Judi's joy at a blooming marvellous journey
Judi Roche holds a degree in Mechanical Engineering, became a secondary school teacher, turned to sales but eventually followed in her mother's footsteps by opening a flower shop.
Judi Roche has run the very successful Balla Florists for the past 19 years. Over those two decades, she has experienced a recession and the Covid-19 pandemic as well as having her family, but one thing has stayed constant – people’s want for a personal touch to their flowers, and that drives Judi on.
She closed her shop in Balla in recent years and now works out of a beautiful studio at the back of her house. The place is buzzing with activity on the day I visit but Judi makes time to slip away, sit down with a cup of tea and chat about her journey to becoming one of the most successful florists in the west of Ireland.
Judi: I'm from Wexford. I'm from a little village called Campile, south of New Ross, and I'm the eldest of seven children. My mother was a florist, she had five shops around the Southeast. My father was a horticulturist. I grew up in a madhouse with seven kids and running between flower shops and helping my mother. I did my first wedding when I was eight.
Judi: My mother's best friend, she fell off a trailer so she couldn't work. And the book was handed to me and there was a wedding bouquet, like Princess Diana's bouquet, and that time it all had to be hardwired. And somehow I must have just known how to do it, I suppose, watching her for years, and that was it. And then I went through school and I decided I was allergic to the whole thing. So I went on and I did a degree in Mechanical Engineering, and then I left that because I was confused. I decided that I wanted to do teaching. So I went back to NUIG and I did a BA in English and Maths degree. And then I did a Higher Diploma in education, and went secondary school teaching for a while. I couldn't get a full-time job. I got headhunted in Galway to work as a sales rep for a company in the North. And then I met my now husband and I fell pregnant with my eldest boy, Jack, and moved to Mayo. I worked for O'Gradys Joinery in Charlestown for a period, and a job appeared in the paper for a flower shop in Claremorris. It was a third of the wage I was on but I just got this yearning to go back. After about eight or nine months in that job, my brother-in-law had a video shop in Balla. We were out one night and he said he was getting out of it and he was going to put the place up for rent. After a few drinks, I turned around and I said, that's grand, I'll take it. He said to me, what are you going to put in there? I said, I'm going to open a flower shop. In Balla. Everyone at the table roared their heads laughing. That was August, and I handed in my notice. My sister was getting married in October, so I said I'd wait to do her wedding. She got married on October 16, I came back to Mayo on the 23rd, went to Dublin, bought the stock, put a sign over the door and off I went, and that's it. That's my journey to Balla.
Judi: I opened up in the smallest little place you ever saw in your entire life. My workspace was a small counter. When I opened, there was no social media, there was no Facebook, no Twitter, no Instagram, nothing. Everything was handwritten. Then a couple of years down the line I went on Facebook and all of a sudden things took off in a big way. Facebook in the very beginning became my showroom because I was in a small village in the west of Ireland. You'd put up a picture of the bouquet and then you'd sell five of them, and then you'd put up something else and you'd sell another five of them. So in 2009 the recession hit and we became a very important service. I remember on Mother's Day for example, all these kids are ringing to send flowers to their mum. It was huge. We went to doors, people were crying, missing their children who had to leave home. Again the power of social media – I threw up this story. I just told the story of what happened that weekend in about 500 words, and it went viral.
Judi: It's the sentiments that they represent. You're handing over something physical, but it's the emotion behind it and true meaning of what it is. It was after all of that that we won our first Irish Wedding Award. I think we've won eight or nine at this stage – we've won the Weddings Online one, which is the Oscars of the wedding world, three times. In 2012 when I was pregnant with my little lady, who is 11 now, I got blood clots in both my lungs and collapsed. So I ended up in ICU, and I was in hospital most of that summer. When I got out of the end, they were like, you need to take six months off now and stay at home. I went back to work the following day! After that we outgrew the little shop in Balla and we opened up our big shop in 2015. By August 2017, we nearly burst at the seams. It was too busy. I had 9, 10, 11 staff at that point. I still have nine staff. I'll never forget Mother's Day 2018. I'm talking 1,500 pieces. Then you have to manage logistics and drivers and everything has to be ordered in. But my eldest boy Jack, he was only 12 and 13, he was my little logistics manager. Now I have a software system, which I implemented when I had time when Covid came. So then in '18, my mother was up here and I said to her, I have to close that shop. And she was like, why? I said, I have to just go out to a warehouse or I have to get off the Main Street. No one really understands why I'm gone off the Main Street. I said, by 2025, the main streets in Ireland, as you see them now, will not be the same. Now, I didn't know about Covid at that stage. So in 2019 I bought everything and I threw it into a storage unit, preparing to open a studio-type situation. And then Covid hit. You couldn't write it. We were like, what do we do? Because when you're in the motions of floristry, providing a service, you're a heartbeat of the community. People are depending on you. I kept the two of the girls on my staff with me, and I said, right, we're going to put the head down. We're going to go day by day. We're getting these flowers out for the mothers that have ordered. Anyway, we got it all done. James and two of the lads were masked up and we got it out. Then I shut down for two or three weeks. The sun was shining, and we thought this is great. I was walking the roads, having a great time. And then a lovely lady I knew from Claremorris passed away and the family rang me and there wasn't a flower to be got in the country. But because I had such a good relationship with my suppliers and always paid my bills, I had a way in. I said, do you know what? Give me an hour, because I didn't want to let them down. So in I went and that was it. I worked the whole way through Covid.
Judi: I suppose for me at the moment now, I'm nine months today out of the shop in Balla. I said I'd give myself twelve months. The twelve months were to give me time to get out of a bricks-and-mortar brain and to get into a studio brain. Even though both are creative, the studio brain should be more creative because you have more time. My reason for this decision was to spend time with my family. My eldest son went to college three years ago and when I think of it, I was standing in Limerick and I couldn't stop crying, even though I was delighted for him. So I said, this is never happening to me again. So I'm here now every evening with them. The plan down the road is to get used to this and find my niche, my exact niche. Personally, I absolutely love events and weddings and preparing funeral flowers – that’s such an important job. I need to bring the business to a place where I'm in control to the point that I'm not afraid to take a week off. I'm giving myself another three to four months until I can figure out who I am, where I'm going. I'm 50 next year. So I don't want to be jumping in our vans for the next 20 years. People who are 20 years older than me who have been in business have all said to me, make sure you spend time with your children. Make sure you have time for yourself, because at the end of the day, you're only a number. However, I love my job, so what I'm trying to do is find the balance between being a woman, a mother, a wife. And I just want to still obviously have my business to be the best and have the best service, but to be the best mother I can be as well. I'm not going to sacrifice my children for my business anymore, but I'm not going to sacrifice the business either. So it's just trying to find the balance.
