Meet Alyson Vitt

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Alyson Vitt. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Alyson below.

Hi Alyson, thanks for sharing your insights with our community today. Part of your success, no doubt, is due to your work ethic and so we’d love if you could open up about where you got your work ethic from?

I would say my parents. While my mom was a “stay at home” mom for a little bit of my childhood(and thank goodness she was! Nothing beats having your parents around and involved when you’re a kid), she still worked a lot of freelance as a photo stylish and my dad worked Monday through Friday as a printing salesman. He worked at the same company for 23 years. He was salesman of the year many years as well. We did not grow up with lots of money, but I never felt poor. Definitely rich in SO much more than just money. But I saw that my parents had to work hard and thats where I get my work ethic.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

Flower & Forage was founded by floral designer Alyson Vitt in 2018, in Oakland, California. Alyson takes ultimate inspiration from the places she calls home – Western North Carolina and the California Bay Area. She grew up in the mountains, where foraging nature’s abundance has always been at the core of her love for floral design. Tall grasses, seasonal wildflowers, and roadside weeds all spark inspiration. She finds beauty in the unusual places and it shows in her work – textural, impactful, and beautifully out of the box.
As a mom of two, I love showing my children a strong work ethic as well as a balanced work-family life. I love the floral industry for many reasons, but being creative everyday with a job that allows me to spend time with my family and build community is at the top of the list.
Alyson has a long history of working in the hospitality and restaurant industry and began her transition into floral design in 2013, taking on weekly floral accounts for local restaurants and working with some of the Bay Area’s biggest floral studios as a freelancer. Through years of hard work and the constant support of her floral community and clients, Flower & Forage has grown into one of the Bay Area’s brightest floral design studios for weddings, elopements, weekly accounts, corporate events and more.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

1. Freelance! I still freelance because I think it’s that important. And I always learn something every time I do. Many in the floral industry just decide they want to be a florist. I believe that learning from the bottom up is important in learning the whole craft. At first I was only allowed to clean candles. Now I really know how to clean candles. Then I could only do bud vases, now I really know how to do those. Then centrepiece’s….. and so on. You get the idea.
2. Work for people who have different design styles. In the beginning, this is good to help you learn your own design style.
3. Seek advice/knowledge from a mentor if you can. My floral community has helped me tremendously with business questions.

Before we go, any advice you can share with people who are feeling overwhelmed?

Honestly, I hate to admit this one, but feeling overwhelmed as a small business owner is a common occurrence for me. Juggling business(emails, proposals, orders, recipes, instagram, pinterest, tikTok, bookkeeping and the physically work of designing the flowers) and family has not been the easiest for me. So some things I do(Often!) to help when I am overwhelmed are:
Morning stretches
Drinking LOTS of water
Asking my husband for help
Hiring more help for a job if needed
Spreading out the “to do” list
Going to bed early

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.flowerandforage.com/
• Instagram: flowerandforage
• Facebook: Flower and Forage, but I rarely go on facebook these days
• Linkedin: don’t have
• Twitter: definitely don’t have! I do NOT support Elon Musk
• Youtube: don’t have
• Yelp: don’t have
• Soundcloud: don’t have
• Other: Pinterest: Flower And Forage
  TikTok: Flower and Forage

Image Credits

Arlene Easterwood