A Dallas flower shop has earned national attention for playing along in a silly and, well, rather buttery prom promotion.
Cheddars Scratch Kitchen, a comfort food restaurant chain founded in Irving, Texas, in 1979, noticed a peculiar trend blowing up social media last year: teens wearing puff pastries around their wrists to prom. Turns out, when their dates texted asking about their corsage preferences for the big night, auto-correct mangled their question with the word “croissant.”
Famous for its honey butter croissants, Cheddars decided to capitalize on the texting snafu by marketing “the Croissant Corsage.” In late February, a PR company representing Cheddars contacted Brad Weinstein, CEO of Petals and Stems, a member of the Society of American Florists, to see if his shop would create such a design.
“It sounded whacky, of course, but we were willing to hear them out,” Weinstein said. At the end of the pitch, he doubted the croissant corsage would have a lot (or any) sales but recognized the potential for publicity.
“I figured, this will generate headlines, people will read the story, laugh and think, ‘I don’t want that, but I do need flowers for prom’ and then will call us,” he said.
To Weinstein’s surprise, he has already received one order for a croissant corsage (a $20 design that includes spray roses, baby’s breath, ribbon and a Cheddars coupon) after the story broke earlier this week. The promotion has received substantial coverage locally, and has been picked up by many national publications, including People, USA Today and MyRecipes.com
Cheddars handles the orders and money, and Weinstein bills the restaurant for his costs assembling the corsages.
This is not the first time an SAF member has teamed up with a restaurant to create an edible corsage. In 2014, Nanz & Kraft Florists in Louisville, Kentucky, partnered with KFC to sell corsages that showcased fried chicken drumsticks resting on a bed of gypsophila. The promotion netted the company major attention. In the days after the story broke, Nanz & Kraft’s website had 11,000 visitors, up from its typical 500 to 600 a day. Many of those shoppers were teens purchasing the silly corsages for “promposals”— the social media-fueled tradition of asking a date to the dance in a memorable way. “No one is substituting chicken entirely for flowers,” President Eddie Kraft told E-Brief editors. “They’re just having fun with it.”
Katie Hendrick Vincent is the senior contributing editor of Floral Management magazine.
