Peddler's Village becomes "Village of Chocolate" to celebrate Valentine's Day weekend with deals and specials
Peddler's Village is celebrating Valentine's Day all weekend and the popular destination will feature a village-wide Chocolate Trail along with some special activities and dining options.
"The chocolate trail is something special we started offering last February," Christine Hensel Triantos said.
Triantos is the village's Director of Marketing and Communications and says the Chocolate Trail attracts dozens to hunt.
Visitors can pick up a map of the 18th-century-style specialty shopping village founded in 1962 by lifelong Bucks County resident Earl Jamison.
On the map are five different neighborhoods that you must visit – and collect stickers from two in each.
"We have about 65 shops here, most of them are small independently owned businesses. Very unique merchandise and shops," Triantos said.
You return your map with stickers showing you visit the different shops, and you get a golden ticket. Then scratch it off and see what your ticket gets you. It could be a gift card, free dessert, or even a free night at the Golden Plough Inn.
The best part, everyone wins.
Peddler's Village has been around for more than 60 years and the Cock 'N Bull Restaurant which Jamison ran in the early years is still around.
Early Saturday morning we tried several dishes and drinks at businesses including Skip's Candy Corner and Cock 'N Bull. Thanks to Kim Pietrak and David Perini for letting us try everything from chocolate decorating to the bacon brulee with chocolate fondue.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Tom's Guide
2 days ago
- Tom's Guide
CVS Photo coupon codes for Jul 2025
Yes! CVS Photo does offer passport and ID photo services. Most CVS pharmacies also accept walk-ins for this service. Yes, CVS offers copy and print services at most of its locations. They use KODAK Picture Kiosks so you can easily upload and copy any photos or documents you need. Yes, you can print photos directly from your phone via the CVS Photo app, which is available on iOS and Android. You can then pick up the photos from your nearest store. Weekly Deals: CVS refreshes its deals and promotions weekly so there is always a new deal to help you save money on all your printing needs. CVS ExtraCare: CVS ExtraCare is a free loyalty program that offers savings and rewards on purchases at CVS Pharmacy, including CVS Photo. You can also earn ExtraBucks on eligible products. Newsletters: Sign up for CVS Photo newsletters to receive the latest deals and discounts in your inbox. You'll also be notified whenever there is a big sale, so you never miss a chance to save on your photo printing needs. Seasonal Sales: The best time to save at CVS Photo is during a seasonal sale, such as Valentine's Day, Father's Day, Mother's Day, or Christmas. During these times, the CVS Photo often has many offers and coupon codes sent via newsletter. 1. Choose the CVS Photo coupon or deal you'd like to use and click 'Get Code'. 2. Go to the CVS Photo website and add your desired products to your shopping cart. 3. On the checkout screen, look for the box labelled "Promo/Coupon Code' usually near the order total. 4. Click inside the box and enter your CVS Photo coupon code. 5. Click 'Apply', and your order total should change to reflect your savings. The coupons you'll find on Tom's Guide have been sourced by our dedicated coupons team, who use the web, our relationships with retailers, & our affiliate networks to find the latest codes. The offers on each coupon page are updated every few days to ensure we feature the freshest ways to save, and our commercial team (based in London) also sources exclusive codes and sales info directly from some of the biggest retailers around. All the coupon codes we list on our pages have been tested by our deals & offers teams to check they work as intended before they've been uploaded. You'll find a wide range of coupons on Tom's Guide, including free shipping offers, student discounts, and savings on various kinds of products. To ensure that all listed codes are available to use, we don't include any one-time use or user-specific coupons. We also provide as much information as we can to keep things as clear as possible - any expiry dates or terms & conditions will be listed alongside the code. Look for the 'Terms & Conditions' text - you'll be able to click this to expand this section for more details. We take care to only list tried & tested coupons on our pages, so all codes should be active and confer the listed discount or deal. However, although we keep up to date with expiry dates and any terms & conditions, sometimes retailers change these before we can update our pages. Should a coupon fail to work as expected, check you meet any listed requirements. These can include minimum spends, multibuy offers, or product-specific promotions (i.e. 10% off selected tablets). You can view all associated requirements by clicking 'View terms and conditions' below your code. If this does not solve your issue, you can contact our customer service team by emailing Make sure to let us know which coupon you were trying to use and which page this was listed on, and we'll be in touch to help as soon as possible. Tom's Guide makes money from coupons through a commission-based model. We have agreements in place with each retailer on our site - for every purchase made using one of our coupons or deals, we earn a small percentage of the order total back in commission. Thanks to this model, we can save our customers money without charging them a thing. You won't pay a penny to get the discounts listed on our pages, so whichever code or deal you choose, you'll get exactly what it says on the tin If you're looking for more information on Tom's Guide coupons, you can also read more about How We Source Coupon Codes and How to Use Them on our dedicated page.
