Both Eileen Looby Weber and John Looby III started off in different fields, but both father and daughter are now at Lake Forest Flowers on its 100th anniversary.
John Looby liked to work in the family garden and greenhouse while growing up in Lake Forest, but after college he taught at Holy Child High School for Girls.
“The school closed in the 1970s,” Looby said. “I built a large greenhouse and started growing things wholesale. Five years in, I bought Lake Forest Flowers and never looked back.”
That was in 1981, around the time his daughter Eileen was born.
“(My siblings and I) kind of grew up helping out,” she said. “Both my parents worked full time. We would walk over from School of St. Mary if we didn’t have an after-school activity. We’d process flowers and put away supplies and clean up and ride around with the delivery staff.”
Looby Weber said she earned a bachelor’s degree in horticultural production and marketing at Purdue University with the intention of running giant greenhouses. She had a change of heart.
“I started thinking about what I wanted to do, and I wanted to work with people and not just plants,” Looby Weber said.
She joined Lake Forest Flowers and, after two years, said she also earned an MBA at Lake Forest Graduate School of Management.
Looby said when he bought the business, many of his flowers came from greenhouses around Chicago. Now, the flowers come from around the world.
“Europe, South America, Africa,” Looby said. “You can get any type of flower any time of year you want, as long as you are willing to pay the cost of shipping.”
In 1981, the business mostly delivered to Lake Forest and Lake Bluff, Looby said. Nowadays, they’ll deliver as far north as Kenosha, Wis., as far west as Schaumburg and south into Chicago, Looby Weber said.
While both say the number of parties and events they design flowers for has greatly increased, Looby noted that as hospital stays for new mothers have shortened, those flower orders have decreased.
“They are all outpatient today,” Looby said. “Mothers are only in a hospital for 24 hours.”
Looby Weber said the flower business is complicated, starting with ordering flowers from overseas and hoping their flights don’t get interrupted to U.S. Department of Agriculture inspection. Then there’s cutting, cleaning, removing thorns, soaking, designing, packaging and delivering them.
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The busiest times of year are Mother’s Day, the Christmas season and Valentine’s Day, Looby Weber said, and Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day are the most challenging.
“With holidays, everything is within one to two days, designed and delivered,” Looby Weber said. “Even when we have a lot of notice, like at prom, nobody orders more than three days before. We’re inundated with 200 last-minute orders.”
There is also more competition with area grocery stores and farmer’s markets selling flowers, Looby Weber said.
Looby says that while 40 to 50 percent of customers look at the business’ website, many prefer human contact.
“We’re helping people express their emotions with flowers,” he said. “Even though they use the Internet to look at pictures, they will still call us and talk about flowers being custom-designed and writing a personal message.”
Both father and daughter sound a bit amazed that Lake Forest Flowers is celebrating its 100th anniversary.
“When I got into this business, I never thought we’d be at the point of 100 years,” Looby said.
Lake Forest Flowers started in 1917 as Rosemary Road Greenhouses on Illinois Road near Rosemary Road, Looby Weber said; the greenhouses were heated with coal brought in by train. The store moved to the corner of Deerpath Road and Western Avenue in the late 1920s, and decades later to its present location at 546 North Western Avenue. When John Looby bought it in 1981, the entire business was contained in what is now the showroom.
Lake Forest Flowers will celebrate its 100th anniversary on Oct. 14 from 1 to 4 p.m. with refreshments, a flower design demonstration and a free rose to anyone who visits the store, Looby Weber said.
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