Photo by Frank Couch.
Continental Florist, operated by Jim Orr and his mother, Barbara, has been going strong at its Vestavia location for 30 years.
Jim Orr didn’t have a lot of life plans nailed down on the day his grandfather died.
“It was in the late ’70s, and I was living in Chattanooga,” he said. “I came to Birmingham for my grandfather’s funeral, and an uncle of mine came up to me and asked me what I was going to do with my life.”
Jim told him he didn’t know.
“My uncle said, ‘You have a cousin who owns a flower shop in Fairfield, and she wants to retire. Would you be willing to look at it?’ And I said, ‘Uncle Buddy, I’d be willing to look at anything.’”
Jim came back a few days later and spent two weeks with his cousin in Fairfield.
And something happened that surprised him.
He fell in love with the flower business.
“So I quit my job, moved to Birmingham, moved into my grandfather’s house and have been a florist ever since,” he said.
Slowly his family moved to the area to join him, and it wasn’t long before Jim, his two brothers and his mother, Barbara Orr, were running three flower shops in the city — the one in Fairfield, one on First Avenue downtown and one in Vestavia, Continental Florist.
“But that just turned out to be way too much work, so we ended up closing the other two and focusing on Vestavia,” Jim said.
It’s a focus he’s glad they chose.
Thirty years since beginning their work at Continental Florist, he and his mother are still going strong in the same location.
“We are celebrating our 30th anniversary here,” Barbara said. “It’s worked well. Jim is the talented designer, and I do the other stuff — wait on customers, answer the phone, things like that.”
At first, Barbara didn’t work full time in the flower business — she just wanted to dabble in it and learn a little.
“But after a few years, I wanted to get my feet wet and learn more,” she said.
So she quit her job as an office manager for a local physician and joined her son in the business.
“I love the people,” Barbara said. “We have many who have been customers for 20-plus years.”
She and Jim invest a lot in relationships with customers and in the community, she said. They often provide flowers for the local high schools, nursing homes and library.
“We try to stay active and try to be participants in the city,” Barbara said.
Jim also does a flower demonstration the last Thursday of every month for Talk Alabama and often helps with events for Sav-A-Life.
“We could tell stories for days of the people whose lives we’ve gotten to be a part of over the years,” he said.
For example, he’s done the flowers for the weddings of three former Miss Alabamas. And he’s done arrangements for former first lady Laura Bush.
“We’ve had a good variety of work,” he said.
That’s kept them entertained. When mother and son started the shop as a family business, they “never thought we would be doing it this long,” Barbara said.
But Jim has always had “a very natural flair,” Barbara said. “He loves to work with brides and customers.”
Barbara feels the same way about interacting with clients.
“We want to help our customers get as close as possible to exactly what they want,” she said. “We try to run a smooth operation. Every business makes mistakes, but when we do, we try to correct those as quickly as we can.”
Barbara loves the contact with people — the customers, but also the staff.
“We love each other. It’s obvious. It’s like a family environment, and I think it makes us a little bit different,” she said. “We have people who have stayed with us, not people who come and stay a year and move on.”
One current employee, for instance, has worked there since before he could drive, and he’s working on his master’s degree now, Barbara said.
“Jim has mentored him, and we feel like he’s family,” she said. “He is just a joy.”
And as for the actual core family that runs the business, both Jim and Barbara say with a smile that working closely as mother and son has its pros and its cons.
“It’s definitely positive that we get to spend so much time with each other every day,” Barbara said. “We work well together.”
But it’s also best when they can go home and leave business talk behind at the store, she said. “Jim is better at that than me — he can turn it off, and sometimes I have to remind myself not to talk about it too much outside of work.”
Jim agreed that they try to make some separation between work and life.
“We try to leave the personal stuff personal and the business stuff business,” he said. “But we love it. We just enjoy what we do.”