Atlantic
6 days ago
- Atlantic
Fired by DOGE and Sick With Cancer
Anne Romatowski noticed a small, soft something in the flesh below her collarbone just before Christmas. She wasn't concerned. It was a bump on her uppermost ribs, not a lump in her breast. Still, she figured that she might as well schedule the routine mammogram she had been putting off for 10 months. By the time her appointment came around—on a frigid Thursday afternoon, the day before Valentine's Day—she had other worries. Donald Trump had returned to office promising to 'drain the swamp' and had set up a task force to root out excess and incompetence in Washington. Trump and the Department of Government Efficiency, headed by Elon Musk, were targeting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where she had worked for three years remotely from New York. A few days earlier, Russell Vought, the acting director of the agency, had ordered all of its employees to halt their work. The CFPB shielded taxpayers from romance scams, Ponzi schemes, excessive fees, unbreakable contracts, and confiscatory interest rates. Romatowski specialized in artificial intelligence. She studied how criminals used deepfaked voices to rip off the elderly and how biased banking algorithms charged Black families more for mortgages than white families. The bureau didn't require a single penny of taxpayer resources. It generated some of its budget through fines; the Federal Reserve covered the rest. Yet DOGE fired 70 newly hired or recently promoted employees at the CFPB two days before Romatowski's mammogram, sending each one an email composed so carelessly that it hadn't bothered to replace [EmployeeFirstName], [EmployeeLastName], and [JobTitle] with the recipient's own name and title. 'The Agency finds that that you are not fit for continued employment,' the typo-laden email read. When the mammogram technologist saw the bump below Romatowski's collarbone, she took the scan, referred her for an ultrasound, and told her to talk to a radiologist across the hall right away. Romatowski did not put her sweater back on, and went into the doctor's closet-size office wearing shoes and slacks on the bottom and a cloth hospital gown on top. Two computer screens obscured the radiologist's face, and a mask muffled his voice. 'I'm sorry,' Romatowski said. 'Can you repeat that?' He overenunciated: 'You have a lump … on your left … breast. It's extremely … likely that you have breast … cancer.' She needed a biopsy as soon as possible. 'Is there any way that we can do it tomorrow?' she asked, choking back tears. 'I work for the federal government, and I think Elon Musk is going to fire me.' When she left the appointment, Romatowski sent a few texts to friends to ask for support before her phone died. She stopped in the lobby of a nearby hotel to plug it in. When she turned it back on, she was bombarded with pings on Signal and Slack. Dozens more of her colleagues had been locked out of their computers that afternoon. Her union had sent her a Zoom invitation to an emergency session for terminated workers. Elon Musk had fired her. Romatowski joined the meeting from the corner of 23rd Street and Eighth Avenue, and ducked into a Target to get out of the cold. She didn't have headphones with her, so she listened to the call in the open, pushing an empty cart through the aisles. She couldn't figure out how to get taken off of mute to ask what would happen to her health insurance. A biopsy performed a few days later confirmed that she had a rare and aggressive type of breast cancer known as triple-negative. At some point, a cell in the lining of one of her milk ducts had followed the commands of a damaged bit of DNA and started proliferating at an unhinged pace. Her body had failed to kill off the cell and its progeny, which grew into a mass on her chest wall and infiltrated the lymph nodes nearby. Doctors advised that she undergo chemotherapy, immunotherapy, another round of chemotherapy, and a mastectomy or lumpectomy, as well as a potential third round of chemotherapy and radiation, to eradicate the disease. At the same time, functionaries in Washington were starting to 'crush the deep state,' as Trump put it. The 'steady creep of government bureaucracy' had sapped 'the vitality and wealth of the people,' he had claimed, accusing civil servants of leeching taxpayer resources and subverting the will of the executive. Now he was following through on a promise he'd made on his first day in office: 'We're getting rid of all the cancer.' I was one of the people Anne texted that afternoon when she left her mammogram. We've been friends for 20 years. A few days later, I brought a bottle of wine to her apartment and ordered us Thai food. Anne picked at her noodles, preoccupied not with her misfortune, but with planning and logistics. She had already set up consultations with multiple physicians and networked with fellow breast-cancer patients. At the same time, she was figuring out how to pass on her work to her colleagues who remained employed at the CFPB and scouring job listings for those who did not. Others had it worse than she did, she said. 