Latest / Mic Hamptons Podcast: Hamptons Real Estate & the People Behind It / More Than Flowers: Building Bloom with Kerry Weisse

Transcript

More Than Flowers: Building Bloom with Kerry Weisse · Mic Hamptons Podcast: Hamptons Real Estate & the People Behind It

• 0:00
  Mike Petersohn: Hi, I'm Mike Peterson from Brown Harris Stevens. The Hamptons runs on relationships and over the years, I've built a network of top tier professionals who operate at the highest level. Mike Hamptons is your access point to that world. The people, the insights and the opportunities behind it all. Hi, welcome to another episode of the Mike Hamptons Podcast.
• 0:27
  My name is Michael Peterson. I'm an agent with Brown Harris, Stephens and the Hamptons. I'm a luxury real estate agent here, and I am also the president of the H and G Hamptons Networking Group, and we are about 30 folks. We meet every week. And in my group, there are architects and master plumbers, electricians, and everybody you kind of need to live your life and deal with situations and problems in the Hamptons.
• 0:58
  And we even have a florist in our group. So I'm very excited today to introduce one of our newest members in H and G, Kerry Weisse. Welcome aboard. Yay. I just want to start off and just say that I don't really I love flowers, but I got really excited the other night.
• 1:20
  We had a social event. We had a cocktail event at 75 Main in Southampton, and you showed up with a whole bunch of arrangements, and they looked amazing.
• 1:30
  Kerry Weisse: Yes. I wanted to bring our creativeness to the Hamptons to show people that we're just not a floral, we're not one-eight 100 Flowers, we are bringing a different approach to flowers that we can celebrate with everybody.
• 1:46
  Mike Petersohn: Nice. So what H and G, for folks that aren't aware, we're a group of folks and we all try to help each other out. So everybody always asks me as a realtor, do I have, you know, an electrician I can recommend? Do you have a plumber? Do have a whoever?
• 2:04
  And we all grow our businesses that way, and I thought what was really exciting to me that night was that Zach, who runs 75 Main, was so impressed with your floral arrangements that I think that you guys are now engaged somehow.
• 2:18
  Kerry Weisse: Yep, yep. So we're going to hopefully have a whole big contract with him and basically supply his flowers throughout the whole season, and so that way we can be blooming in there.
• 2:30
  Mike Petersohn: What a great high profile location, and those guys always do a really nice evening for us there. I'm really excited. But I'm now going to take you back into the way back machine, the history, because we were talking about this the other day, you have a, you grew up in a family business which led you down this path. I was wondering if you could maybe enlighten everybody a little bit about how you got from A to B.
• 2:55
  Kerry Weisse: So my family, we own a funeral home, and we lived above the funeral home for X, Y, Z years. And my best friend, who was the limo driver's daughter, we would always help clean up after a funeral would go out. And of course, we had to get ready for kindergarten, so what we did was we made like pretty wreaths in our hair of all the flowers. And of course, with funerals, always there's flowers, and we want to always caps the whole thing of flowers and how people show their love. And through the years of having the florist with the funeral home, my sister actually was a designer, and she worked at the local florist there, and her dream was always to become or have a florist.
• 3:44
  So unfortunately, she did not fulfill her dream, but she had passed, and that's where we wanted to fulfill that, and basically have a florist in memory of my sister, Eilish. And she was very unique, and she wanted to do things very unique and show her style and her creativeness of everything. So that's how that started. And of course, you know, very difficult in the sense of always, you know, with funerals and flowers and having people, why show their sympathy, their love? But we were able to celebrate many different things with having a florist besides funerals.
• 4:31
  Mike Petersohn: To me, it seems so logical to have such a simple extension vertical. Okay, know, we're in the funeral business, and now we sell flowers as well. It makes all the sense in the world to me, and I know that your business has grown exponentially. Everybody I know who knows you, as I get to know you, says that you're doing a great job. I was going to say killing it, but that probably wouldn't be appropriate here.
• 4:58
  Kerry Weisse: You know, being in the business forever and always changing things, helping families to say, if they didn't like this, can you move this or can you change this? And even flowers making a difference for them, for a family. And when starting out the florist, you know, it was just something that I can run to. Being in a business of funerals and seeing sadness all the time, you want to be out and having your own therapy and helping people and celebrating them and just running up to a doorstep with somebody who wants to say happy birthday. And they get the best, know, Oh my God, I got flowers today.
• 5:41
  And that was like, that's my therapy as far as, you know and of course, playing with pretty flowers is the best.
• 5:49
  Mike Petersohn: It sounds like you've chosen the right profession. Have just a little background on you. I know that you've got at least one or two kids.
• 6:00
  Kerry Weisse: Well, I am a woman with a cape, I say, because I'm a wife, I'm a mom of six, and yes, that word of six is a lot. A lot of personalities, a lot of love. Where my house can go from love to a WWE ring in two seconds? Yes. But again, they are all in the family businesses, and you know, we just, you know, it's challenging.
• 6:34
  In this economic times of a woman who is a business owner for several businesses and having her family life, business life, they have adapted to everything, and I love them dearly. Awesome.
• 6:52
  Mike Petersohn: I always get that impression from you when I speak to you. You also have I know that this just came up this morning in conversation in our group meeting. You have a family home. It sounds like it's pretty old, it sounds like it's going to need some work, and it sounds like H and G might be involved with that.
