Like most floral companies, Postal Petals was busy in the weeks leading up to the Valentine’s Day, taking orders, securing flower shipments and talking to growers. But when it comes to making floral arrangements, all of the work is done by the West Hollywood-based company’s customers — and that’s by design.

Instead of vases or bouquets filled with carefully curated blooms, Postal Petals sells boxed bundles of fresh-cut flowers shipped directly from farms for customers to make their own creations.

“People’s historic experience with flowers is as a ready-to-use product,” Postal Petals founder and Chief Executive Talia Boone said. “But what we’re trying to do is really bring people into the experience of working with the materials themselves and using that process as a way to relieve stress and to express creativity.”

Boone, a marketing professional, launched Postal Petals in May 2020 after not being able to source fresh-cut flowers from local wholesalers during the pandemic-related shutdowns.

“I had for years done flower arranging just as a form of self-care,” she said. “I found it to be very relaxing and very therapeutic.”
At that time, when the Los Angeles Flower Market was closed, she reached out to a wholesaler hoping he would lower his minimum order requirement so she could get a box of flowers shipped to her house. With requests for wedding flowers and other events getting canceled in droves, the wholesaler agreed. Boone got to make her flower arrangement at home but also cultivated a business idea for Postal Petals.

Now Boone has five employees and sources flowers from about 20 farms on the West Coast.
“We wanted to really focus on domestic flower farms so that we could work with them to create a model whereby instead of sending flowers to a florist, where the best of their lifecycle is spent in refrigeration, they can send them directly to our consumer,” Boone said.