Central design workers will handcraft 15,000 holiday arrangements and decorate 3,000 poinsettias and dish gardens.
Royer’s Flowers & Gifts begins to decorate its stores for the holidays right after Halloween.
From installing heavy bell arches and larger-than-life toy soldiers, string lights and Santa’s sleigh, the process consumes more than a week across 16 stores in seven counties. But that’s just what the public sees.
The truth is that for Royer’s, one of the largest florists in the United States, Christmastime is all the time, even if much of the work takes place behind the scenes.
“We actually start prepping for Christmas in January,” said Geoff Royer, vice president of production and product development. “So once we go through the Christmas season, we have a review of what worked, what didn’t work. It’s a year-round thing for us.”
January will take Royer’s buyers to a major trade show in Atlanta, for instance, where they order holiday giftware that will arrive in stores some 10 months later.
Orchestrating everything requires varying amounts of attention at points throughout the year. It reaches a crescendo in December when dozens of Royer’s employees, creating their version of Santa’s workshop, gather in teams in the company’s central design department in Lebanon.
Combined, they handcraft 15,000 holiday arrangements (centerpieces most of all) and decorate 3,000 poinsettias and dish gardens for distribution to the 16 stores.
Royer’s reaches far and near to source its products.
Flowers are grown in South America. Most of the greens come from the West Coast. Poinsettias, although native to Mexico, hail from greenhouses in Ephrata, Lancaster County, and near Philadelphia.
“But we also get white pine straight from out of the Poconos,” Geoff said. “We have a guy who goes out and cuts bundles for us. And he’s right here in Pennsylvania.”
Just as Royer’s works on the holiday season the whole year long, some customers might like it if holiday arrangements were available all 365 days.
“People will send them for get-wells, they’ll send them for birthdays,” Geoff noted. “So just because it’s a Christmas arrangement doesn’t mean it’s not appropriate for all occasions.”
Laura Burke, executive director of the American Red Cross’ central Pennsylvania chapter, and Amber Charnoff, marketing manager, Royer’s Flowers & Gifts.
From Oct. 14 through Nov. 16, all Royer’s Flowers & Gifts stores collected holiday cards and coloring pages from generous members of the public for area military veterans.
It’s a favorite annual tradition for Royer’s, which has a decade-plus affiliation with the American Red Cross “Holidays for Heroes” program.
In fact, Royer’s is the largest contributor among a list that also includes a senior-living center in Centre County, other corporate partners and school districts, said Laura Burke, executive director of the Red Cross’ central Pennsylvania chapter.
Amber Charnoff, Royer’s marketing manager, presented more than 3,000 cards and coloring pages to Burke on Nov. 20.
Next, Red Cross volunteers will review and sort the cards. They will be placed into totes destined for Veterans Administration hospitals, veteran homes and senior-living facilities within the 11-county chapter, which stretches from Centre in the north to Adams in the south.
Burke will be among the people making the deliveries in early December.
“I like to see how they’re received,” Burke said, “and it’s always met with gratitude and thanks. For people to just get a bundle of cards that have some personalized message in them, thanking them for their service, hoping they have a great holiday season, is always a meaningful thing.”
Burke said there’s a through line of support for service members and veterans from the Red Cross’ origin in 1881, in the aftermath of the Civil War, to Holidays for Heroes.
“Supporting our military community is a core of what we do as the Red Cross,” Burke said. “That carries through case work and helping veterans in distress and helping our active military on bases overseas. And also through supporting our veterans in giving them goodwill and well wishes during the holiday season. So it is a core of our mission.”
When you’re a fourth-generation family-owned business nearing its 90th year in operation, you cherish your company history.
But a hallmark of Royer’s Flowers & Gifts’ enduring legacy is honoring its past while still being willing and able to change course when circumstances dictate.
That agility has made Royer’s one of the most successful florists in the United States.
Sometimes change is thrust upon you suddenly, as it was during the coronavirus pandemic, an existential threat that forced Royer’s to rethink many of the ways it functioned. At other times, Royer’s has had to respond to structural developments in society, which brings us to our latest rebranding effort.
The first glimpse of that new look and feel began arriving in customers’ mailboxes this fall in the form of our year-round and fall catalogs.
Increasingly digital world
Go Welsh, our long-time design agency in Lancaster, is leading the rebranding.
