Romantics will exchange candy hearts, chocolates and flowers next Saturday, but the Ivy Place considers the big day for lovers more than just a single sunrise and sunset.
“Valentine’s Day is the biggest one-week holiday that we have,” owner Geni Fulcher said amid a foam rack full of ribbon to spin into decorative finishing art for countless gift baskets in the store’s work area. “It’s a totally different ballgame when it’s on a Saturday.”
When the day for lovers falls on a Saturday, it means a mad dash for Fulcher and her niece and marketing coordinator Emily Muirhead to arrange every rose, curl every ribbon, and stuff every gift basket to order for the business’ customer base.

“This young generation likes ‘lux’ flowers, or premium flowers,” Fulcher said “Roses with those shorter petals in the middle, peonies, garden roses, tulips. These girls like things different from my generation and the one before me.”
Roses aren’t just red at the shop at 2451 North Frontage Road. There’s the pink and crimson variety, both among more than 100 hybrid species of the woody perennial.
“The last couple years, we’ve had a tie-dye rose that we’ve injected color into, so you get that pretty blue, green, yellow and other colors that open up and it’s really cool,” Fulcher said. “Yellow is supposed to mean friendship, white is purity. There’s always a new variety.”
Delivery zones expand across the Mississippi River to Tallulah and down U.S. 61 South to Alcorn State University when Valentine’s Day becomes “Valentine’s week,” as Fulcher calls it. Overall, the staff of she and Muirhead expands to a half-dozen dedicated locals who drive the store’s two vans and help complete orders for “tons” of walkup business that augments phone-ups and online orders.
Fulcher started Ivy Place on Clay Street in October 1984 after majoring in retail floristry management at Mississippi State.
“We had a floral shop up at State that the students run, so Valentine’s Day up there was different,” Fulcher said. “We had 40 people running around all the time.”
“I was planning on interviewing for a job in South Carolina and I was just going to do this until I got that interview. But I started doing this and things changed quick.”
Muirhead’s marketing degree from the University of Southern Mississippi has come in handy when it comes to advertising the shop’s stock of floral offerings, artsy home furnishings and more.
“We started doing a lot of social media with our Facebook page and on Instagram,” Muirhead said. “We do a lot of contests, like the one this week that had over 8,500 views. And we gave away a half-dozen roses, with 250 shared photos and a lot of feedback from that.”

Lightning-quick product recognition for the holiday is a far cry from when Fulcher started with just a landline phone and whoever walked in the door.
“Everything was manual,” Fucher said. “You had to work with your wholesalers over the phone, one on one. We’d get orders over the phone from other flower shops. And customers would get flowers over the wire services like Teleflora. But now, people go straight to Google. It’s better now, because we get to sell what we have instead of someone else trying to sell what they think we might have.”
Her best-known product this week will have a short shelf life, perhaps a few weeks. But, Fulcher leans on what she knows will sell.
“Studies show a woman can remember every time they got a dozen roses,” Fulcher said. “Temporary art is what we call it.”