Luxe Blooms Flower Café is certainly the freshest retail face in Ottawa’s ByWard Market. The plates are pink, the chairs are pink, pink cotton floss adorns some drinks, and the café’s north wall is embellished floor-to-ceiling with powder-pink roses.
Owner Michelle Louis-Jean says the distinctive décor means marketing often takes care of itself.
“The first week we opened was a little slow,” she admits, “but as people started coming in and posting their photos on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok, everyone else was like, ‘What is this place? Where is it? Is it in Ottawa? Can I go?’”
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The value of an Algonquin College degree: Experiential learning, taught by industry experts
Zaahra Mehsen was three years into a biology degree at a local university when she realized she wanted to take a different path. “I realized that it’s not my thing,”
The café, at 254 Dalhousie St., opened its doors July 1 of this year and, aside from Louis-Jean’s first anxious week, has remained busy ever since. The café website warns that waits for tables can be 20 to 45 minutes on weekends. Louis-Jean jokes there’s sometimes a second line within the store as well. That’s because the tables directly adjacent to the flower wall are the prime location for selfies. And Louis-Jean loves that energy.
“It’s a space to come and just meet your friends and family, get all dressed up, all dolled-up, get some great pictures and some great memories,” she says.
The flower wall itself is an arrangement of flowers Louis-Jean calls “infinity roses.” They are real flowers that do not require water and that maintain their fresh appearance for two to three years thanks to a proprietary infusion technique.
The buzz and bustle around the wall have spill-over marketing benefits as well. That’s because Luxe Blooms is both a café and a traditional flower shop. Louis-Jean says the lingering crowds make for great cross-promotion.
“When they’re here, they end up inquiring about the flowers and the candles and all the other products that we have,” she explains. “And at the same time, if they’re buying flowers, they’ll buy coffee, some macaroons or pastry.”
Louis-Jean started Luxe Blooms as an online business six years ago when she noticed that no one in Ottawa was doing boxed flower arrangements. She was working as a legal secretary at the time and the flower business was more of a creative outlet and side hustle for her. But interest in the relative novelty of her boxed arrangements got her thinking about a brick-and-mortar store.
“I like to do things that are different and unique. If it’s been done before, I don’t really have much interest in it,” she explains. “And so I knew that when I was going to open my flower shop, I really wanted it to be something different.”
She is careful to note that flower cafés are not new. There have been similar shops in the U.K. for years, but the idea of integrating it with a flower shop is certainly a first for Ottawa and other Canadian cities.
“I’ve actually had people come in all the way from Toronto and Montreal. They said that they came all the way to Ottawa to do nothing else,” Louis-Jean says. “They saw it on social media and they just had to come.”
As a self-taught florist with no background in food service, Louis-Jean is an unlikely retail entrepreneur and restaurateur, but she is growing her business. She recently added a full-time florist with a decade of wedding experience to her staff of 10 employees and plans to ramp up her wedding flower business, which can include renting one of two eight-by-eight removable flower walls. She is also looking at adding a balloon bar to complement the mix of fresh and preserved flowers on offer.
It has been a big change for Louis-Jean, whose online business was a one-woman operation.
“I wouldn’t say that it’s easier now, because I’m running two businesses, but at least I have a lot more help,” she says. “It’s easier in that sense, but then it’s on a much bigger scale.”
Speaking of scale, she says a second location is the next big thing on the horizon for her.