• 7:09
  Kerry Weisse: Yes, and unfortunately, during this wonderful winter season, how the lovely pipes froze, and during the coldest days of the year in February, unfortunately, the pipes froze, and as somebody who went over there to try to get down to the pipe, started using a blowtorch.
• 7:31
  Mike Petersohn: With
• 7:32
  Kerry Weisse: that lovely blowtorch, who knew that fire can jump? And look at that.
• 7:37
  Mike Petersohn: Oh, no.
• 7:38
  Kerry Weisse: So unfortunately, we had
• 7:40
  Mike Petersohn: That wasn't one of our guys, though.
• 7:42
  Kerry Weisse: No, no. Again, my mom is still with us, and she lives in one of the back houses. So trying to get water to her in the coldest of days of the year, and of course, trying to do something as a Band Aid, and it went wrong.
• 8:01
  Mike Petersohn: How old is that house?
• 8:03
  Kerry Weisse: Oh, it was definitely built in eighteen something.
• 8:06
  Mike Petersohn: Okay. And now, my understanding, Joe Reffees has been by your house and kind of giving you some ideas of what needs to be done, and it sounds like So the process with, you know, if you end up working with Joe, which I think sounds like you guys are on track to do that. Joe's a contractor, and then we have so many subcontractors in our group. I think we've got you covered, so that's exciting.
• 8:28
  Kerry Weisse: And it's just weird that, of course, joining this group, I have everybody at my fingertips, and it's amazing.
• 8:35
  Mike Petersohn: I like the group an awful lot. One of the things I was thinking about, especially in terms of the Hamptons, Hamptons clientele, and your business, that it's not I always think of a florist as Mother's Day, and that just passed. You know, that's a huge, I'm sure, remarkably busy time for you. But that being said, a lot of my clients will like to have flowers delivered, you know, weekly throughout the season, etcetera. I know you've been delivering, servicing the Hamptons for quite some time.
• 9:12
  Do you want to Is there something you can elaborate on that?
• 9:17
  Kerry Weisse: So a few years back when we started The Florist, and we had a property manager come to our St. James location, And he was in a rush, and I was saying to him, hi, what do you need? He's like, just a bucket of flowers. I said, okay, what do you need it for? And he had basically said that he was going to bring it out to his clients.
• 9:38
  And I said, do you have somebody arranging? And he's like, no, I'm going to do it. And I said, well, do you need help? I'll come with you. And that led on to me coming out to the Hamptons to basically come and make beautiful flowers for this one family.
• 9:56
  And then it went into week after week after week. And then his other friend who is another property manager said, well, can I steal her? If she's doing this, I would love to have these beautiful flowers here also. And then it went into off season people who are still living out here that love the flowers, especially during the holidays. We went to someone's house during Thanksgiving, Christmas, and just bring beautiful flowers to them.
• 10:23
  Mike Petersohn: That's great. And I'm assuming that's a line of business that you're going to continue to grow out here. So my job and my role is to introduce you to as many property managers as I possibly can going forward. So that's all good. Obviously, so I'm trying to think about who else we can introduce you to help grow your business, and I'm sure that you've got lots of ideas and designs without my input on this, but at an enterprise level, I think about my competitors, Coopetition is how I describe, you know, what we do out here, but other real estate agencies, real estate agents, anybody else that springs to mind that you think would benefit from?
• 11:18
  Kerry Weisse: So, basically, like restaurants who are hosting showers or the night before wedding, you know, rehearsal dinners, we have weddings. We have showers, bridal showers, baby showers. So restaurants, you know, would cover all that and also just basically anyone who's celebrating an event. We have also besides the florals, all the event decor that we have. So we also just bring everything to someone's house as far as my other vendors who have balloons and so forth.
• 11:54
  So it's not just florals that we're doing, we're doing everything that somebody would need as far as a celebration.
• 12:01
  Mike Petersohn: Awesome. Again, what I've seen of your work has been remarkably beautiful, and I don't throw out compliments like that lightly. They're really fantastic. So I guess I would say if you could please tell our audience how they can reach you and get connected to you.
• 12:25
  Kerry Weisse: Okay. You can call us or text us or message us on any social media platform. We will be glad to help you. One other thing I want to bring up that I completely forgot, that we're going to be in a car dealership's commercial. They just I made about 10 pieces for them, and of course, it's going be in a commercial.
• 12:52
  So I'm excited to see that because I made beautiful pieces for the sense of having beautiful pieces next to their lovely cars.
• 13:01
  Mike Petersohn: Nice. I like it. So I guess thank you again for coming to visit us today. Thank you for turning into another episode of the Mike Hamptons Podcast. If you ever need anything in The Hamptons, I know a guy.
• 13:21
  We'll see you on the next episode.
• 13:22
  Kerry Weisse: Okay.
• 13:25
  Mike Petersohn: Hey, this is Michael. Thanks for listening to Mike Hamptons, powered by the Hamptons Networking Group, where the right people make the right things happen. If you're planning anything in The Hamptons, buying, selling, building, hosting, or investing, don't do it alone. Tap into our network of vetted top tier service providers who get things done at the highest level. And if real estate is part of your plan, I bring deep knowledge, strong network, and a track record of getting deals done the right way.
• 13:57
  Reach out anytime. We'll see you on the next one. You can call, text, or DM me right now or visit my website to get connected. I work with the Titan Network and the best deals go to the people who move first. Don't forget to subscribe.
• 14:11
  I'll see you on the next deal. Keep making moves.