When she first learned how to use email through her local library, Karen Good said, she was told to select three words for her address that represented things she liked.
One of them was “rose,” which reflects her affinity for flowers.
Good, of Mount Joy, Lancaster County, now has good reason to be fond of carnations and daisy poms, too.
She won this year’s Royer’s Flowers & Gifts name-the-arrangement contest. Her entry, “Harvest Beauty,” was chosen from nearly 900 online submissions.
The all-around arrangement features a ceramic pumpkin, measures 12 inches high and 10 inches wide, and comprises carnations and daisy poms in fall colors.
Good said she sought divine inspiration for her entry.
“Now Lord,” she said, “what would you call that? It’s beautiful.”
Good and runner-up Janet Adams of Columbus, Ohio, will receive one of the arrangements as their prizes. Adams submitted “Blooming Pumpkin” through Royer’s sister company, Connells Maple Lee Flowers & Gifts, which has three Columbus-area stores.
Author: Neal
Royer’s at 85: An internet pioneer
This is part of a series of occasional blog posts about important events in Royer’s history as the company marks its 85th anniversary in 2022.
The internet is so entrenched in our lives that it’s easy to forget that only a generation ago everything was new. Online access was mostly via dial-up service using phone lines. The term “blog” hadn’t yet been coined.
And you may not know that Royer’s Flowers pioneered online marketing within the floral industry and was among the first Internet providers in central Pennsylvania.
Kevin Laicha had joined Royer’s in 1984 to provide support in the areas of accounting and computers. In 1993, he hired Scott Curtin, a Lebanon native who was studying computers at Carnegie Mellon University.
Carnegie Mellon was an early player on the internet, which began as a Department of Defense project. Ostensibly hired to clean and maintain computers, Curtin steered Royer’s to acquire an Internet connection through the university.
Selling to the public
In 1994, Royer’s created a new company – Nothing But Net – to get a foothold in the burgeoning online world. To cover the cost of connecting each of its stores and leveraging its computer server capacity, in 1996 Royer’s, through NBN, began selling internet service to the public.
“So that was all we thought: we’ll just get 100 users to offset the cost,” said Laicha, who was president of NBN, which operated from Quentin Circle Shopping Center in Lebanon. Before long, NBN had 3,000 customers paying $19.99 per month for unlimited online access.
NBN built Royer’s first website around 1996; at the time, Laicha recalled, 1-800-Flowers was the only other florist online. NBN’s profits paid for Royer’s ads on Yahoo!, then itself a nascent search engine. Orders flowed in from all over the world.
Another offshoot of the NBN/Royer’s partnership was the development of Flowerlink, an internet-based flower-ordering service that grew to a membership of some 1,000 flower shops around the world.
Royer’s eventually sold NBN to a Lebanon County competitor, Lebanon MobileFone, to focus on its core floral business. But Royer’s maintained an internet division and a strong presence in the digital world while growing its brick-and-mortar stores.
Royer’s today attributes more than half of its annual revenue to online sales.
Royer’s Flowers contest asks customers to name new pumpkin arrangement
Candy corn is so popular that it seems to arrive in grocery stores earlier every year.
Royer’s Flowers & Gifts’ annual name-the-arrangement contest is getting a head start on fall, too.
The new all-around arrangement features a ceramic pumpkin, measures 12 inches high and 10 inches wide and comprises carnations and daisy poms in fall colors.
To enter the contest, visit royers.com/contest. Limit one entry daily per email address, through Aug. 12.
One winner and one runner-up will be selected from entries received by Connells Maple Lee and its sister company in Pennsylvania. Both the winner and runner-up will receive one of the arrangements (retail value $36.99) as their prize.
Allison Rivera wins Royer’s Flowers birthday card design contest
Allison Rivera, 9, enjoys playing any game with a ball, including tennis with a neighbor.
But regardless of whether the East Lampeter Township, Lancaster County, resident ever masters her forehand or backhand, she’s already a skilled freehand artist.
“She loves to draw, loves to color,” said her mother, Debbie. “She always has.”
And she’s gotten so good at it that the fourth-grader at J.E. Fritz Elementary School aced this year’s Royer’s Flowers & Gifts Kids Club birthday card design contest.
Her winning entry will adorn the electronic card that kids club members will receive on their birthdays in the coming year. Her design features white daisies set against a purple background and the message, “Have a Flowertastic Birthday!”
Allison’s prize is a free flower delivery on her next birthday.
Allison, whose family also includes her sister, Emily, 8, and father, Angel, loves to draw flowers and people, her mother said. One of her specialties is drawing a person’s face on the side of a cake when it is his or her birthday.