'A lot of people get fired when they get sick. A lot of people get fired because they are sick.' I am biased, but Anne really is selfless and levelheaded, dry-witted and good. She worked in what bloodless McKinsey types might call 'financial inclusion,' but what she describes as 'policy work, close to people.' She had helped low-income mothers in Washington, D.C., find safe housing and good jobs. She had assessed anti-poverty programs while living in Kenya. She had directed philanthropic investment in distressed communities in the Bronx and Houston and protected New Yorkers from financial swindles. Getting hired by the CFPB was 'a dream,' she said. The agency is the only financial regulator specializing in direct support to the public. Over the past decade and a half, it has capped the late fees charged to 45 million credit-card holders, scrubbed medical debt from 15 million credit reports, managed as many as 50,000 complaints a week, returned $19.7 billion to consumers, and fined firms and individuals $5 billion. Financial businesses require this kind of exacting, assertive oversight, Anne believes. They power the economy. But their tendency to engage in predatory lending and frothy speculation risks pitching individuals into bankruptcy and the whole world into recession. (Indeed, fraud is a leading indicator of downturns; flailing firms sometimes try to scam and swindle their way back into the black.) The agency gave Washington unique insight into household finances, and acted as an early-warning service for the country's systemic regulators, including the Treasury and the Federal Reserve. Anne began her career during the 2008 financial crisis. She'd seen how it devastated people's lives. The CFPB, she told me, existed to 'prevent it from happening again.' But banks had long argued that the CFPB stymied good financial products instead of stamping out bad ones. The American Bankers Association cast it as a 'regulator gone rogue.' The Chamber of Commerce accused it of 'hurting consumers by limiting choice and diminishing competition.' And Republicans on Capitol Hill had always felt that the CFPB was so independent as to be unaccountable, because Congress has no control over its budget and little control of its operations. The Trump administration went further. Vought, the CFPB's acting director, described the agency as 'woke & weaponized.' Musk posted, 'CFPB RIP' on X in his first weeks in Washington. Trump called it a 'very important thing to get rid of.' (Notably, the CFPB has regulatory authority over the president's crypto token, X's forthcoming payment system, and Tesla's auto-lending arm.) Anne thought her job might be reinstated, she told me that night in her apartment. The administration hadn't gone through the legal steps required for mass reductions in force. Plus, the Constitution obligates the president to 'take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.' A law Congress passed in 2010, the Dodd-Frank Act, had created the CFPB and tasked it with protecting Americans from 'unfair, deceptive, or abusive' financial contracts. Trump was supposed to act as a faithful executor of the agency and its mission, whether he wanted to or not. The day she was fired, a legal team representing her and her colleagues made that argument to a judge, accusing Vought and Trump of 'the unlawful dismantling' of a government agency. 'This a tragedy for American consumers, and it is lawless,' Deepak Gupta, an attorney, argued. DOGE was planning to fire nearly all of the CFPB's remaining employees. The plan was put on hold as the case started to work its way through the courts. In early March, Anne joined a call to discuss her union's legal strategy, then went to Memorial Sloan Kettering for an MRI of her tumor. A similar rush of appointments and meetings and paperwork consumed the rest of the month. She had a painful ultrasound-guided biopsy of her axillary lymph nodes and consulted with advocates for the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, which Trump was also trying to shut down. She had an echocardiogram and applied for unemployment insurance. She finished packing up her apartment in New York and moved back into her childhood bedroom in McLean, Virginia, then had a chest port put in for IV infusions. On the last Saturday in March, she received an email at 9:28 p.m. Judge Amy Berman Jackson had issued a 112-page opinion