Business: Blossom Boom

Into Killian’s department store in Cedar Rapids, Iowa last week bustled thousands of women to get something for nothing. The “something” was a small orchid. In three days, Killian’s gave away 10,000, and pushed sales 53% above normal volume.

Killian’s was not the only store to discover that free flowers attract bargain-hunting females. In Manhattan, James McCreery & Co.’s department store holds an orchid day once a month, hands out 100,000 free blossoms a year. When Chicago’s Spiegel, Inc. opens a new retail store in its widespread chain, it pins orchids on its women customers.

Doc & Dible. This blossom boom has been planted and cultivated chiefly by a fast-growing company called Flowers of Hawaii. Founded by Hawaii’s Territorial Senator William H. (“Doc”) Hill with the help of a fast-moving Los Angeles florist named Graham W. Dible, F.O.H. has sold some 5,700,000 orchids since 1946. This year the company hopes to sell 6,000,000 vanda orchids (a small flower about 2½ inches long), and gross about $900,000.

Bald, stocky, 59-year-old Doc Hill had tried almost everything else on the island of Hawaii before Dible got him into flowers five years ago. Hill’s first job, in 1913, was selling eyeglasses to Japanese plantation hands on Hawaii at $3 apiece. He did so well that he opened a jewelry store, later branched out to finance, real estate, autos (he has the General Motors franchise on Hawaii), movie theaters (he owns ten) and utilities (he is president and principal stockholder of Hilo Electric Light Co., Ltd.). When Hill’s wife started shipping a few orchids from her garden to the U.S., Dible suggested the big commercial possibilities.

Pins & Packing. The flower company grows no orchids itself, buys them at 4¢ apiece from 428 island growers. It boasts that it is the “only firm in the world which can get an order for 50,000 vandas and ship them out the same day.”

At an Olaa packing and fumigating plant, 150 girls grade and separate the blooms, insert the stems into small plastic vials which have wads of wet cotton inside and are fitted with lapel pins. The flowers are air-expressed to mainland customers, who pay 10¢ to 15¢ a blossom.

Flowers of Hawaii sells about 85% of its orchids for giveaways and other promotion stunts, but it is hard at work setting up “orchid bars” in U.S. stores to sell the flowers for as little as 25¢. There are 21 orchid bars in the U.S. now; the newest one will open this week in Richmond, Va. While low prices have killed the vanda for the retail flower trade, Dible thinks that giveaway orchids are helping florists nevertheless, by making people who have seldom gone into florist shops more flower-conscious. Said one orchidman: “Why, eight out of ten women have never had an orchid. They all want ’em!”