The Royer’s Kids Club is free to ages 5 to 12. With parental permission, children may register for the kids club here or at any Royer’s store. Kids club benefits include a membership card, online activities, a quarterly e-mail newsletter, contests and events.
Royer’s at 85: From flower grower to importer
This is part of a series of occasional blog posts about important events in Royer’s history as the company marks its 85th anniversary in 2022.
In 1937, Lester and Hannah Royer moved their young family from downtown Lebanon to a new home on the outskirts of the city.
Their son Ken was 6 at the time. In his book, “Retailing Flowers Profitably,” Ken noted that the new property provided nearly an acre of land for gardening, “thus my involvement with plants and flowers began.”
That year also marks the beginning of Royer’s Flowers, which Lester and Hannah started from their new home. Decades later, the company would travel far outside the United States to source its flowers.
The elder Royers, who met while students at Elizabethtown College, had each been raised on a farm and knew how to grow vegetables almost instinctively. Hannah also grew African violets on her windowsill. A neighbor sold them at a local garment factory where she worked.
Greenhouses boost production
But starting in 1939, production would begin to far exceed what the neighbor reasonably could sell at her job.
Because that summer, Lester obtained a 10-foot-by-10-foot greenhouse. It was free (“That definitely fit our budget,” Ken noted) but for the effort of dismantling and removing it from the owner’s property.
The greenhouse multiplied the Royers’ production capacity for small plants tenfold, Ken noted. For sales outlets, the family would turn to farmers markets (Ken and his sister working them every Saturday) and eventually open their first store in a converted garage behind their home, adding more greenhouses over time.
“The business remained pretty much the same through the 1970s,” Ken said in a 1991 interview with the Lancaster New Era newspaper. “It was very basic. You grew flowers in a greenhouse and sold them right there. At one time, Lancaster County was the country’s largest producer of carnations.”
But two key events in the late 1970s confronted the floral industry with “vast, profound change,” Ken said.
One was the oil crisis, which caused the price of heating oil to jump from 7.5 cents per gallon to more than $1 seemingly overnight.
“This price change had a devastating effect on the costs of greenhouse operators in the Northeast,” Royer’s included, Ken wrote in his book.
Product now thousands of miles away
Flower production shifted to Colorado and California, the added cost for transportation to the East Coast still less burdensome for Royer’s than the higher fuel costs.
The second event was the realization that Bogota, Colombia, lying on a plateau near the equator, offered the perfect year-round environment for growing flowers, with plenty of cheap labor available for production. Colombian carnations were often superior to what Royer’s grew and lasted longer in a vase.
Other parts of Colombia, such as Medellin, and other South American countries also would gain a foothold in the flower-growing business.
The net effect was that Royer’s had to change from growing flowers to importing them. Around 1980, Ken traveled to South America to begin developing relationships with growers.
“We had to learn how to monitor and control the quality of the product like we did in our own backyard,” he told the New Era, “except the product was being grown thousands of miles away in South America.”
Starting with Ken and continuing with his son Tom and then grandson Geoff, three generations of Royers have made regular trips to South America flower farms. Royer’s may be the only local florist in the United States that makes such visits to check on the quality of the product that will wind up in its customers’ homes and workplaces.
For instance, it has become an annual tradition to visit rose farms in the days leading up to Valentine’s Day to ensure the best quality possible for a florist’s version of the Super Bowl.
Royer’s follows the flowers to Miami, where they pass through customs and are placed on refrigerated trucks for delivery to Royer’s headquarters in Lebanon.
“It’s a product of the way we do things,” Tom said. “We’re very detailed about a lot of things we do. Flower-buying is just one of them.”
Then as now, the purpose for going to Bogota is simple.
“We want the best possible flowers we can find,” Tom said.
Royer’s at 85: Finding our niche
This is part of a series of occasional blog posts about important events in Royer’s history as the company marks its 85th anniversary in 2022.
Ken Royer, the son of Royer’s Flowers founders Hannah and Lester Royer, wrote the book on running a successful flower shop, both in a figurative sense and quite literally.
His decades of experience at the helm of Royer’s Flowers, during which it became one of the largest florists in the United States, certainly qualified him as an authority in his field.
And he put his insights into words, which he published in book form under the title, “Retailing Flowers Profitably.”
QUALITY CONTROL
If you wanted a distillation of Ken’s 500-page manuscript and flower-selling philosophy, you could do worse than a 1991 “Masters of Business” feature in the Lancaster New Era newspaper.
