Charles Scrase and Davang Shah worked together at Google for more than a decade before joining Vignos last year as partners. They’re not looking to scale exponentially, Scrase says, but rather to “tap into all the demand that’s in the marketplace already.” | Photo by J. Adrian Wylie
University Flower Shop has expanded from Nickels Arcade to the west side with a second, much larger production and sales site. The 4,000-square-foot facility on S. Wagner Rd. provides ample space for creating custom floral arrangements and planning events, as well as free, on-site parking for drop-in or pickup customers.
Founded in 1931 and a fixture in the historic campus arcade since 1963, the shop has been revitalized since Dani Vignos, fresh out of college, bought it in 2015. “It’s had its highs and lows,” she says, “and so I bought it in a low, which made it affordable, but it wasn’t thriving at that point.
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“There used to be tons of brick-and-mortar flower shops around Ann Arbor and the university, and those are just not as common any more,” she points out. “To hold on to this type of art, event, design kind of business in our area, it’s a special thing that helps to shape a community.”
Responding to the business’s growth and her own move to Chicago, where her husband now works, Vignos brought in two partners last year. Also U-M alums, Charles Scrase and Davang Shah are experienced executives who worked together at Google for more than a decade.
Scrase, who left Google as its Ann Arbor site lead and global director for search customer care, says he’s “excited to work on a business where you weren’t trying to convince people that the product was good, but that you were trying to help the business figure out how it could scale.”
Their first project was to add a second location. Vignos “had grown it to a great, healthy size, but now it was kind of bursting at the seams,” Scrase says. “When you’re doing a job like floral design, like any creative endeavor, having space to think and create is really important.”
The Wagner Rd. facility includes both a custom twenty-by-ten-foot cooler and enough open space for clients to visualize their event designs. It will also, eventually, host flower arranging workshops. Staging all deliveries there also helps free up staff in Nickels Arcade to better attend to walk-in customers, he adds.
Scrase says University Flower Shop is well suited for people who have a budget, a vision, and a willingness to let designers exercise creative freedom based on that vision. Especially from spring through fall, they rely on partnerships with local growers for much of their stock.
While the new location is bigger and easier to reach, he says, maintaining their local identity is at the root of their mission to be “the primary purveyor of joy to people in Washtenaw County.”
“People buy flowers for really important moments in their lives or their family’s lives,” Scrase says. “And if you’re buying something at a sort of a premium price because you want someone to feel special, we want to make sure that we get that perfectly right.”
They’re not looking to scale exponentially, he says, but rather to “tap into all the demand that’s in the marketplace already. We feel like we’re maybe a quarter of the way there … just in making people more aware that we’re here and that we do something unique and different, right? What you get here you can’t get at a grocery store floral shop, you can’t get at a big online floral distributor.”
University Flower Shop, 212 S. Wagner and 7 Nickels Arcade. (734) 665–6037. Mon.–Sat. 10 a.m.–5 p.m. Closed Sun. uniflowershop.com
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