Name: Sarah Brysk Cohen
Location: Brooklyn, NY
Company: Blossom & Branch
What is your aesthetic? We create modern, structured floral designs with lots of texture and color. We aim to surprise and delight our clients with special touches – everything we do is custom. We will use vintage brooches, paper mache birds or unusual flower combinations in our work. We are thrilled when people say “I have never seen that done before with flowers!” We find that brides and other clients who are themselves creative people tend to be attracted to our work – artists and designers, especially.
How does your studio style convey your professional aesthetic? I am compelled to incorporate fabulous color into everything – from colored paper clips, pens and ribbon, to bright containers for floral arrangements, to the picture on my iMac desktop wallpaper! And I am a bit of a collector, so you will find bins and trays of cards, trinkets and knick-knacks around the studio that I save because I think “I will use this someday in a floral arrangement or on a tablescape.”
Favorite part of your studio? The open space and enormous windows. We are blessed with a nice amount of room and year-round streaming light, as our studio is in a converted loft that was a turn-of-the-century underwear factory! Apart from the desk and granite island, everything from our Parsons work table to our files are mobile, so we can configure the space in any way that suits the particular event on which we are working. When the space is filled with flowers it is truly magical in here.
Where do you go for inspiration? With floral design, inspiration is easy – we are inspired by seasonal flowers! My favorite time for the flowers is definitely spring – we love to use fluffy blooms like peonies, lilac, garden roses and anything else fragrant. I also take cues from fashion, interior design magazines, the Brooklyn Flea market…anywhere I can be exposed to color and pattern inspires me to create new and unique combinations with flowers.
What tool do you use in your business that you can’t live without? I am so grateful for our Honda Pilot that I have named her – Frannie. She holds a miraculous amount of flowers and gear. Some mornings at the market I am absolutely certain I have bought too many flowers to fit in one trip and somehow it always works.
Is there anything you’d upgrade to? My upgrade fantasies involve refrigeration – a massive walk-in floral cooler and a refrigerated truck. Lately when I am out and about in the city, I fixate on the giant trucks I see and wonder how hard they would be to drive and whether or not they could be refrigerated for our flowers!
Anything else we should know? We adore being a boutique floral design studio – this gives us the flexibility to do flowers for intimate gatherings or grand affairs and provide incredibly personalized service. We love it when a bride or a client comes to us and says something like “Please create flower arrangements inspired by vintage candy…” (which we recently did!). A light switches on and the creativity just flows.
[images from Blossom & Branch]