excoriating the Trump administration, whose intent, a sworn affidavit revealed, was to turn the CFPB into a 'room at Treasury, White House, or Federal Reserve with five men and a phone.' The president was acting in 'complete disregard of the decision Congress made,' Jackson wrote—the decision that the CFPB 'must exist.' Anne had her job back. On Monday, she read the financial papers. On Tuesday, she went to Georgetown University Hospital for her first round of chemo. It took two weeks for the CFPB to reissue Anne a laptop. She went to the agency's headquarters near the White House to pick it up, and spent three hours waiting in the lobby. The Trump administration had banned her and most other CFPB employees from entering the building. When she finally got the computer, it would not boot up. Vought had ordered the agency's civil servants to stop what they were doing, but he had not given them any instructions on what to do instead. Anne wasn't sure what her job entailed anymore. Still, if she was drawing a salary, she was going to work. She was not allowed to hold any meetings with industry representatives. So she pulled up data on mergers and acquisitions. She could not provide technical assistance to other agencies, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission. So she went to as many internal meetings as she could and performed 'statutory' tasks specifically required by Dodd-Frank, such as monitoring fintech companies' public financial statements. Each Monday, as DOGE required, she sent an email to the Office of Personnel Management with five bullet points explaining what she had done over the past week. Getting fired again might be a 'silver lining,' her oncologist told her; that way, she could focus on her treatment. But she would lose her insurance and her income. 'The whole silver-lining thing wasn't convincing,' she told me. She did wonder if she should tell her boss that she was sick. She decided against it. She felt fine. She might not later. The chemotherapy's side effects—nausea, exhaustion, anemia, brain fog, digestive problems—would intensify over time. The summer would be worse than the spring, the fall worse than the summer, the winter worse than the fall. On April 17, she received an email with the subject line 'Specific Notice of Reduction in Force.' She would lose access to her computer and email account again at the end of the following business day, DOGE told her, and she would be placed on administrative leave for two months. Then she would be let go. That night, she joined a virtual town hall with hundreds of other laid-off employees. The CFPB had 1,700 workers when Trump came into office, and now had only 200 left. Even if the court gave Anne and her colleagues their jobs back, the agency was disintegrating. Scores of skilled civil servants had retired or taken positions outside government. The Trump administration had canceled contracts for user research and testing, financial management, 'internal controls,' and 'identity access software.' The remaining employees did not have the skills or capacity necessary to do the work required by law, let alone the novel work the agency had undertaken in recent years. When I visited Anne in Virginia in late April, she told me that she worried about scammers stealing grandparents' retirement savings, thieves hacking people's bank accounts, sports-betting apps bleeding young men dry, and 'buy now, pay later' companies targeting poor consumers. I worried about her. She had dyed her hair pink, but little of it remained. She moved slowly. I kept asking how she was doing. Losing your job, getting cancer, and moving back in with your parents—it was a heck of a punch line, she told me, as well as a gut punch. The thing that really upset her was the way Vought talked about his own colleagues in government. In a leaked video, he'd said he wanted 'bureaucrats to be traumatically affected.' He wanted them 'to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.' He wanted to 'put them in trauma.' After I saw Anne, I reached out to Rohit Chopra, who had led the CFPB from 2021 until Trump fired him in February. In private, Chopra told me, many elected Republicans supported the agency. It had done a lot for their constituents, even if few would say that out loud. Trump was not only destroying the agency, he believed, but destroying state capacity and 'the human capital that really powers' the government. He could not quite articulate what it would take for the system to heal. Chopra has known Anne for a long time and he admires her work, he told me, though he hesitated to linger on her contributions to the agency. He worried about focusing on the plight of civil servants rather than the people they serve. And he worried about his comments sounding 'almost obituary,' given her health status. The issue is personal for him. Chopra was diagnosed with thyroid cancer days after Trump won his first presidential contest. He was undergoing treatment while leading the CFPB. 