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In a little white room above the Cloudforest chocolate shop on Southeast Morrison, flowers are for sale—some real and some conceptual. The pop-up, which runs until Labor Day weekend, represents a foray into physical space for two clothing brand designers, Trey Hales and James Fink.
The shop takes its name from Hales’ brand Fresh Cut Flowers, and the pop-up seems largely under his direction, but Fink’s apparel is also on display—limited item creations for a brand called Daag. The brands are similar insofar as both are the projects of graphic designers and make very limited runs of each item.
Despite the abundance of apparel, the flowers—or the idea of them—are the shop’s main focus.
The original idea of the upstairs pop-up was that Hales and Fink would sell clothes and a local floral designer Cody Shulund would sell actual fresh cut flowers. “But the first weekend, we found that this environment wasn’t conducive to keeping flowers fresh.” Hales explains. “I said, ‘Well, do you want to do dry ones?’ So he made that installation.”
Shulund sculpted a massive dried flower arrangement that seems to grow up around two mirrors in the loft, then force its way through an interior window until it curls around the upstairs entrance. It lends an art gallery feel to the already white-walled space.
“As the flowers dry, it continues to change,” Hales points out.
Hales still wanted to sell bouquets to keep with the pop-up’s original theme. And that’s how Fresh Cut Flowers became a place—the only place—where you can walk in and buy a dried flower bouquet by local artist Manu Torres.
“People come in specifically for his stuff. They’re looking for specific things like these pink fuzzies,” Hales says, gesturing to a bouquet on his counter. “There’s nowhere else to get grab-and-go bouquets of his projects.”
Since Torres was already making arrangements for Cloudforest below, the partnership came together easily.
Hales has run Fresh Cut Flowers as an online label since 2018, but he’s been designing apparel for much of his adult life.
“I started off in the DIY [music] scene helping with tour management and merchandising,” Hales says. “But then, when I started working for slightly bigger bands, the merch I was selling—I just thought it was so bad.”
Hales realized designing band merch was something he was good at and loved doing. He still designs for artists on a freelance basis. “Now, what I work on are entire spreads of merch; if they want the look to be really cohesive.”
The cohesion and constraint of Fresh Cut Flowers lie in Hales’ playfulness around the idea of flowers and floral arrangements in general.
The bulk of his wares are hoodies, sweatshirts and graphic tees. But he’s been trying to push out, into concepts like hats and hoodies that say “Florist,” a label that could be taken any number of ways.
“I was thinking, if I design something flower-based, illustration-based or repurposing floral imagery,” he says, “is that some kind of floral work? Am I a florist?”
GO: Fresh Cut Flowers pop-up, 727 SE Morrison St., shopfreshcutflowers.com. Noon-4 pm Friday-Sunday.