“Whatever we do and propose,” said agency owner Craig Welsh, “it has to live in digital, but it can’t feel digital.”
At its heart, the rebranding addresses the challenge of promoting the organic feeling of flowers in an increasingly digital world.
More than half of our sales now occur online. All those swipes, clicks and taps come at a faster pace than the turning of a printed page, making it harder to capture the public’s attention.
The new catalogs feature a reworking of our logo, distilled from the long-stemmed flower it has been for decades into a clean, contained round icon that’s more recognizable across media.
On social media, Craig noted, an “icon becomes much more prominent in the expectation” among users. And with increased awareness, that icon can become the brand’s primary mark, lending itself to many more uses.
Mid-century modern
The icon makes for a “much cleaner brand presence visually,” Craig said, but the flip side is that the mathematical representation of shapes, lines and curves in the digital realm can overpower the organic world.
That’s why Go Welsh seized on the idea of bringing organic into the mix through inks made from flower petals and stems. Jenna Flickinger, a Go Welsh designer, keeps vials of ink at her desk, with labels such as lily, lavender and pansy, and clematis.
She boils the petals herself, adding salt (to release color) and gum arabic (a stabilizer) to create ink. She brushes the ink onto watercolor paper and then scans the washes into her computer.
Some of the colors and textures have been incorporated into the new catalogs, but the learning process continues. From vial to dried paper, the ink colors aren’t always predictable.
“Even though this was a pink carnation,” Jenna said of one example, “it still [dried as] this yellow color.”
Craig described the rebranding as a “mid-century modern aesthetic,” invoking a design style known for sleek lines connected to nature and a timeless essence.
“We’re trying to find a place where we can combine this organic sensibility with the vector, screen-based digital stuff, so we started looking at mid-century modern sensibilities,” Craig said.
It starts with the new catalogs, but you can expect to see many more representations in the year ahead.
Grandparents Day is a time to celebrate our mom and dad’s parents and the significant impact many of them have had on us.
On Grandparents day people often visit their loved ones, give them a phone call or send them a card. Others use the time to reminiscence about their late grandparents, possibly remembering the days cuddled in their laps listening to their stories.
According to Reader’s Digest, Marian McQuade of West Virginia created the holiday in 1956 after realizing a lot of senior citizens in her local nursing home were not visited by family while she was trying to plan a community celebration of the elderly.
McQuade then made it her mission to ensure they were not forgotten by creating Grandparents Day. It became an official holiday in 1978 when it was signed into law by former President Jimmy Carter.
However, the purpose of the holiday is not meant just for grandchildren to celebrate grandparents, but also the reverse. The National Grandparents Day Council says that the holiday is also meant for grandparents to celebrate their grandchildren.
The holiday is always celebrated on the Sunday after Labor Day in the United States. This year the special day is on September 8.
This year the official theme is “Grand Minds: Learn, Love, Legacy”. Generations United is encouraging people to #DoSomethingGrand this year with their grandparents and have a list of activity ideas on their website.
Grandparents Day Gift Ideas
We put together a Grandparents Day gift basket for those looking for ideas for Grandparents Day. Check out our basket below!
From left, Sharon Cash, donation coordinator; Jean Ussery, resident support and recovery coordinator; and Tymia Green, executive director, Shalom House, with Josh Hemmann of Royer’s Flowers & Gifts.
Mary Quinn, president and CEO, YWCA Greater Harrisburg, which manages Dress for Success, and Josh Hemmann, director of marketing and e-commerce, Royer’s Flowers & Gifts.
Members of Girls Who Code Central PA flanked by Josh Hemmann of Royer’s Flowers and Lin Taylor, Girls Who Code advisor.
Royer’s Flowers & Gifts has announced a new round of charitable donations totaling more than $11,000 to four mid-state nonprofits.
The recipients and their awards:
Girls Who Code Central PA, with clubs in Harrisburg and Hershey, $1,350;
Shalom House, a shelter for women and children in Harrisburg, $2,000;
“We’re grateful for our loyal customers whose support makes it possible for us to give back to these incredible organizations that work every day to improve lives in our communities,” said Tom Royer, president and CEO of Royer’s Flowers.
Josh Hemmann, Royer’s Flowers director of marketing and e-commerce, and Laura Burke, executive director of the American Red Cross’ central Pennsylvania chapter.