'You never want to feel like it's over,' he said. Two days after my visit, Anne received an email with the subject line 'Recission of Specific Notice in Reduction in Force.' (The email misspelled the word rescission.) DOGE had ignored a court order requiring it to perform a 'particularized assessment' of each employee it fired, a whistleblower had testified: 'All that mattered was the numbers.' Judge Jackson forced the Trump administration to reinstate Anne and her colleagues again. At the beginning of June, I went back to Virginia to take Anne to immunotherapy and chemo. The night before the appointment, at her parents' house, we talked for hours. She showed me an email she had gotten from the Treasury's human-resources office that day, informing her that she had been overpaid and owed $11,292.50 to the government. (By her own calculations, the Treasury actually owed her interest on back wages.) I watched as she sent her weekly email, distilling her labor into DOGE-mandated bullet points. A few weeks earlier, I had put her in touch with my friend Allison Rockey, who had just completed treatment for the same kind of aggressive breast cancer Anne has, and at the same hospital. Allison had given Anne special mitts to hold cold packs against her hands and feet during chemo, to mitigate the nerve damage the medication can cause. Anne had been meaning to reach back out to Allison so they could catch up, she told me. I sputtered. Allison had thought she was in remission, but the cancer had metastasized to her brain. She had died at home two days before. Anne hadn't heard yet. 'I'm sorry, I'm so sorry,' I said half a dozen times. Anne interrupted me. ' I'm sorry,' she said. The next morning, I showed up with an N95 mask on. We loaded the car and commuted across the Potomac River. At the hospital, Anne met with a nurse practitioner to discuss some gastrointestinal symptoms she had been having. The nurse ordered a CT scan of her abdomen; if it showed excessive inflammation, she would recommend that Anne skip a week of chemo. The phlebotomist struggled to find a vein to administer the contrast fluid for the scan. Anne had to go to a different part of the hospital to have another provider access the port in her chest. It took hours to get the test and the go-ahead. In the mid-afternoon, we finally got settled at the infusion center. I persuaded her to let me get us lunch. 'Literally anything,' I told her. 'Literally anything you want to eat.' Why not lobster and champagne? She settled on crab cakes, which arrived in a comically fancy box. As she ate, I yapped, trying to cheer her up. Nurses hooked her up to a pump, and I helped strap Allison's cold mitts onto her hands and feet. They did not just protect against neuropathy, but also reduced the chance that she would lose a fingernail or toenail and end up with an infection, Anne told me. 'If you get sick while you have cancer, you can die,' she said. 'You can get an infection that your body can't fight, and then you could die.' As the life-destroying, lifesaving medication flowed into her, Anne drifted off. I wondered what she would be like the next time I saw her. I kept thinking about Susan Sontag's 1978 meditation on cancer, a disease she described as 'spectacularly' caught in the 'trappings of metaphor.' At the time, writers used cancer as an allegory for emotional repression and encumbered it with idioms of shame. In 2025, the predominant metaphors involve cancer's endogeneity. It is the sickness that comes from within. The night before, Anne had told me how moving she'd found it to take the oath of office. Her grandfathers had enlisted in the military and fought for this country; her mother had worked on the Hill and her father for the Justice Department. She felt proud to be a public employee, sworn to 'support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.' When she woke up the next day, she would log on to her computer and do her job. She would try to protect consumers, as her doctors would try to protect her, as her union would try to protect the CFPB, as financial regulators would try to protect the markets, as the courts and the bureaucrats would try to protect the Constitution and the country—human beings in human systems trying to heal human faults. For his part, Elon Musk has given up on trying to administer his radical treatment to the civil servants Trump had described as a metastatic disease. After falling out with the president and failing to make the government more efficient, Musk had fired himself from DOGE.
