Sometimes all moms want is the assurance they are doing a good job.
That and other supportive sentiments like “you rock it without sleep” and “your child loves you” have been distributed in about 60 “kindness flyers” around the city. The team at Bloomier, a flower studio in West Vancouver, put the flyers up -- using biodegradable tape -- around Downtown Vancouver, Kitsilano and the North Shore just last weekend.
Kamila Alikhani is the owner of Bloomier and says the initiative was created as a less materialistic, more sentimental approach to what she says is the equivalent of the Super Bowl for flower shops: Mother’s Day.
"I'm a mum, I have two kids and so I noticed that for Mother’s Day there is an overload on spending," Alikhani said. "I thought we moms, we just need sometimes assurance and a kind word."
Alikhani says she came up with what to write on the slips of paper based on the things she would want to hear.
"It felt very isolating to be a mother of young children and I could feel that I'm not the only one and now especially during the pandemic,” she said. “I just wanted to remind everyone that they're doing great and they're doing a wonderful job."
In photos shared to social media, many of the slips of paper bearing the supportive messages have been taken and presumably shared with loved ones, a success Alikhani didn’t expect to see so quickly.
"I'm quite touched. I'm very touched and I'm quite humbled," she said. “I'm also feeling that we're on the right path as a company and the goodness and the community is what we want to build so I feel pride in my team."
While this is the first time Bloomier has created the flyers they have been involved in other community betterment initiatives before. Pre-pandemic, gently used flowers salvaged from events Bloomier supplied flowers to would be reorganized into bedside bouquets for hospice patients or distributed to senior homes.
