The thing about rural life and small businesses usually amounts to this: there are too few people, too little money, and too many state and septic regulations.
Some people have done it, but that’s rare.
Many businesses went along with family farms when the government decided they were too inefficient for the global economy. Sue Lambertini quit her first shop for personal reasons. She decided to take a significant risk and do it again.
Sue has pulled it off, and good for her. I love to write about good, kind, and quiet people who take on challenging dreams and succeed against the odds.
My acquaintance with Sue was casual, and I didn’t know how her new business was doing until the convergence of Mother’s Day, prom, and wedding seasons breathed new life into her business—The Cambridge Flower Shop. It seems everybody in town needs flowers.
I find myself visiting her shop, not just to say hello and bring along my dog Zinnia (who is always welcomed with open arms) but also to find that one unique flower.
I decided to capture this in a photograph (above). I also buy chocolates from her and give them to Walgreens’s hard-working pharmacy aides.
Sue’s store has advanced my flower photography season by several months—many of the pictures you’ve seen come from her shop.
Soon, I’ll have some of my flowers in my garden bed, but in the meantime and almost certainly beyond, Sue has become a valuable source of beautiful flowers with enchanting colors for my photography as I wait for the warm weather to plant some of my own.
If she has to throw out a beautiful flower because it stayed in the store too long, she’ll sometimes offer it to me. Otherwise, she has a great instinct for what I might like. I usually buy one or two flowers at a time.
We’ve become friends, and I am happy to see her business take off. She isn’t rich and has no powerful backers, but she is a hard worker and a gutsy one.
She was very anxious at first, and I could see why.
The life of a florist is complex. Flowers can only sit around briefly; they must be sold quickly or discarded. And they can’t return what they can’t sell. It seems like Russian roulette to me, and then there’s fierce competition online from websites that take orders and payments online and ship them to buyers.
When Sue orders a lot of flowers, she gets nervous—this happened in Easter—hoping they will sell. She puts a lot on the line, buys a lot, and sells almost all the flowers she orders.
She has worked hard and long days since the beginning, and she has become one of those success stories I love to write about—good guys beat the odds and win in a small town. She is one of the good guys.
She had one advantage – she was known and liked from her first shop.
Sue Lamberti was the only florist in town seven years ago; I bought flowers from her then. She was shy and quiet then, and she tells me now that it was a difficult period in her life. I knew nothing about that and still don’t.
Sue closed the first flower shop in 2017. I didn’t know her well, but I loved her flowers and bought them for myself and others.
After that, she went off my radar, and I was surprised a few months ago when Maria and I noticed that a flower shop had returned to town at the intersection of the hardware store, Walgreens Pharmacy, and Cumberland Farms.
A flower shop had been in that spot, but we had yet to notice it, and suddenly, there was a new one. It had a full and appealing window display and an outside stand, and it gave off a lot of energy.
This was something to be noticed.
After driving by for a dozen times, we went in there. We loved the place, and we loved Sue.
Sue recognized me before I recognized her, but I was happy to see her back.
She was much more animated and charismatic than I remembered (so was I, maybe), and we connected and immediately became friends. Of course, I wasn’t in such good shape either then.
She was interested in my new relationship with flowers. I admired her for having the courage and determination to start a new business in our small town, a notorious graveyard for small business owners.
This morning, when I went in to say hello and scout her flowers, I knew I had to return and take a photo of her surrounded by Mother’s Day, prom, and wedding orders. She hardly had space for them and worked day and night to prepare her orders.
There are no extensive media reviews around here, no slick ad agencies, wealthy backers, or Internet marketing specialists. She’s had to do it on her own.
Two people in the store work with her and are both busy: Linda and her friend Michael.
She’s even getting orders from Vermont, and the phone is ringing all day.
I thought this was it. Sue had made it. She still gets nervous sometimes, but she is also excited and relieved all of the time.
I see it as a victory for the quiet people, the good, hard, hard-working people who have a dream and make it come true.
Congratulations, Sue, you did it, and you earned it.