Los Angeles Times
17-06-2025
- Los Angeles Times
Vendor Spotlight: Emma Rothschild, Bitchin' Blooms
Floral designer Emma Rothschild's job title? 'Founder, marketing director, creative director—all of the above.' However, despite her dizzying array of responsibilities, including starting and running her own business from scratch, Rothschild never breaks a smile when talking about her work. 'We're all just playing with flowers,' she says, and, undeterred by the incontrovertible challenges and intensity of what she does, she never seems to stop having fun. Within a short couple of years, starting with only her own apartment and a resume consisting of a Master's in Nonprofit Administration and Management, corporate work, and no floral design experience whatsoever, Rothschild has turned play into work, founding her own floral design business, Bitchin' Blooms, that has worked with brands including Nike, Glossier, Totême, Ana Luisa, and more. I always really loved art in design and color. My mom does floral arrangements from the garden. My grandpa always did really fun and unique fruit plate designs. So, I always just was interested. And then, when I was in grad school, I basically emailed every florist I could find under the sun in L.A. asking if I could freelance, if I could do it for free, get any experience I could. And luckily, a few people said yes. So, that's when I started doing it. And then, I worked at some flower shops, and then started Bitchin' Blooms. My first experience doing flowers, I lied a little bit and said that I already had flower experience because there was a florist that needed a lot of freelancers for Valentine's Day, and, I figured, 'It's the busiest holiday of the the year, they're not going to know if I have no idea what I'm doing.' So, I just kind of jumped into it and, like, the night before, was researching flower names to make sure that if they asked me anything, I knew what it was. And, I was just making little bouquets for Valentine's Day. Before Bitchin' Blooms, I did a bunch of freelancing under florists, and then I worked at two different flower shops. One of them had a very distinct kind of classic style, and then the other one was a lot of building bouquets on the spot for people. So, whatever they wanted, you just kind of had to make it, and make it quickly. What led me to open my own business was really wanting the creative freedom to do, kind of, whatever I wanted at any given moment. I would say that when you work at a flower shop, sometimes you have to adhere to specific styles. So, I really like having that ability to do anything. I got my master's in nonprofit administration and management. So, I had quite a few internships in the nonprofit arts world, and then I also worked in marketing at a women's healthcare clinic. And, although that fulfilled a different part of my personality and what I enjoy, I really missed the creative aspect. So, when I realized that Bitchin' Blooms could be my full time job, I just decided to kind of dive in. Switching from corporate America-y jobs to this was kind of scary, mostly exciting. I have a lot of really supportive people around me that were urging me to make the jump for a long time before I did it. And, I just kind of had a moment where I was always doing Bitchin' Blooms while also working. But, it just got increasingly more difficult to split my time, and I had wanted to do flowers since I started it. And, it just felt like it was a moment where I could actually sustain myself and do something I really wanted to do. I would say the biggest trends right now are more color and more unique and interesting flowers. I think people are starting to veer away from the whites and greens and those, kind of, classic looks and going for bright 'pops.' Some of the trends right now are Ikebana style—so the minimalist arrangements that just have a few different really cool stems. I would also say anthurium and orchis are specifically really big right now. And, just more color. Lots of color—which I love. 'I'm really excited that there's a lot of young women that are starting to be floral designers,' says Rothschild. I would say the main thing that sets me apart from other floral vendors is the personal aspect. When you're coming to Bitchin' Blooms for your wedding, you're going to be working with me, specifically, from start to finish. So, I'll give you my cell phone number, so if you see flowers out in the wild that you love, you can send it to me so that I know something that you're, you know—that's popping up that you're really into. I also would say that I use really unique flowers and designs. And then, another thing is that I don't have a minimum for my weddings, so even if you have a really small brunch or a microwedding, we can definitely make something that'll be special. I think that people choose me because of the colors that I use and the natural style that I go for. So, something that's more unique. You're not going to see just roses—well, sometimes you do, but they'll be with reflex, or there'll be something that's different about it, that you wouldn't just see typically. And, I do think that there is a personal aspect to coming to someone like me, where you know that you're talking to the person who's designing your flowers, and they're overseeing everything, and there's that direct communication so that it's not just, you know, hiring 1-800-FLOWERS to do your arrangement or your wedding. You're hiring someone that you know and you can talk to and bounce ideas off of. I ruptured my Achilles last year, and a week after I did that, I had a wedding on the Malibu Pier. So I was in a cast on crutches. But, when you're running your own business, and you want to make it work, you do. So, I had my mom help, I had my boyfriend help. We ended up forgetting the crutches when we got there, so we had to zoom over to CVS. But, luckily, we had plenty of time, and it actually ended up being one of my favorite weddings. Some of the challenges during peak wedding season are definitely… sleep. You get up at 5:30 in the morning to go to the flower market, and then you have to stay fresh to make sure that your designs look the way that you want them to. And, another challenge would be knowing when to turn your phone off, when you're running your own business. You want to answer every email within 15 minutes and just be really on top of it, but that's just not possible, and it's definitely good to know when to take a break. I would say the most challenging aspect is more the mental side of it. Because, you know, you're doing a wedding—it's a really special day for people, you want to make sure that the bride loves her bouquet, that the photos turn out just how she wants them to. So, I would say the most challenging part is just making 100-percent sure that you're on the same page as the couple, so that the end product really reflects what they want. 