Flower Duet Appears at Women in Business Torrance Area Chamber of Commerce

We were so hon­ored to be invit­ed to speak at the Tor­rance Area Cham­ber of Com­merce on August 7, 2024

On Wednes­day, August 7, 2024, Casey and Kit were invit­ed as speak­ers at our local cham­ber of com­merce in Tor­rance. It was a love­ly morn­ing with the full house of atten­dees! We enjoyed shar­ing our advice and the stage with the tal­ent­ed founders Jann and Hay­ley from sock­prints. The event was titled “What­ev­er She’s Hav­ing.” It ses­sion focused on being authen­tic in friend­ships, learn­ing to take time for your­self, and how to excel as a leader.

Full House in Attendance including a U.S. Congresswoman

Pic­tured above from left to right, is The Hon­or­able Max­ine Waters  (D-CA 43rd Dis­trict U.S. House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives), Hay­ley Mullin and Jann Mid­do from Sock­prints, Casey Cole­man Schwartz and Kit Cole­man Wertz of Flower Duet and Don­na Duper­ron, the Pres­i­dent & CEO of the Tor­rance Area Cham­ber of Com­merce.

It was a full house and we loved shar­ing the “stage” with the founders of Sock­prints, a patent­ed sock-print­ing busi­ness based in Tor­rance. Their com­pa­ny was found­ed by two soc­cer moms and even though their girls are grown women now, they are still expand­ing their business.

What She’s Having: Our Tips

We talked about how we start­ed our flower part­ner­ship (Casey knew how to design flow­ers from around the world and Kit was get­ting mar­ried in LA), how our friends encour­aged us to start our flower arrang­ing par­ty busi­ness that turned into Flower Duet, and how our friend­ships we forged and keep mak­ing help grow our busi­ness and ourselves.

Take Time Out

We also talked about how we share our skills with oth­er florists in our com­mu­ni­ty. We’ve co-worked events with our com­peti­tors because we know it’s good busi­ness and it’s reward­ing. We also talked about how we take care of our­selves (I go to a Pilates reformer class twice a week at a stu­dio in Tor­rance and Casey takes a yoga class in Redon­do Beach) and how impor­tant it is do take time out and focus on your own needs.

How to Excel as a Leader

Final­ly, we talked about how to be a leader is to know what your own weak­ness­es are so you can ask for the right help. As small busi­ness own­ers, we wear many dif­fer­ent hats, but some­times we need some­one else to wear the hat and help us. Often that is turn­ing to each oth­er’s strengths. Casey is great a sales, procur­ing flow­ers, pro­duc­tion and account­ing. I excel at online marke­ing, adver­tis­ing and plan­ning. We both love to design and teach flower arrang­ing so that’s good, too!

Casey takes a turn talk­ing about Flower Duet at the Women in Busi­ness break­fast through the Tor­rance Area Cham­ber of Commerce.

We met Max­ine Waters, U.S. Con­gress­woman from our local dis­trict, who attend­ed the entire ses­sion and gave a few won­der­ful kind words about Tor­rance and its great busi­ness­es. We’ve enjoyed being mem­bers of the Cham­ber for many years which has afford­ed us great vis­i­bil­i­ty in our com­mu­ni­ty and guid­ance for a lot of busi­ness ques­tions we’ve had before, dur­ing and after the pan­dem­ic. If you have a local busi­ness cham­ber of com­merce, we high­ly rec­om­mend join­ing it!

The group of atten­dees pos­es for a pho­to after the morn­ing event. It was a fun net­work­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty, too!