The Story of Dragonfly Floristic

It is often said that when one door closes, another one opens. That was exactly the case for Olha when she stepped away from her position as CEO of a chain of retail stores in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine.

After a difficult goodbye to the drugstore industry, Olha decided to explore new creative paths and began attending various hobby classes and workshops to discover what truly inspired her. Being artistic by nature, she eventually found herself at a flower pumpkin workshop. The result exceeded all expectations, and that experience led her to enroll in a week-long “Basics of Floristry” program at Art House Flower School in Dnipro, Ukraine.

The program introduced students to every aspect of floristry — not only the beauty and romance of working with flowers, but also the demanding side of the profession: flower ordering, inventory and processing, cleaning buckets, and even taking out the trash. The instructors often said, “If you still love it after all of this, floristry is meant to be yours for life.”

The next major step was a year-long floristry program in Kyiv, Ukraine. One week each month was dedicated to different subjects, including Funeral Floristry, Spring and Christmas Design, Weaving with Grasses, Sketching, Wedding Floristry, Bouquets, and Arrangements. Olha graduated from the International Floral School in Kyiv with excellence.

Life changed rapidly after Olha moved to California in 2019. After spending a year assisting at a floral shop in the heart of Silicon Valley, she launched the Dragonfly Floristic website during the COVID pandemic in 2020. Just two days after the website went live, the very first order came through.

What started as a home-based floral business in 2020 has since grown into a cozy floral art and design studio in the heart of downtown Los Altos, California, in 2024.