Every Bouquet Tells a Story

By Paul Berger, New York Times

On Friday afternoons, the headquarters of the Chabad sect of Orthodox Judaism comes alive as men in black jackets and hats stream like worker bees in and out of the subterranean entrance on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn.

Those exiting scatter across Crown Heights to prepare for the coming Sabbath — Shabbos in Yiddish — many drawn a block east by the overpowering smell of lilies and the ebullient welcome of Chani Frankel to Mimulo, a flower shop on Albany Avenue.

“Shalom, rabbi! How are you?” she asked one customer on a recent Friday, greeting others with a “Happy Shabbos!”

Mrs. Frankel, clad in an aquamarine headscarf and a denim dress, skipped around the counter at the back of the sun-drenched, 900-square-foot store, but altered her stride to reverently approach an imposing, middle-aged rabbi to go over flower options for that week.

“They say that on Valentine’s Day flower shops pull in a crazy amount of money,” she said after the rabbi left. “But we have Valentine’s every Shabbat.”

Mrs. Frankel and her business partner, Freidel Levin, both 26, had been up priming the walls until 1 that morning. The shop, which opened three years ago, was in the midst of one of its regular makeovers.

A teal antique couch was standing on its head, undergoing repair by Mrs. Frankel’s father; the women had installed it for nursing mothers, knowing, with five children between them, how difficult feeding in public in Crown Heights can be. A hutch, from which they usually serve tea and coffee, was pushed up against a far wall. But no customers seemed to notice.

Some of the young men, dressed in jeans and North Face jackets, and tapping away on smartphones, would have looked at home in any Brooklyn neighborhood if not for their neat beards and tzitzit — ritual prayer tassels — spilling over their pants.

The volume rose as Mrs. Frankel and Mrs. Levin, a pair of sunglasses perched atop her stylishly short hairdo, greeted each customer by name. Excited cries came from the back of the store as Mrs. Frankel’s brother, Shua Hecht, 24, answered the constantly ringing telephone, responding to people placing orders or checking when their Shabbos flowers would arrive.

“It can’t be 392,” Mr. Hecht explained to Mimulo’s delivery man, Jonathan Espinal, “That’s Aunt Rivka’s address. It’s got to be 329.”

With that, Mr. Espinal, 21, stuffed a bouquet into a milk crate attached to an antique Schwinn bicycle and freewheeled out the door. Mrs. Frankel’s intimate knowledge of her customers and their families gives her a special insight into each bouquet.

“Different flowers represent different people,” she said, surveying dozens of plastic buckets on low tables and across the floor. Pink hydrangeas, white roses, Vanda blue moon orchids and mango calla lilies.

“Light colors are for bright, bubbly people,” she said, “More traditional flowers are for older, more conservative people.”

People like tulips, Mrs. Frankel added, pointing to a bucket of bright yellow flowers, because they have a mind of their own.

“When you put them in a vase,” she said, “they are not so stiff.”