On my blog, I will be interviewing a series of inspirational women in different job roles and businesses and telling their story in 5 minutes.

 My first interview is with a very old friend of mine, who is now running a very successful floral design company – Jo Truby Floral Design

Introduce yourself and your company?

My business is called Joanne Truby Floral Design (named after myself) and we specialise in providing floral styling for weddings and events.

It was a bit of a fluke as to how I got into it! I have always loved being creative and designing, after a travelling trip to Central America in 2008 I had a light bulb moment where I decided that I wanted to retrain and study a degree doing something creative so enrolled to do a visual display degree.

This would have linked to my previous career and experience working in retail head offices. It wasn’t meant to be as the course was discontinued and they offered me interior design as an alternative which I knew wasn’t for me. Looking down the list of options I spotted ‘Floral Design and Events Management’ and immediately thought wow that sounds interesting and decided to go for it!

Initially I thought I would progress into working within events but I fell head over heels in love with the flowers and have never looked back since.

Wow I am pleased to say that there has been a few, so this is a bit of a tough one to answer but one of them most definitely has to be appearing on the front cover of Perfect Wedding Magazine for four consecutive months in a row!

 Do you have a favourite flower?

This can change depending on season, fickle florist. Sweet peas are my absolute favourites they smell amazing and I love the shape, followed closely by ranunculus when in season, I can become a little obsessed!

Try not to get to bogged down with day to day ‘fluff’ remind yourself of your end goal and dream keep plugging away, work hard and never give up.

It can vary from day to day (another reason why I love my job) but usually my day starts with checking and responding to emails, putting together quotes and design briefs to send to clients. Some days I may have a venue visit planned and then the afternoon is spent tidying the workshop and working on marketing material.

I have so many ideas and plans for the future, it is hard sometimes trying to do everything (not enough hours in the day)! We had our first successful one on one workshop a couple of weeks ago which I absolutely loved and this is something we shall most certainly be doing more of (watch this space). I’m rapidly running out of space to as the business gets busier and busier so I think a workshop relocation is on the cards soon, all very exciting and I can’t wait to see what the future has in store!

All the photos in this blog post have been taken by Rebecca Douglas