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Take This Job and Love It: Florist

3 Wishes
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For our series, Take This Job and Love It, meet a florist who said she enjoys the creative process that goes into her floral designs, rather than the flowers themselves.

 

Jodi Wischmeyer is a florist who co-owns Three Wishes Floral and Design Studio in Mount Pleasant.  

 

The shop owned by the three Wischmeyer sisters is located at 600 S. Mission Street.

 

Jodi said she loves using flowers to create something people can enjoy.

 

“I like the creativity of flowers,” Jodi said. “I love the design, the artistic end of it. People ask me all the time, ‘what’s your favorite flower?’, I don’t have one. If anything it’s probably a green rose but I don't even like roses.”

 

Jodi said she and her two sisters always wanted to open their own business together. She said they had the most skills in floral design, so six years ago they opened the studio.

 

“We knew no matter what we did, we knew we would always have a business but whatever we did I would be running it,” Jodi said. “Flowers was something that we all agreed on.”

 

Jodi said the industry is like the food industry in a way.

 

“This is a trickier industry because you have to sell your project or you lose it,” Jodi said. “You got to find a way to move the product you have because if not, you just wasted money on flowers that you had to throw away.”

 

Jodi runs the shop, answers phones, orders flowers, creates bouquets and works with deliveries.

 

She said she began working in floristry when she was 16 as a part-time job.

 

“I love the creativity of it and so I think that’s what made me stick with it,” Jodi said. “Every day you learn new stuff and you get to know your customers. That’s one thing you don't find at other jobs because I know every aspect of my clients. It’s kind of cool because you watch them grow as long as you’ve been in the business.”

 

Jodi said on average she works 9 hours a day and seven days a week.

 

Credit 3 Wishes / Facebook
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“I ran another flower shop for 18 years, thought I did everything and I didn’t,” Jodi said. “It’s just different, you put in a lot more hours that you’re ‘not paid for’, but it’s what you do when it’s your own.”

  

In the last six years, Jodi said she has put together flowers for weddings, high school dances and the Michigan Special Olympics Summer Games.

 

Jodi also does flower arrangements for funerals, which she said is hard to do on a regular basis.

 

“You deal with families that have lost their loved ones,” Jodi said. “There is a lot of times where it’s car accidents, it’s young kids that have passed away. We deal with that all the time because they have to get the flowers made and it’s heartbreaking.”

 

In light of her work, Jodi said they donate ten percent of every order to local schools.

 

She said in this business, over time she goes through every aspect of customer’s lives.

 

“From homecoming corsages to then doing their weddings, to them having babies,” Jodi said. “It’s just kind of a neat little life cycle in this business.”

Tess DeGayner is a student reporter for WCMU News. She is a senior at Central Michigan University studying Journalism and Broadcasting. Her hometown is Fenton, Michigan.