In a question-and-answer format with a reporter, Ken described how Royer’s carved a niche for itself that allowed the company to grow from one store with $170,000 in annual revenues when he took over from his parents in the mid-1950s to 18 locations and more than $12 million in annual revenues at the time of the interview.
“Most people in this business are crafts oriented,” Ken said, “they’re most comfortable with the design aspects and working with the flowers. That makes it hard to be able to grow beyond a store or two.”
Ken, who earned a degree in floriculture from Michigan State University, said he was more drawn to the business side.
“I saw a big opportunity to bring sophisticated business procedures and marketing techniques to the industry, which traditionally was very segmented and never really had a national chain like most other industries.”
Creativity being a subjective thing, Ken explained, made it difficult to institutionalize across multiple locations.
“But that’s essentially what you have to do,” he said. “The key is developing a system where there are controls over the stores that give you consistency and quality control.”
Royer’s was dubbed the “McDonald’s of the flower business,” Ken said, for offering 25 basic arrangements available at each of its stores. Royer’s talented designers could customize anything, but the company’s aim was to offer “easy-to-buy flowers for personal enjoyment or routine social expressions.
“The average guy can come in here and not feel intimated or embarrassed. You don’t have to know a thing about flowers or how much they cost to come in here and get something nice.”
MAKING MAGIC
To control the quality of products and services offered, Royer’s introduced:
- An in-house design training program
- A central design division in Lebanon
- A 24-month management training program
The depth of the effort betrayed the limit of the fast-food comparison.
“It all comes down to knowledge,” Ken said. “You can’t just hire anybody to stand behind the counter; they must understand the business. It’s not like fast food – you can teach somebody everything they need to know about burgers in five minutes.”
Floral design was more complicated than flipping burgers, but Royer’s wanted the process to be fast-food simple from the customer’s perspective.
Royer’s focus early on was to make flower buying easier and more convenient.
“I guess you could say that we want to take the mystery out of flower buying,” he said, “but not the magic.”
One creative child will win a flower delivery in Royer’s annual birthday card design contest
Like the start of summer break itself, Royer’s Flowers & Gifts’ annual birthday card design contest presents a blank canvas.
Royer’s is challenging children ages 5 to 12 to design an email birthday card that all Royer’s Kids Club members will receive in the year ahead.
The artist with the winning entry will receive a free bouquet delivery on his or her next birthday.
To enter the contest, download an entry form here or pick up one at any Royer’s store, create a design, and drop off the entry at any Royer’s store by July 15.
Good luck to everyone!
Royer’s at 85: Expansion to Ephrata
This is part of a series of occasional blog posts about important events in Royer’s history as the company marks its 85th anniversary in 2022.
In 1991, a reporter for the Lancaster New Era newspaper asked then-Royer’s president Ken Royer how the company had been able to grow from its flagship location in Lebanon to 18 stores throughout the region.
“What we did first was figure out our niche,” Ken said, “determine what kind of store we wanted to be. You can’t be all things to all people and maintain the element of control that is so vital.”
He noted that many flower shop owners could do well with one or two locations if they were relatively close to one another.
“But when we opened the Ephrata store in 1969, we crossed that mountain, so to speak,” he said. “The Ephrata store was in a different county from our Lebanon base, and I couldn’t be there all the time, yet I had to make things happen there.”
Ken’s mother, Hannah, started what would become Royer’s in 1937 without really knowing it. She was just growing African violets on the windowsill of her Lebanon home until a neighbor offered to sell some of the plants at the garment factory where she worked.
Acquiring For-Get-Me-Not
What evolved into South Side Flower Shop and ultimately Royer’s Flowers & Gifts comprised only the Lebanon store until the expansion 20 miles east into Ephrata, Lancaster County.
Royer’s acquired the For-Get-Me-Not Flower Shop in Ephrata, which Paul Weik had founded in the 1940s. The store, adopting the Royer’s name, moved from 9 W. Main St. to larger space next door at 11 W. Main St.
It remained there until April 1983, when it relocated to yet larger space, a former Arco gasoline station at 165 S. Reading Road, across Route 272 from the Ephrata Cloister. Jim Martin, who had owned the gas station, joined Royer’s as a delivery driver in Ephrata.
Royer’s spent $100,000 to remove underground gasoline storage tanks and renovate the building, expanding it from 1,500 square feet to 4,500 square feet and adding a greenhouse and walk-in cooler for customers to select loose flowers.
The new Ephrata store celebrated a five-day grand opening in June 1983 with a circus theme and a visit from Miss Lancaster County.
By that time, Ephrata was one of seven Royer’s stores, with a first York store soon to open.
Royer’s had found its niche, which we’ll explore in a separate installment in this series.
