St-Char-Ro celebrates four decades in business
Megan Strickland
St-Char-Ro Janet Gardner works on a bouquet, 40 years after the family’s floral and event shop opened
Megan Strickland
John Romero works in St-Char-Ro, the flower shop he partially owns with his family.
Megan Strickland
John Romero works in St-Char-Ro, the flower shop he partially owns with his family.
Megan Strickland
John Romero works in St-Char-Ro, the flower shop he partially owns with his family.
Megan Strickland
St-Char-Ro Janet Gardner works on a bouquet, 40 years after the family’s floral and event shop opened
Megan Strickland
St-Char-Ro Janet Gardner works on a bouquet, 40 years after the family’s floral and event shop opened
Megan Strickland
Megan Strickland
Hey savvy news reader! Thanks for choosing local.
You are now reading
1 of 3 free articles.
Ask Janet Gardner the secret to being in business for 40 years and she will tell you that there isn’t really a secret at all.
“Work, work and work,” Gardner said of why her family’s floral and event rental company St-Char-Ro celebrated the four-decade anniversary mark earlier this month. “We’ve made it 40 years because of the community. We were able to grow because of the advice and mentorship and training from the community.”
Gardner had never had any business experience in 1975 when she decided that a career in nursing just was not for her. The long hours away from her four young children made the medical field unappealing, though she was already fully trained.
“I wanted to go to church and spend holidays with my husband and my children,” Gardner said. “My mother had a neighbor who came from Oregon and knew about the Western School of Floral Design.”
She approached Al Skogan at Ronan State Bank with a business proposal: she would get some training as a florist and open her own floral business.
The bank agreed to give her $3,000 if she went to floral design school for six weeks and agreed to apprentice under George and Jim Caras, Sr., in Missoula. Later, tutor Fritz Roll was also a mentor. She opened just before Mother’s Day and sold out within a matter of hours. She was off to a good start. A week into the business, classmates of Gardner’s sister helped give the establishment its moniker: St-Char-Ro, an abbreviated version of the three names of the communities it served in those days: St. Ignatius, Charlo and Ronan.
“Of course we quickly outgrew that and we now deliver all over western Montana and sometimes out of state,” Gardner said.
Along the way, Gardner said having the mentorship of a core group of businesswomen was integral. Back in those days, Gardner was not even allowed to sign the business loan papers by herself as a woman. Her husband Dennis had to co-sign. The ladies she surrounded herself with – LaVern McGreevy, Alice Gleason, Helen Symington, Shirley Moody and Sherri McDonald – helped her navigate the business scene and learn work-family balance.
Gardner’s learned a lot over the years. Styles and preferences in the floral business are always changing, and so has the nature of the business. Flowers are bought in a global market, but at St-Char-Ro, much has remained the same. Her first crew of Julia Maughan, Nancy Grisamer, Leona Maughan, and Cheryl Cheff worked nearly 25 years at the shop. Over the years she’s hired high school students who worked their way through college. And the cast of customers is something that is at once steady and reliable, but also a bit unpredictable.
“It changes,” Gardner said. “You deal with everything from birth to death and every kind of thing in between. In our business it’s just part of life. We get to be very creative, because people bring us in ideas and then we have to make a picture out of it. We do it with fabric, with pictures, with flowers. We try to figure out what they are dreaming of and make it a reality.”
Over the years she has had some interesting requests: a groom who wanted the florists to pick feathers off dead roosters he brought in and put them in his wife-to-be’s wedding bouquet; another groom brought in a skinned rabbit to be part of the bouquet and garter.
“That was a fun wedding,” Gardner said. “We become part of their lives.”
Some of the most touching work Gardner has done involves memorials.
“We do some really custom work in memorials,” Gardner said. “They bring me in (items from) the deceased – like their saddle, their fishing pole, tackle box, their shovels that they dug ditches with if they are a farmer, their tool belt if they were a construction worker. Then we are to create something that represented them.”
In some cases, foreigners meet Montanans abroad, fall in love and then bring them back for ceremonies that are culturally-infused. Gardner’s had to put pieces of Thailand, Europe and Africa into her work for customers before.
“They are from all over,” Gardner said. “The United States attracts people. Then I have to stop and study their culture and their religions. You cannot just be an order taker because that isn’t going to work. Sometimes when I’m doing pieces I have to do research and contact people in the industry that work in that country or have designed for that country.”
The decades of providing unique service has not gone unnoticed. Seven years ago Montana State University awarded St-Char-Ro a multigenerational business award. The store has always supported a family atmosphere, with Gardner’s mother, Nancy Grisamer, children, and grandchildren working in the store.
Last year the shop’s ownership expanded to include daughter and son-in-law Connie and Roger Romero and grandson, John Romero.
As the family bustled about on April 22, Connie and Roger were preparing to head to Idaho, where their daughter Cassie was giving birth to their first granddaughter.
“There’s no way I’m stopping,” Connie told Gardner as she gathered things together. She remembered how Gardner kept slipping away from the flower shop to view John when he was born 22 years earlier.
The new baby girl, Emma Rose VanLydegraf was 5 pounds, 10 ounces.
“It’s the next generation,” Gardner said with a smile.