Royer’s Flowers & Gifts has presented 2,300 holiday cards and coloring pages to the American Red Cross for distribution to area service members and veterans.
Royer’s collected the cards and coloring pages from the public in each of its stores from Oct. 16 through Nov. 14, continuing a decade-long affiliation with the Red Cross “Holidays for Heroes” program.
Noah Gingrich of Royer’s wholesale department installing string lights on one of two giant sycamore trees in front of Royer’s Lebanon store.
It takes two people to carry sections of the bell arch.
Noah Gingrich with one of the bell arch sections.
The bell arch being installed on the front of Royer’s Lebanon store.
From left, Barry Spengler, chief administrative officer, and Noah Gingrich, from the wholesale department, secure a trumpeting soldier statue under the bell arch.
Lebanon driver Brenda Yordy removes last year’s lights from garland.
Hershey assistant manager Alexi Strine, left, tries out the newly installed selfie station with the help of sales associate Paige Blankenhorn.
Noah Gingrich went trick-or-treating with his young cousins on Halloween night.
By the next morning, temperatures having devilishly dipped into the 30s, he was placing a sleigh and two reindeer in front of Royer’s flagship store in Lebanon. It was the start of an eight-day process of decorating the company’s 16 stores in seven counties for the holiday season.
An employee in Royer’s Flowers wholesale department, Noah has been the lead holiday decorator for the past three years, readying store exteriors with toy soldier statues, wreaths and garlands, string lights on bushes and trees.
Two of those trees are mighty sycamores that flank the Lebanon store’s driveway. On the left side, staple gun in hand and ladder at the ready, Noah wound nine courses of lights around the trunk.
“And there’s one tree,” he pronounced as the final staple clicked into place.
Standing out
Decking the halls is a decades-long tradition for family-owned Royer’s, now in the hands of its third and fourth generations. One of the latter is Geoff Royer, vice president of central operations, who oversaw the work in Lebanon and that afternoon at the Hershey store.
“It definitely dresses the stores up for the holidays,” Geoff said. “And nobody really does this any more to the scale that we do it, so it does make us stand out.”
It’s a significant undertaking, involving other members of the wholesale department and employees at every store.
Before Noah arrived, the stores were tasked with stripping old sets of string lights from garland, attaching new ones and generally fluffing greenery that has been in storage for the previous 11 months.
Brenda Yordy, a Lebanon driver, working at an outside table, used a pair of wire cutters to extract the lights.
“Easier than untangling them, right?” she said. Later, she was joined in the task by store manager Melissa Fahr.
It took two people to carry each of four sections of a metal bell arch from storage to the front of the Lebanon store, on South 12th Street.
“It’s a beast,” said chief operating officer Cheryl Brill.
In previous years, the arch spanned the doorway, attached to decorative wooden beams. This year, with the beams newly clad in metal, no one wanted to risk scratching them.
So, the team instead affixed the arch, with its bells of red, green and white, above the Royer’s sign to the left of the beams, securing it with hooks and wire to the red-brick building. They placed a trumpeting soldier statue beneath the arch.
Selfies in Hershey
By afternoon, Noah and Geoff were working their Christmas magic 12 miles west at the Hershey store, which enjoys a prominent corner spot on West Chocolate Avenue, downtown’s main thoroughfare.
Several stores have enough storage space to hang on to their large exterior decorations year-round. For those that don’t, such as Hershey, their larger pieces are kept at Royer’s headquarters in Lebanon and delivered to them by Noah in a box truck.
Hershey store manager Andrea Campbell and assistant manager Alexi Strine were excited about turning their store’s sleigh into a selfie station. They moved the sleigh closer to the front door than in past years to make it more accessible to customers.
To be sure, the holiday season requires weeks of hard work, store decorating being just the start. In the floral industry, Christmas sales are on a par with Valentine’s Day but spread out over a period that’s three times longer.
Poinsettias require prudent watering, low centerpieces with shallow water wells can be sloshy, and fresh evergreen branches can be sticky. And glitter is seemingly everywhere.
“But we’re making everyone really happy,” Andrea said. “We make so many people so happy.”
One customer has followed Andrea from her first stint in Hershey, to the Harrisburg East store, back to Hershey. Every Christmas, the woman brings in silver pedestal bowls to be filled with greens, berries and roses that she gifts to family members.
“There’s a lot of sentimental things that are happening,” Andrea said. “Then you really feel like you are part of this super-special moment for this family. And I think that’s cool.”
