27-year-old quit her 9-to-5 to start a floral business—this year, she brought in 6 figures
Colleen McCarthy was working a corporate job where she never got “overly excited” when she started creating floral arrangements in her spare time.
Two years later, through her business, she designed floral arrangements for stars such as Sabrina Carpenter and Drew Barrymore. Colleen Rose Flowers.
McCarthy, 27, grew up in Ridgefield, CT. She majored in environmental studies and communications at Fordham University, but after graduating in 2020, she says, “it became harder to find a job, let alone the job I really wanted to do.”
He found a job at a PR agency but saw the job as “a temporary thing” while he prepared his long-term plan.
A few years after starting her job, McCarthy says she had a “mini quarter-life crisis” regarding her career. He took a step back to think: “What do I like? What have I always loved? What am I good at?”
McCarthy had always loved flowers — “I was always going to be the one to buy store-bought flowers in my apartment and arrange them beautifully,” she says — so when floral design came across her as a potential creative career, she decided to give it a try.
McCarthy took an introductory class at Flower School New York, a floral design educational institution, in late 2022. Beginner classes currently cost about $175 per person. website.
“I remember the instructor came up to me and said, ‘Oh, is this your first lesson?’ I remember you asking. And I said yes. And he said, ‘It doesn’t look like that.’ “You seem to have a natural talent for this,” he recalls.
Hearing this, she says, gave McCarthy the confidence to seriously pursue floral design.
‘I just started telling people I’m a florist’
While still working her full-time job, McCarthy began picking up flowers at the grocery store every week to practice creating her floral designs and began sharing her work on Instagram, TikTok, and several local Facebook groups.
Social media has been “really big” in helping McCarthy grow his business, he says.
“I just started telling people that I was a florist, even though I wasn’t actually that established,” he says. “I think just telling myself and other people, ‘Yes, I’m a florist,’ made it happen easier.”
McCarthy is holding one of her floral designs.
Jenna Yandle Photography
Its first official sale was made in March 2023 to a member of one of the Facebook groups.
“I was so excited about the fact that someone was going to pay for my work,” he says. “That was also really validating.”
In May 2023, McCarthy officially registered Colleen Rose Florals as an LLC; He says it’s a costly process, but worth it in the end.
“I don’t regret it at all, because then I got all the official stuff done, and then when I actually started getting more attention and getting more work, I was happy to get it,” he says.
McCarthy began working with event planners to design florals for her brand events and even booked her first wedding for late 2023.
“Once I did that, it gave me a lot more confidence that I could do larger-scale events and solve the problem,” he recalls.
We focus on flowers
McCarthy says he’s starting to “really think about it” in the middle of 2024 quits his day job.
“Increasingly, I have to turn down flower jobs because I work nine to five,” she says. “I think that was kind of the tipping point because I was like, ‘Wait a minute, I’d like to say yes to these opportunities.'”
In December 2024, McCarthy decided to quit her job to focus on running Colleen Rose Florals.
“I was pretty confident that I would be successful,” he says. “I didn’t really feel nervous or scared about it. I think my mom was a little more nervous than I was.”
Colleen Rose Florals generated over $175,000 in revenue in 2025, the first year she focused on the business full-time.
An arrangement McCarthy designed for a brand event.
Courtesy of Colleen McCarthy
The main business expense is naturally flowers. She says high-quality flowers are “really expensive” and that “there’s a disconnect between what the average consumer thinks flowers cost and what flowers actually cost.”
McCarthy provides floral arrangements for a variety of events, including weddings, brand events, book launches, photo shoots and even concerts.
She charges a minimum of $250 for a single “bespoke” floral arrangement and often charges $1,000 or more for smaller events; small and medium-sized weddings can cost between $5,000 and $10,000.
Starting in spring 2024, Madison Square Garden began ordering floral arrangements from McCarthy to decorate artists’ dressing rooms.
This year, she provided bouquets for the dressing rooms of stars including Katy Perry, Lainey Wilson, Haim and Renee Rapp.
One of her most exciting moments was being asked to create a bouquet for Sabrina Carpenter in October.
“It was so exciting and validating that someone trusted me enough to commission my work for a major artist,” he recalls.
The floral arrangement that McCarthy designed for Sabrina Carpenter’s locker room at Madison Square Garden.
Courtesy of Colleen McCarthy
Look ahead
Currently, Colleen Rose Florals operates alone, but McCarthy sometimes hires freelancers to help with large events.
Running her flower business is “extremely different” every day, she says, but she usually wakes up at 6 a.m. to pick flowers from Manhattan’s flower district.
She says she usually starts preparing for big events the day before, and depending on the scale of the event, she either takes the flowers to her home or rents a studio space for the day.
McCarthy has to “treat” each flower before working on her arrangements; It’s a “quite time-consuming” job of removing the leaves, cutting the stem, peeling off the old leaves and putting them in water.
After his designs are finished, he carries his designs to the venue by hiring a driver or renting a minibus himself.
A bouquet that McCarthy designed for her engagement party.
Courtesy of Colleen McCarthy
He says one of the biggest lessons he’s learned as a solo business owner is “knowing when to ask for help.”
“There were a few times where I pulled an all-nighter to get everything done or did all these arrangements on my own, whereas if I had just asked for help it would have taken half an hour,” she says.
McCarthy’s main business goals for 2026 are to rent permanent studio space and launch a weekly flower arrangement subscription program as a way to create “another consistent revenue stream.”
She currently shares her floral designs on social media and frequently receives messages from florists who want to learn about her career journey.
“I used to be the one reaching out to florists and wanting to learn from them,” McCarthy says. “The fact that I am now someone that others look up to is really crazy.”
“It makes me feel like I’m doing what I’m supposed to do,” he continues.
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