Mirroring Designers

On passion for what you do

Interview with Kristina Rimienė, EMC from Lithuania

Kristina Rimienė, EMC is one very talented designer and a lady with an amazing personality, She lives in Lithuania and besides owning a flower shop, designing gorgeous events and organising a unique floral festival in her country, Kristina is also quite known to the Lithuanian public as the host of a famous television show. We have interviewed her in this new series of articles, Mirroring Designers, along side Flavia Bruni from Italy, to give you an insight on how the same two areas of creativity, floristry and television, can beautifully and successfully blend together.

How have flowers taken you from the floor of your flower shop to a television studio? Tell us in short, your first encounter with television. 

Four years ago, the idea to make a new talk show for TV where different personalities would share their life stories was raised. A production company had also an intention to make some new kind of setup advising audience how to arrange flowers or do gardening besides the interviews. At first, I was introduced as a florist, but later we came to the conclusion that I can also host the show. For the first season I was doing this together with a colleague and after all by myself. Time passes so quickly. I haven’t even noticed as our show is already entering the 9^th season on the largest national TV channel of Lithuania TV3.

By the visible personal investment you put in your TV show, one can assume this is more than a job to you. Would you consider television a passion, as well?

For sure! It is a passion for me to get personally acquainted with different people, especially when the preconception that I for example have about them from a press or TV suddenly changes. I interview a lot of celebrities, music, TV stars, writers, politicians, businessmen, basketball players, etc. And sometimes even internationally famous artists. But not only celebrities come to my show. I look for people with interesting life stories to tell. Sometimes people from international floral designer society implementing amazing projects become my guests too.

This is for me even more interesting and I am glad to be the one who enlighten the society with up to date events, interesting personalities and their stories. I guess the reason why people love my show is that it is really positive and is always followed by flowers. It has nothing to do with the standards of yellow pages. So, each time I work for the show I am replenished with positive emotions.

How do you balance time in between to such time consuming endeavour: floral design and television?

My motivation is a possibility to create. Of course, there is a whole team creating the show. And it is fun, because each time you start with thinking what theme to take and what person to interview, and then look forward to an interesting outcome. Usually it takes about 2 days per week for me to work for TV.

Each show beside the interviews has a Floral Dessert section, where I do a demonstration of a floral design. Each time a new arrangement, composition, bouquet or even a project or event. This makes me grow as a florist myself, because I think about flowers, design techniques, floral ideas all the time. The only problem as you correctly observed is a lack of time… My flower shop, event decoration, floral project development requires a lot of attention and consumes a lot of time, so I always have to run working even on evenings and weekends. I consider it as the price I have to pay.

You focus in your TV show on telling the story of successful, influential or inspiring people from all over Lithuania. It’s about a personal learning experience that inspires people. If you were to do one show about Kristina Rimiene, EMC what would you say people could learn from it? 

Wow… I never thought about that! I guess people could learn from my story that it’s not too late to change your life for better. I was working at IT business and data mining sector as analyst, marketing manager, head of a company and at the same time I was doing PhD in economics, teaching at university.

I was good as people were saying. :) But having so many activities, all the time running with no time for myself was tearing me apart. I wanted to change the situation, to find the creative thing to do just for myself. I have found flowers. Unfortunately, I haven’t stopped running.

But the problem is my perfectionism in all activities I do. I want to do the best I can, I want to learn, I want to seek for improvement and creativity. It’s all about self-motivation and my personal character. But the message is – don’t be afraid to change, no matter how hard your decision is – you will be happy you made it. And what concerns floristry I am so happy that I have a possibility to see it worldwide, to discover new ideas, to share, to bring the understanding of floral art to Lithuania. And the TV show helps me to spread the message. Now being a florist or a decorator is among top professions in Lithuania. :) I guess that is my mission.

How do you design a TV show? Does the process relate to the floral design process? 

I think these are 2 different things, though both processes include creativity. Of course, in both processes at first you have a theme, an idea, tools, people, then you create and have the result. But flowers are arranged usually for a very short time and always in order to bring an emotion. A TV product lasts quite long as it is uploaded and stored in different platforms and the purpose can be to tell the story, to bring the emotion, to keep up to date news, to search for a problem solution, etc. So, I would see those fields as two different ones.

Last year you have stepped into the world of floral festivals by organising one in Lithuania. Huge success! Tell us a little about that experience and how was it influenced by both your TV experience and your floral design expertise?

I am so proud of becoming a creative director and organiser of the first international floral art festival in Lithuania, FlorArt’2019. We haven’t had anything like that in Lithuania before. Traveling around the floral events in Europe, seeing so many beautiful flower projects created, happiness in the faces of people enjoying the view became an inspiration for me. Huge thanks to Kaunas District Municipality and the Mayor who believed in the idea, provided a financial support and a historical Raudondvaris castle for this event to take place.

I still was lucky to have floral designers from different countries and their projects were amazing! Interest and the feedback from the visitors redeemed all the efforts. FlorArt’2019 was on the news, so people have started to come from all over the country. Being a TV person helped me with communicational and organisational questions and experience in floral design event attendance, contacts with florists and floral exporters have all facilitated to organise it in a highly professional manner.

If you were to give your younger self one advice, what would that be?

Mind yourself and listen to your heart. It covers all the fields of your life. And the life passes so fast. So, doing something for yourself – choosing the profession you want, not being afraid to change, trying something new, enjoying professional and ordinary life – is the essential thing we have to do on our daily basis.I am still learning this myself. If I could go back, I would start learning this much earlier. 

If you want to read the mirroring story, of Flavia Bruni, CFD, EMC from Italy and find out all about her story of how flowers and television mix, click here!