'The secret to my success is blind optimism—and,' Rothschild jokes, 'having a mom and boyfriend who will work for free.' My flower style is very colorful and architectural and really plays with heights and textures. Something that's always inspired me, and that I've always loved, is art, in general. I almost was an art history major in college, and I've loved Impressionists and just seeing those vibrant colors and the way that they melt together. So, I think that definitely inspires me. And then my biggest inspiration is, just, what's freshest at the market. Because sometimes you can go into the market, and you think you're going to do something, and then you find out that the dahlias look terrible that week, and you just have to pivot and find something else that matches what you're thinking. And, the colors of the market are just so fun and exciting to look at. Thank God [my style] has evolved, because sometimes I look at old pictures, and I'm like, 'Oh my God, I can't believe that passed. But, I would say the main thing that has evolved is being able to play with the depth and texture. I think, when I started out, arrangements were really flat, and although they were colorful, and pretty flowers were in them, they were very one-sided, and you couldn't see the different flowers because they were kind of just too mushed together. And now, I've really been playing with depth and height and just trying to make the shapes a little more interesting than your average flower arrangement. My personality is definitely not go-with-the-flow—and I think all of my friends would say that, too. I think I'm a problem-solver type. If there's something that needs to be figured out, I don't stress out about it. I'm just going to make sure that it happens and go for it. And, I'm a perfectionist sometimes. Like, when it comes to flowers, I will be looking at something forever to make sure it looks perfect. And then, for other aspects of the business, like Instagram or something, I just want it posted, and I don't want to think about it anymore. And then, I think being light-hearted is just an important part of owning your own business and going for it, because you can't take things too much to-heart—even though sometimes I do—because it's just, you're in customer service, at the end of the day. So, you can't take every little comment to, you know, impact your entire business or being. 'I think being light-hearted is just an important part of owning your own business and going for it,' Rothschild says. The most difficult part of my job? I don't know—I feel very lucky to be able to do flowers for my job. I think the most difficult aspect would be admin stuff, in general. Like, you have to figure out taxes and bookkeeping and become an LLC, and all of these things that you just don't think of when you start arranging flowers. You think that you're going to get to do creative stuff all the time, but there's a lot of backend work. And then, also, cleaning up is always hard, and you never want to do it at the end of the day. My approach to marketing at the beginning was—none. I just posted everything. And, sometimes I'll scroll all the way back on my Instagram, and I think about deleting things, and I don't, because I feel like it really shows the evolution. But, I think when you're starting out, you know, you just have your friends support you and follow you and go along. And then recently, I've tried to have a more strategic angle to my marketing, where I'll show people how I make the arrangements, going to the market, and kind of the behind-the-scenes of it. And, I also got a little pedestal to put in my apartment so that all my photos look more professional. What do I hope for the future of my business? I would love to be, well—currently my flower studio is my apartment, so I would love a formal flower studio with gorgeous lighting to take pictures in. And, just more of what I'm doing now. I do, you know, brand events and weddings. And, you know, having a wedding a week, or a brand event and then a wedding, or something like that I think would be really cool. Sometimes, I'm like, 'Yeah, I want to have a staff'—I kind of like just having it be me, and making everything, and doing these more 'micro' weddings. I think it's nice keeping it small. My team generally consists of my mom, and my boyfriend will do all the heavylifting. I have hired freelancers in the past—luckily, from my past flower experiences, I have a lot of friends in the flower world doing their own things or working at flower shops or have moved on, but still have that skillset. But so far, I don't hire a consistent team. [Note: Emma has, since we interviewed her, moved into her very own 'formal' flower studio and done a series of events and collaborations with various brands.] My favorite flowers to work with—I'll probably just keep going and going—but I love sweet peas, peonies, anthurium, orchids, dahlias… I'll keep it to those five, I would say, are my top, top flowers. I think my dream flower arrangement would be really colorful. I love working with pinks and oranges and vibrant greens and, like, a pop of purple. And, it would definitely have a lot of orchids, anthurium, sweet peas—all those. And also allium, which are the giant, purple, ball flowers. They're in the garlic family, and they're just a really fun flower to work with. I know what my dream wedding would be, and it would be at the Ojai Valley Inn, specifically, and it would have a lot of orchids and anthuriums and dahlias and sweet peas and all the flowers that I mentioned. And, it would be very florally dense. I think something that I do in my arrangements is I don't use a lot of greenery at all, if any, so it would definitely be bloom-centric. And, just, everywhere, flowers—flowers up the trees, down the centers of the tables. And, also, food styling. I think food styling with flowers is really cool.
