I snapped this messy hot mess with my phone last Friday, and uploaded it to Facebook with the caption, “You know it’s been a good day when the design floor looks like this.” My Dyson-loving, super-organizing, clutter-loathing friend, Lisa, left a comment that may go down in my history of all-time favorite Facebook comments. It went a little something like this:

“… I can’t lie… I actually gasped out loud when I saw the picture before reading the caption. My first thought was someone broke into your new location and vandalized it. Then I realized you were making money.”

I love her.

I think one of the most challenging hurdles I had to clear as a blossoming florist was learning to live with the overall filthiness that is a flower shop. Sure, it smells lovely when you walk in and the retail area is neat as a pin; but should you dare to venture into the depths of the work area all bets are off, friends. The design floor looks like the scene of  a horrible flower massacre, every inch of counter space is covered in the weird dusty pollen that comes off of filler greenery (sealed by a layer of the plant shine spray we wield like aerosol hairspray on the set of Steel Magnolias) and when we get real crazy and repot plants, actual dirt is involved. Heaven help my little neat-freak soul…

I used to spend a good 75% of my day sweeping and dusting and scrubbing my nails. I toyed with the idea of instituting new standard operating procedures that mandated hourly scrub-downs and sweep-ups and floor-to-ceiling tidying. Then I realized that this plan was neither practical nor necessarily sane. And I came to accept that my business may resemble an episode of Hoarders every now and then (a mild case, there aren’t any cats living in here) and that’s okay. Now I feel like our design floor reads like a testimony of the success of a work day. The level of dirty is proportional to the level of busy, so the dirtier the better I say!