Royer’s at 85: Planting roots in Lebanon
This is part of a series of occasional blog posts about important events in Royer’s history as the company marks its 85th anniversary in 2022.
Like any great success story, that of Royer’s Flowers & Gifts began humbly in 1937. Hannah (Mom) Royer grew African violets on the windowsill of her Lebanon home. A neighbor who worked at a local garment factory offered to sell some of the plants to her co-workers.
The success that one day would make Royer’s one of the largest florists in America didn’t happen overnight. Hannah’s husband, a teacher in the Lebanon School District, added greenhouses to provide additional growing space.
In 1947, Lester joined the flower business full time. Around that time, the Royers converted their garage into a retail store called South Side Flower Shop and Hannah attended floral design school in Gloucester, Mass.
‘Most beautiful place to shop’
It wasn’t until 1964 that the family – son Ken was a partner in the business by then; his wife, Jean, was the office manager – introduced what it called a “modern flower shop” to replace the remodeled garage. That new store, at 810 S. 12th St., remains the flagship among the 16 locations in six counties that Royer’s operates today.
Royer’s celebrated the new store with a grand opening March 25-27, 1965.
“You are invited to the Royer’s South Side,” read the headline on a full-page newspaper ad.
The copy continued: “To serve you better, we have created this area’s most beautiful place to shop.”
Not only was the grand opening an opportunity to showcase the new store, but its timing was strategic, too, as Easter fell on April 18 that year.
The photo above appeared in the Lebanon Daily News on the first day of the grand opening. In it, Ken Royer, right, presented “floral tributes” to Lebanon Mayor J. Gordon Smith, left, and a representative of the Lebanon Valley Chamber of Commerce.
“The firm,” the caption read, “has completely modernized its quarters at 810 S. Twelfth St.”
Where are they now? Former Royer’s Kids Club members Alex and Marisa Heisey
If Marisa Heisey ends up at a college in western Pennsylvania, the Conestoga Valley High School junior will follow in the footsteps of her older brother, Alex. He is a sophomore at Grove City College, an hour north of Pittsburgh.
It wouldn’t be the first time the close siblings have walked similar paths. A decade ago, they won Royer’s Kids Club contests in back-to-back years.
In 2010, Alex, then in third grade, won the kids club’s birthday card design contest. In 2011, Marisa, then in first grade, won a back-to-school coloring contest. (In 2017, while in seventh grade, Marisa also won the birthday card design contest.)
Alex and Marisa are the children of Nevin and Joy Heisey of East Lampeter Township, Lancaster County. At the time of Alex’s win, his mother said, “Both of my kids love flowers.”
We caught up with Joy recently for an update on what her children, long since having graduated from the kids club, are up to now.
Majoring in business management
At Grove City College, Alex is majoring in business management with a focus on supply chain.
“He loves Grove City,” Joy said. “He really is enjoying his experience there.”
While some colleges resorted to online studies-only during the pandemic, Grove City stuck with in-person classes, albeit at times with mask requirements.
“He’s very thankful to be in-person on campus this whole time,” Joy said.
His varied interests and busy schedule have taken Alex beyond his school’s campus, too.
Through his involvement with Impact, Grove City’s outdoor adventure leadership program, Alex has backpacked in southern Virginia, ice climbed in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and skied in New York.
He is a library aide, training to become a tour guide, and a member of the school’s human-powered vehicle club. The latter involved designing and building something that resembled a recumbent bicycle and racing it in Michigan.
Leaning toward nursing school
When we spoke with Joy, she had just come back from one of five planned college visits with Marisa, who is leaning toward nursing school, either in Pennsylvania or Ohio. She was preparing to take the SATs in May and again in June.
Marisa is active in student council, music and science honor societies, school bible study and her church’s youth group. She is one of eight Conestoga Valley girls participating in a mentorship program through the Lancaster County Chamber of Commerce. She works in the bake shop at Kitchen Kettle Village.
“She still loves drawing,” Joy said. “She’s very much (into) water colors, she likes to paint ceramics.”
Joy fondly recalled her children’s involvement with the Royer’s Kids Club. They were such regulars at kids club events that store employees knew the family members by name, Joy said. Marisa was officially too young for the club when Alex started going, but the staff would let her participate anyway.
The Heiseys still have mugs, vases and baskets from the various kids club event projects.
“That’s a good memory,” Joy said of attending events.
Better still, the kids club events seem to have inspired a lasting love for flowers in Joy’s children.
Last fall, Marisa won a flower-arranging contest at the West Lampeter Fair, just as she – and Alex – had done in years past.