Royer’s Flowers & Gifts will give away red, white and blue bouquets to military veterans on Nov. 11, Veterans Day.
The bouquets – featuring a red carnation, a white carnation and a blue bow – will be available in-store only at each of Royer’s 16 locations in Berks, Cumberland, Dauphin, Franklin, Lancaster, Lebanon and York counties.
“This is one of our favorite events each year,” said Tom Royer, president and CEO of family-owned Royer’s. “It is our honor and privilege to recognize the men and women who give so much to protect our freedom.”
Non-veterans may purchase the bouquets for $2.20 each.
You can serve your country with just a few crayons.
The Royer’s Kids Club is participating in the American Red Cross “Holidays for Heroes” program, which collects coloring pages and holiday cards for service members and veterans.
A Royer’s truck set out from Lebanon in early August on a 250-mile journey into the future of foliage plants.
The truck headed southwest on Interstate 81, its destination a 200-acre farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western Virginia, in the town of Stuarts Draft. On that farm lies a five-acre building that from above looks like nothing so much as a gigantic Lego piece (photo, below).
It’s a state-of-the art greenhouse where The Plant Co., which was birthed during the pandemic, is drawing on one family’s decades of floriculture experience and the latest technology in a quest to “reinvent the houseplant industry.”
Royer’s is the first florist to carry The Plant Co.’s products.
“It was amazing to see how many of our own people purchased the Proven Winners plants as soon as they came in,” said Cheryl Brill, chief operating officer.
CEO Tom Royer and Zach Barkman, wholesale manager, got to know The Plant Co. this spring when they attended the International Floriculture Expo in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. It was there that they met Jennifer Kuziw, The Plant Co.’s northeast sales manager.
Kuziw grew up and still lives in central Pennsylvania. She already was familiar with Royer’s and thought the two companies would be a good fit given their commitment to delivering high-quality products to customers.
Within weeks, she was showing product samples to Royer’s officials in Lebanon. Tom and Zach then visited the massive greenhouse in Virginia, which opened in 2020.
Tissue culture
“This is all great stuff,” Tom recalled upon seeing the plants.
Tom noted that in the past 30 years, mass marketers began offering foliage plants. Florida growers either catered to those customers, turning plants into mere commodities, or went out of business altogether.
The result was plants that weren’t as special as they once were. That left fertile ground for The Plant Co., the brainchild of founders and brothers-in-law Jason Van Wingerden and Frank Paul.
Just as four generations of Royers have made the family name synonymous with flower shops, the Van Wingerden family is deeply rooted in the greenhouse trade. It began with Aart and Cora Van Wingerden, who arrived from Holland in 1948 and started a greenhouse business in New Jersey, spawning many other similar enterprises.
Jason Van Wingerden, a grandson of Aart and Cora, worked at Green Circle Growers in Oberlin, Ohio, which Jason’s father started in 1968. Green Circle comprises 150 acres of indoor growing space, making it one of the largest greenhouses in the United States. Frank Paul was Green Circle’s former head grower of orchids.
The brothers-in-law settled on western Virginia for its climate, proximity to interstates 81 and 64, and high-quality well water, said Ben Wright, The Plant Co.’s national account manager.
The elevation in the Blue Ridge Mountains means warm days, cool nights and “good, consistent quality growth year-round,” Wright said.
The greenhouse (photo, above) is just a couple miles away from a Hershey Co. factory that makes Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.
The Plant Co.’s products begin as tissue culture in test tubes, arriving from labs around the world, before they are rooted in soil in the greenhouse. Tissue culture makes the plants cleaner and less prone to disease.
Ease of care and use
The greenhouse’s 21-foot ceilings keep plants cooler, as do metal poles that are powder coated white to absorb less heat.
Thirteen layers of sand and gravel sit below capillary mats. Plants are watered from below through the mats, then the water drains back into holding tanks so it isn’t wasted.
Carbon dioxide from the greenhouse’s high-efficiency natural gas boilers is captured and pumped into the greenhouse to encourage plant growth.
The plants are promoted for their quality but also for their ease of care and use. The plants are sold with tags that include the variety name, genus and species and information about where to use them within a room and how to care for them.
The goal is to embolden consumers who haven’t had success with plants in the past.
“And so they kind of discover that green thumb,” Wright said.
