Mirroring Designers

Flavia Bruni, CFD EMC

Insight into the world of television and flowers

Flavia Bruni, CFD, EMC is one very talented designer and a lady with a breathtaking personality, She lives in Italy and besides owning a flower school, designing gorgeous events and establishing her own wedding Academy, Flavia is also quite known to the Italian public as the host judge of a famous television show featuring aspiring florists. The show features Flavia as a permanent guest judge and hosts the show along side a colleague. We have interviewed her in this new series of articles, Mirroring Designers, along side Kristina Rimienė from Lithuania, to give you an insight on how the same two areas of creativity, floristry and television, can beautifully and successfully blended together.

How have flowers taken you to a television studio? Tell us in short, your first encounter with television.

My first time on TV dates back to about ten years ago. Through my website, the editorial staff of a television program contacted me via email to ask me to be part as a guest, expert on flowers, of a show for Valentine's Day. On that occasion I had to present short live tutorials, to create floral ideas for the party of lovers.

From there, my participation became a regular appointment every 2 weeks for about a year, in which every time I presented a different kind of flower, talking about the meaning and characteristics, and creating an arrangement that could be easily replicated by the spectators. 

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? 

After gaining this experience, I thought it would be nice to have not only a few minutes space but a program entirely dedicated to the world of flowers. Here is where the idea of "Star in Bloom" comes from; a contest between professional florists of 6 episodes. In each episode three Floral Designers challenged each other on wedding arrangements with a specific mood.

Designing and building this format was very demanding but also a unique and exciting experience. With my colleague, the Wedding Planner Giulia Sonnino, we conceived, wrote, organised and presented the entire program.

It's not my job, but I love having different experiences. However, it was fun and above all I achieved the goal of making the potential and beauty of Floral Design known to a wide audience. I like television, but I don't consider it a passion, rather a tool to make known the floral art that is my true passion.

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

All my activities have flowers as their common denominator. I can match everything by making a good planning of the commitments, trying to dedicate the necessary time to each one even if sometimes I would have appreciated the possibility of having a 48-hour day.

The Education Activity is planned from October to June, as well as the floral design for events (weddings) which are then gathered, as a delivery, mainly in the summer season. Only occasionally I have overlapping commitments. Participation as a guest on television is occasional and often during the holidays, while in the case of "Star in bloom", being a complex project of which I followed all the phases, it absorbed me for about 3 months, it required my full commitment and I chose, in this case, not to take any other professional engagement during that time.

In your show you are in the position of judging other aspiring florists from Italy. What are the main features you look for in judging in a TV show, which is different than official competition?

On Star in Bloom there were two other judges with me. A wedding planner and a professional from the world of wedding as a photographer, MakeUoArtist or cake designer, who judged the aesthetic aspect in the mood of the episode. My role therefore was to judge the arrangement from a technical point of view in the choice of flowers, in the creation of structures and in compliance with the principles and rules of floral design.

The substantial difference with official competitions is that in the case of a television program it is not advisable to go too far into technical details that may be difficult to understand for a large audience.

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

After conceiving the format as a contest as a whole, we decided for this first edition to focus the challenges on arrangements dedicated to the world of Weddings. We have identified 6 different moods, (Vintage, Luxury, Urban, Country, Seaside, Garden) one per episode, and I took care of choosing the types of flowers to be made available to competitors by calculating their possible needs for the creation of the centre-piece, the bouquet and a third surprise test.

In addition to the flowers, I selected all the technical materials, containers and structures necessary for the realisation of the works, offering competitors a wide range of choices.  Although the mental process was the same that I use for each of my events, in this case I can say that the work was decidedly more demanding because I had to imagine more variations for each individual style, not knowing which creations the florists in challenge would have made.

You are a successful designer, with an specialised school in floral design and a wedding academy as well. How do you balance the different areas you work in? 

These three activities balance each other in the most natural way possible. I am a Floral Designer with twenty years of experience in the world of events, mostly related to weddings during which I came into contact with the best professionals in the sector. But I also love to teach and that's why I founded my Flower School.

More recently I have combined both skills by creating the Wedding Industry Academy, an educational reality that involves the best experts in the Wedding sector that I have met in my career to train new highly qualified professional. 

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

Do not underestimate the opportunities that arise because each of them can prove to be an important opportunity for personal and professional growth.

If you want to read the mirroring story, of Kristina Rimiene, EMC from Lithuania and find out all about her story of how flowers and television mix, click here.