Maggie Peterson, Florist | From Facebook Marketplace to Italy | Texas Wedding Podcast

Maggie Peterson of By Maggie Peterson, a full-service Austin florist, joins Kevin Cochran on the Texas Wedding Podcast to talk about building a floral business from scratch during the pandemic, and the vendor team chemistry that led to her first international destination wedding in Italy.

Maggie started arranging flowers out of boredom during COVID, selling her early work on Facebook Marketplace before leaving a career in political lobbying to go all in on floral design. She and Kevin look back at the wedding that first brought their teams together, a full property buyout where her husband Jeremy built one of her signature arches out of wire closet shelving, and she shares two hard-won hot takes: hire your florist earlier than you think, and always plan for two bridal bouquets in Texas heat. The episode closes with her first wedding outside Lucca, Italy, soon to be featured exclusively on Over the Moon.

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The Texas Wedding Podcast is hosted by Kevin Cochran of 718 Creative, a Texas wedding videographer.

Full Transcript (condensed)

Meet Maggie Peterson

Maggie Peterson: I'm from everywhere, honestly. I was born in Park City, Utah, my parents moved to Connecticut when I was two, I grew up there, went to boarding school in Massachusetts. I wanted to go to UT Austin and didn't get in, so I took a gap year and sailed from Italy to the Caribbean for four months. I ended up at the University of Utah, met my husband there, and when I graduated I told him I was moving to Austin whether he liked it or not. I got a job with a transportation lobbyist almost immediately, our main client was the Associated General Contractors of Texas, highway and heavy construction. Sat in a lot of toll road hearings. Very glamorous. Eleven years later, we're still here, two kids, two dogs, a cat, and a business later.

From Lobbying to Facebook Marketplace

Maggie Peterson: Jeremy and I got married in Cabo in January 2020, right before everything shut down, and flew straight to Asia for our honeymoon. We landed in Taiwan and I remember thinking, this feels really scary. We were in Bali for two and a half weeks before my dad got so freaked out he rerouted us home through Sydney, where we had to sign papers at the hotel saying we hadn't been in contact with anyone who had the virus. We got back to a Texas that was pretending nothing was happening, but I worked for politicians who knew better, so we shut down work-wise almost immediately.

I was sitting at home with nothing to do. I've always loved flowers, my mom had incredible gardens growing up, and she'd bought us a subscription to boxes from a florist in New York named Louis Miller, who pivoted during COVID to shipping flowers nationally with a YouTube video teaching you how to arrange them. Looking back, my early arrangements were the most cringe things on the planet, but my mom kept telling me I was good at it, and I genuinely started selling them on Facebook Marketplace. That's how it began, selling flowers out of my garage while not working my actual job.

By October, my boss started talking about session planning for the next year, and I realized I didn't want to go back. I told my husband, we'd been married five minutes at that point, that I thought I wanted to quit and be a florist. He was incredibly supportive. My dad, who comes from a family of entrepreneurs, just asked if I was scared. I said yes, terrified. He said, then you should quit. So I did. If you'd told me six years ago I'd end up doing a wedding in Italy starting from Marketplace flowers, I'd have said you were out of your mind.

The Natalie Wedding: A Vendor Team That Clicked

Maggie Peterson: That wedding was a full property buyout at Commodore Perry Estate, the whole weekend together, and it was the first time I'd worked with Kevin or with floral designer Shiloh. Within five minutes it felt like we were old friends. Big things went wrong that day, I won't get into what, but because the team was that solid, it never felt like a crisis from the outside. That's what I'd tell any bride: when you're talking to your planner about vendors, ask who they actually love working with, because that team is with you all day, not just for one moment the way some vendors are.

One of the arches from that wedding is something I still think about. Everyone loves amaranthus, the hanging green stuff, but I used spider amaranthus instead, fluffier and a little different, plus a lot of local Winkleman marigolds that were blooming that week. The mechanics of the whole thing were entirely my husband Jeremy's doing. He took wire closet shelving, snipped and bent it into this beautiful curve, and wrapped the whole structure in chicken wire. My lead designer and I sat there fully doubting he could pull it off until he did. We don't doubt Jeremy anymore.

Hire Your Florist Early

Maggie Peterson: My hot take is that a florist should be one of the first vendors you hire if design and flowers matter to you at all. I want to be in your design meetings from the start, because your linen is only really present at dinner. Flowers are at getting ready, they're at the ceremony, cocktail hour, dinner, and the dance floor. Flowers are everywhere all day. That's a very different level of presence than most other design elements.

Always Make Two Bouquets

Maggie Peterson: I make two bridal bouquets for almost every wedding now, and I don't charge extra for it. If you're getting married in Texas heat and doing a first look with photos before the ceremony, by the time you're taking pictures afterward, that original bouquet looks awful. I don't want to look back at the photos and video a week later and realize half of them are unusable because of it. We also always bring extra boutonnieres, without fail, someone always shows up who wasn't accounted for, grandpa needs one, whoever it is. I'd rather have extra on hand than be assembling one on site. That's basically my husband's old fraternity mantra at work: prior proper planning prevents piss poor performance. I'm type B, but I get to be type A just long enough to make sure the extras exist, then I let the day happen.

First International Wedding: Italy

Maggie Peterson: We did a wedding just outside of Lucca with Val of LBV Design House, for an incredible bride named Becca who's head of brand at the fashion company Eddie. It was at an unbelievable villa, and it's going to be featured exclusively on Over the Moon, so the images aren't public just yet. I've always wanted to break into destination work, and there's a saying that you can't really do a wedding in Italy until you've done a wedding in Italy. Now we have. It was genuinely one of the hardest things I've ever done professionally, and also one of the most rewarding. We might be headed to Portugal next.

Connect with Maggie By Maggie Peterson: https://bymaggiepeterson.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bymaggiepeterson

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