Smell the roses

By CARRIE KIRSCHNER - The Independent

ASHLAND January 07, 2008 02:40 am

— Three separate generations of Fieldses have owned Fields Flower Shop, making it one of the oldest family businesses in Ashland’s downtown.
The shop dates to the 1920s and it has thrived for more than 80 years. It was first opened by Martha Fields Washburn in the family’s home on 21st Street, according to current owner Rob Fields, 41.
Before Rob Fields took over the family business in January 2001, his father, Dick Fields, owned the shop, having received it from his father, Oscar Fields. Oscar Fields, Washburn’s brother, took over the shop in the late ’50s, and it was he who first moved it to downtown, somewhere on Winchester Avenue, according to Rob Fields.
Dick Fields, now 75, moved the shop to its current location, 221 15th St., in the mid 1970s. Rob Fields grew up in the shop on busy 15th Street, earning his first pay check in 1979 when he was in the sixth grade.
Although he worked in the shop as a child and his college years, he wasn’t always sure he would own it. It wasn’t until his father announced his surprise retirement on the ride home from work on Christmas Eve 2000 that Rob Fields would become a third-generation merchant.
“He (my father) kind of wanted me to go out and do something else, he wanted me to try other things,” Rob Fields said. “My father built up a pretty good-sized business. It supported his family, it provided everything that we needed. My dad made it what it is. He worked night and days. There weren’t very many days that he didn’t bring it home with him. It was his entire life, really.”
“He had made up a good thing and I wanted to help him keep going. I thought it would be more interesting than going into the corporate world,” Rob Fields added with a chuckle last week, after nearly eight years of running the day-to-day operations of the business.
Dick Fields isn’t away from the shop very often. According to his son, he stops by every day. Rob Fields doesn’t mind.
“It makes me feel good,” he said. “There are times he’ll say stuff that I don’t know.”
Rob Fields credits his dad’s hard work for the shop’s success. Dick Fields credits something else — technology.
“Our biggest thing is, was, the telephone. That is what has kept us in business,” Dick Fields said. “If we relied on people just walking in, we would have been done years ago. The telephone is really our secret.”
The telephone and the flower wire service, which allows the delivery of fresh flowers around the world through a network of independent shops, helped the business to grow.
In addition to the technology, Dick Fields said he followed the advice of “a fellow from the Independent,” who told him to pick out a single item in his store and sell it as cheap as he could to provide one product everyone could afford. Dick Fields did just that. He began selling a bud vase of a single rose for a $1.50 and delivered it anywhere in the city.
Business soon picked up. The vases were easy to take with more expensive deliveries already going to homes and hospitals, but, more importantly, they made fresh flowers available to the masses.
“That was always my thing, to have (something) as cheap as possible, where everybody could afford something. Before I got into (the flower business) things were expensive. I couldn’t even afford things,” Dick Fields said.
Rob Fields has continued in his father’s lead offering affordable arrangements and looking to technology to grow the business. Fields Flower Shop is among the millions of small businesses to have a presence on the Internet, www.fieldsflowers.com, and is watching as the market slowly changes.
“It gets several dozen hits per day,” Rob Fields said. “More people keep calling us while they are on the Web site.”
“I think it’s a very good thing,” Dick Fields said of the new technology. “I think it could be built into a tremendous business.”
Business is strong at the floral shop. Rob Fields recently opened a second location in Grayson, but it continues to evolve as the area’s culture and economy change.
Fresh floral arrangements have always made up the largest portion of business, but the occasions for people order them are changing. Funeral arrangements accounted for roughly 60 percent of business in his father’s days, but that portion of the business has now shrunk to approximately 40 percent, Rob Fields said. The shop has become more dependent on selling flowers for a variety of special occasions such as birthdays, anniversaries, weddings and births.
“The industry is changing so much, I don’t know where it will be in a few years,” Rob Fields said. “It’s very tough right now.”
Rising energy and transportation costs worldwide top the list of his worries. Most of the flowers arranged by his shop are grown in South America, shipped to Miami and then trucked to him from regional distributors. The increases in costs and climbing wages in the United States keep him concerned.
When asked about his goal for his family’s business, he said a single word: “Survival.” But after a few moments he added: “To take all the different changes that come along.”
Continuing his father’s policy of personalized customer service and an affordable, yet high quality, product will remain at the center of his business plan, Rob Fields said.
“We try real hard to please everyone,” he said. “The people we have working here — we have a lot of people that have been with us for a long time — actually care.”
That’s important, he said, in a business where customers depend on you to convey their feelings.
CARRIE KIRSCHNER can be reached at ckirschner@dailyindependent.com or (606) 326-2653.

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