Branching Out

From April 5 through April 19, the Macy's Flower Show has the State Street store blanketed in color-blocked blossoms and filled with oversize flamingos. Throughout the promotion, daily events will include a cooking demonstration from the owner of the Meatloaf Bakery, a meet-and-greet with fashion and home designer Rebecca Moses, and—for the younger set—a personal appearance from a Smurf and Smurfette.

During past flower shows, "We focused on events that were all floral-related, including tours of the show and gardening demonstrations," said director of events Greg Moore. "We realized a couple of years ago that the Flower Show is a time when this store truly comes alive, and that it would be great to have a number of things for our customers to enjoy in addition to seeing the show, having lunch in the Walnut Room, and shopping. So we added entertainment, cooking demonstrations, kids' events, fashion shopping parties, and more."

Moore said he and his team focused on "making sure we have a good variety of events for our broad customer base." Toward that end, cooking demonstrations highlight a range of cuisines—in addition to meatloaf, local chefs will prepare seafood and vegetarian dishes—and entertainment runs the gamut from can-can dancers to a cappella rock singers.

And, of course, there are the flowers, which fill the 2.2-million-square-foot building, and which present plenty of logistical challenges for visual director Jon Jones and his partners at Green View Companies, a Peoria-based landscaping group. Though the department store is known for its annual display of over-the-top holiday decor, "the flower show is more difficult than Christmas," said Jones, "because you have to keep it alive." 

To do so, Jones and his team have had to ensure that the massive building stays between 65 and 68 degrees each day, and they replanted many of the flowers one week into the show. In the weeks leading up to the event, Green View staffers helped 20 not-quite-in-season cherry trees to blossom, moving them between a greenhouse and refrigerated trucks until it was time to install them in the store. And the process of creating flamingos out of moss, chicken wire, and thousands of kalanoche flowers presented some gravity-based obstacles: Designers had to keep strategic bits of the birds tilted toward light to control the way the flowers grew throughout the structures' building process.

The payoff? "Watching people's reaction has been so much fun," Jones said on a walkthrough of the store last week. "I love passing by and having people ask me to take their picture with the flowers." It also amuses Jones to catch the reactions of out-of-towners who encounter the show by chance. A group of French Canadian tourists asked: "Is the store like this all the time?"