Talent BY JULIE MARTENS FORNEY EMPLOYEE SPOTLIGHT Riley Fox


super focused on learning how they do things at Griffin’s. For instance, here we grid our vases with stems or curly willow, where in the past I would just green a vase heavily. It’s a simple difference, but the impact on the design is huge.”


When I’m not designing: “At work, I water all of the live plants, which is great, because one of my favorite places to go is the Franklin Park Conservatory in Columbus. It’s just so cool and I love to see the plants. I do have a lot of plants at home — maybe too many. A lot of time goes into taking care of them. My ‘child’ is my monstera. I recently found a ‘Thai Constellation’ Monstera, which has been on my wish list. I’m hoping I can get it to grow as big as my other one.”


Floral Designer Griffin’s Floral Design & Wineshop Columbus, Ohio


> For Riley Fox, entering the floral indus- try was like coming home. “I found my place in floral design,” she says. “I love my job so much and get to have fun every single day. I feel incredibly lucky.” With zero experience or interest in flowers prior to her first job, she has spent the past four years honing her design skills. Her favorite creations are high


design styles. “Doing something big and different, or unique things with different shapes is what I love to do,” she says. “I’m passionate about manipulating different greens, using even salal leaves to create structure or cutting leaves into different loops and geometric patterns. I get to be really creative with it.” She also relies on curly willow to add height or grasses to create different shapes. “I have the freedom to be creative


here while also learning different design styles,” she says. Recently, Fox has been


learning how to design funeral pieces, a process that fuels her creative energy. She experiments by designing at home. “The process of design teaches me, and creating arrangements at home gives me total freedom, because no one will see it but me,” she explains.


Current flower crush: “White King protea is my new favorite flower. I fell in love with it at the SAF convention in August. First, I’m all about large flowers, and these offer a large bloom. Second, using white in a unique shape and texture is really attractive to me. They’re breathtaking flowers and make it possible to build an arrangement around them. They’re soft to the touch and bring that classy green and white color palette. What’s not to love?”


What surprises me most about the job: “This is the second shop I’ve worked in, and it’s amazing to me how different shops do things in different ways. I’m


12 FLORAL MANAGEMENT | November/December 2026 | WWW.SAFNOW.ORG


Who I’d love to host for dinner: “Freddie Mercury is a musician I’ve looked up to my whole life. I’ve listened to Queen since I was born because my father listened to them. Mercury was a cultural phenomenon and just so mesmerizing. He was so many good things, but he was also human and made mistakes. I would love to have a conversation with him about how his life really was. Table arrangements for that dinner would be enormous and glamorous, pulling out all the stops with things like anthurium, big orchids and Monstera leaves.”


Advice to live by: “It’s pretty simple: Just listen. That’s what has allowed me to learn as fast as I have. When I started here 20 months ago, I learned by leaps and bounds by lis- tening. That advice serves well with any aspect of the floral industry or even life. In terms of design, don’t be afraid to do it wrong. Sometimes you have to do things wrong before you can do them right. That’s how you learn. Play around with the flowers, cut them up, experiment. Have fun.”


Julie Martens Forney is a contributing writer for the Society of American Florists.


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