About Direct Flowers

Direct flowers is a women-owned minority business enterprise.
Our Miami location is the consolidation point for the most beautiful flowers from around the world to be distributed into the U.S.
Our strategical location, just behind Miami international airport, allows us to offer a fast distribution from the farms worldwide, straight to your door.

Our Founder

Shari Carlquist is the founder and sole proprietor of Direct Flowers. Meticulous about her company product, dedicated service, and competitive industry pricing she strives to provide her customers ― including wholesalers, supermarkets, and gourmet markets, florists and event companies ― she brings a breadth of knowledge to this woman-owned business.

Shari’s love of flowers blossomed into her first floral industry job when she was just 24 years old. She enjoyed learning about the cultivation of flowers, their market distribution, and cultivating close industry relationships greatly rewarding. During her personal travels at home and abroad she found herself meandering through flower markets and discovering gourmet shops to indulge her love of all things gourmet, from food to wine to bespoke handcrafts. When she realized these shops had almost everything except flowers, she saw a niche she could fill. And the seed for Direct Flowers was planted.

Direct Flowers was established in 1990 when Shari relocated to Florida to the greater Miami area to launch her own distribution business. A serendipitous chance to travel to Ecuador for a flower show changed the trajectory of both her professional and personal life. The farms became what quickly felt like a second home and she found herself spending months at a time immersed in flowers, and in budding relationships with Latin American farm owner families. These enduring friendships grew into business partnerships that have continued ever since. These strong family relationships developed into diverse growing/distributing partnerships.

In its infancy Direct Flowers hatched a unique plan to create an array of bouquets designed to sell to markets, since at the time flower farms only sold cut flowers in bulk for distribution. It was successful though labor intensive for our small hands-on team. Next, through our established farm relationships, we collaborated with farm suppliers to initiate the concept of an uncommon business model of creating these bouquets at farm level.

Sourcing flowers from South America, the United States, Europe, and beyond ensures a premium ready-to-sell complementary product for our retail and wholesale customers reducing labor and increasing their profits.
̶ Shari Carlquist

The beautiful European-inspired, hand tied designer bouquets were quickly both embraced and preferred by small markets, gourmet shops, and larger retail grocers. In fact, the concept was so wildly successful that our floral farm bouquets model has been adopted by others. As this concept’s popularity grew the South American farmers’ models evolved and they began producing varieties of high end and consumer bouquets along with their bulk and premium cut flowers to meet the broader market demand.

Partnering closely with growers Direct Flowers distributes cut and bulk flowers, along with the consumer and designer bouquets throughout the United States. We collaborate with growers of farms throughout South America, The Netherlands, The United States, Thailand, Israel, France, and beyond to strategize effective plans for what should be planted seasonally based on the current pulse of our U.S. market. This allows us to guarantee abundant inventory of the quality and species of flowers that the United States retail industry is seeking in any given year.

Farms entrust Direct Flowers as their distribution partner to ensure they plant and cultivate those flowers to meet the needs of our local, regional, and national market base.

The results? Premium cut flowers, bulk flowers, and gorgeous bouquets made at farm level for direct to wholesale and retail markets by the source trusted for more than 30 years.

At Direct Flowers our name is our part of promise…to sell beautiful flowers in an international bounty of varieties, at competitive prices all shipped direct, from farm to our market clients.