realised the business needed another pair of hands. Before he finally hung up his own suit, he tested the water by cold-calling 20 businesses in the West End of Glasgow. “I got meetings with the Buttery [one of the city’s oldest restaurants] and One Devonshire Gardens [one of the top hotels].” He took that as a sign to officially join the business, handling sales, marketing and logistics. Reluctantly, he learned to tell a gerbera from a peony.
For the first few years, the couple ran the business together, building up an impressive corporate and wedding clientele. They took on staff and moved from their shop to a warehouse in an industrial estate. After having two children, Vivienne pulled back, then left the business. Priestly is now not just a florist, he is the face of Mood Flowers. Calming anxious mothers of the bride, assembling celeb-friendly bouquets, working out how to suspend balls of roses in ethereally lit vases is all in a day’s work. Instead of a tie he wears a branded fleece.
He is still responsible for the floral arrangements in One Devonshire Gardens, as well as the Radisson, the Blythswood and Cameron House hotels. Discerning shops such as Cos and Jo Malone trust him with their pussy willow and imaginative greenery. Then there are 200 weddings a year, with an average spend of £1,500 to £2,000. The most lavish nuptials he has done cost £14,500 (that was, he recalls sadly, before the recession).
The Mood Flowers style is urbane and architectural, with striking flowers and structured foliage bringing some of the gloss of New York, Tokyo or Paris to the west of Scotland. But, when the client demands that he ramp up the camp, all bets are off. “Usually our arrangements are all about the flowers. We use very few tricks, no bits of glittered wire or feathers. Unless it’s Strictly Come Dancing’s end-of-tour party, when there were lots of ostrich feathers and beads spilling out of the vases.”
When a Glasgow-based make-up artist died, Thandie Newton, Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise ordered their flowers from Priestly. On P Diddy’s recent sojourn to the city, Priestly filled the star’s suite with white orchids. Rihanna’s people sent him a four-page look book so he got the white and nude roses for her dressing room just so.
While he’s not going to dismiss an order from Diddy, he prefers it when the client lets him go wild and crazy. “We like to do something quite distinctive,” he says, citing the sizzling purple and pink orchids and roses he recently put together for Cyndi Lauper’s birthday. “I play a little bit safer if it’s a bouquet for someone’s mum’s birthday.” He has particularly fond memories of the Valentine’s Day when Keira Knightley was in town shooting The Jacket and he delivered an armful of roses, orchids and fritillaria to her apartment.
One of the downsides of the job is being on call, and Priestly is not amused at being called in the wee small hours for no good reason. “Unless the Queen of Sheba is staying, don’t call me in the middle of the night. If Oprah, Madonna or Ivana Trump do not need flowers, leave it until 7am.”
• www.moodflowers.com
Your view
Please sign in to be able to comment on this story.