How Amelia Kovacs Turned a Blooming Side Project into a Thriving Nationwide Business
When Amelia Kovacs, FOX ’19, first began pressing flowers from her garden, she thought she was preserving something beautiful. Soon she understood that she was preserving something else entirely: memories. That realization would grow into The Pressed Bouquet Shop by Element, a company that has now helped more than 17,000 clients across all 50 states commemorate some of life’s biggest milestones.
By Eddy Kosik
While Amelia Kovacs, FOX ’19, was a student in the Digital Innovation in Marketing graduate program, she started a small garden in her backyard. The flowers that bloomed were beautiful, and so she decided to preserve a few of them. Friends saw the pressed flowers and began asking her to do the same with their wedding bouquets. This spread by word of mouth until, just a few months after graduating, she opened an Etsy store.
Orders began coming rapidly. One day, while Amelia was pressing flowers, she glanced up at something hanging on her wall. It was a gift from her grandmother: a pressed flower from her 16th birthday, framed alongside the printed text of a speech that her father had given to her during the party.
“In that moment, I realized there was so much more meaning behind pressed flowers than simply preserving something beautiful,” she said. “They could preserve a memory.”
“In that moment, I realized there was so much more meaning behind pressed flowers than simply preserving something beautiful. They could preserve a memory.”
Amelia realized that there was something more she could do with this side project of hers. As much as she admired local preservation artists, she wanted to build something larger than a business serving only one local community.
As Amelia brainstormed with family and friends, she kept hearing about a local preservation artist that lived hours away in the Pocono mountains.
“I wanted to figure out how to offer this service to someone that doesn’t have a guy in the Poconos,” Amelia said. “I started asking myself, ‘How can I do this differently? How can I make an impact on this industry? How can I disrupt it?’”
She credits the capstone project from her time in Temple’s Digital Innovation in Marketing program with feeding this ambition and giving her the tools to make it a reality.
Amelia Kovacs, FOX ’19
Amelia Kovacs, FOX ’19
“We had to take something from a traditional, non-digital industry and transform it into something digital,” Amelia explained. “When I started building my own business, I kept coming back to that project. I was thinking about the flower preservation industry and how traditionally you have this one single artist working within their community, all within driving distance.”
Her answer was to build a company on a much grander scale.
“I wanted to go big,” Amelia said. “We went national from the start and immediately turned it into an e-commerce business. That meant building workflows, backend systems and processes that could support customers all over the country.”
Amelia with her Temple degree.
Amelia with her Temple degree.
Amelia built a small team consisting of her mother and one other employee. Together, they spent months developing systems for customers to safely ship fresh flowers from anywhere in the country. After extensive trial and error that involved sending many bouquets to her family on the West Coast, they created instructional videos that would make the process accessible to future clients across the U.S.
Just around the corner from when Amelia launched The Pressed Bouquet in 2019 was the COVID-19 pandemic. One might expect that to be the end of a business dependent on the wedding industry, but Amelia’s sales in fact soared.
“Even though traditional weddings weren’t happening, people attached even more meaning to their flowers because they couldn’t celebrate the way they’d originally planned,” Amelia explained. “Those flowers became one of the few tangible pieces they had from their wedding day.”
During a neighborhood walk with her husband in the spring of 2020, Amelia recalls checking her phone and discovering that, for the first time, they had earned more than $10,000 in a single weekend.
Amelia, second from left, and her team. Nikole, furthest to the right, was the first person that Amelia hired.
Amelia, second from left, and her team. Nikole, furthest to the right, was the first person that Amelia hired.
“When we saw those numbers, we looked at each other and said, ‘Okay, we need to take this a little more seriously,’” Amelia said. “That was the moment we really started asking whether I should quit my full-time job and what the business might become if I wasn’t trying to squeeze it into evenings and weekends.
A demonstration of the flower preservation process.
A demonstration of the flower preservation process.
A demonstration of the flower preservation process.
A demonstration of the flower preservation process.
“At that point,” Amelia explained, “we were staying up until two or three in the morning pressing flowers because they’re such a perishable product. Once they arrive, you must begin the preservation process immediately.”
Amelia quit her full-time job in corporate marketing soon after that. In August of 2020, just about a year after she started The Pressed Bouquet, she and her team opened their first storefront. Until that point, she had been running the business out of her garage—which she only began to use after her husband insisted that she stop using the kitchen to do all her preservation work.
By 2023, revenue had reached an all-time high, and the team continued to grow. When they moved into their third location in 2024, a 13,000-square-foot historic warehouse building that had received the Mayor’s Restoration Award, they started thinking beyond just the production of preserved flower bouquets.
Amelia and her team during the grand opening of their current store in downtown Easton.
Amelia and her team during the grand opening of their current store in downtown Easton.
Amelia and her team decided to open the space up to the local community for event rentals and flower preservation workshops. In expanding their services, Amelia and her team also decided to rebrand the store as Element to represent that they’d become more than just a flower preservation shop.
“We created the Element brand to encompass all the different directions we were growing,” Amelia said. “Around the same time, we also had the opportunity to create a permanent floral installation for the W Hotel in Manhattan. That really made us think bigger. We couldn’t exactly call ourselves Pressed Bouquet Shop while building a 10-by-15-foot floral resin wall for some fancy hotel lobby.”
Amelia and her team decided to open the space up to the local community for event rentals and flower preservation workshops. In expanding their services, Amelia and her team also decided to rebrand the store as Element to represent that they’d become more than just a flower preservation shop.
“We created the Element brand to encompass all the different directions we were growing,” Amelia said. “Around the same time, we also had the opportunity to create a permanent floral installation for the W Hotel in Manhattan. That really made us think bigger. We couldn’t exactly call ourselves Pressed Bouquet Shop while building a 10-by-15-foot floral resin wall for some fancy hotel lobby.”
In rebranding, however, Amelia and her team initially made the decision to drop The Pressed Bouquet as a name altogether. The change proved to be a bit too swift. “We lost an incredible amount of revenue,” she said. “It was a tremendous mistake.” By the end of the year, they decided to bring back The Pressed Bouquet, but within a larger Element brand.
“We’re very grateful that we’ve recovered and are back on track now,” Amelia said.
Amelia has no interest in hiding her mistakes. In fact, she has made it part of her story, and the story of the business. She wants to make herself a resource to young people starting their own business, and even to future Fox School of Business students following in her footsteps.
“I don’t want to stand in front of a classroom and pretend that everything is rainbows and butterflies,” Amelia explained. “That would be a complete fabrication.
“Everyone faces challenges,” she continued. “I think being able to share the realities of those challenges, the fact that it’s possible to overcome those challenges, and then to speak about those experiences even prior to being completely rebounded back to where you were—that’s valuable and humanizing for other people to hear.”
Amelia and one of her sons.
Amelia and one of her sons.
Amelia and her business continue to grow. She and her husband now have two young children, and she wants to use the Element brand to expand into other significant life events, such as baby celebrations. She is also planning to launch the Element Marketplace later this year, which would connect her following with other small businesses to buy wedding mementos such as handmade vow books or journals.
“Every stage of growth within this business required me to tap into a different version of myself,” Amelia said. “Every time I grow a little bit differently, or lean into different skills that I learned, but I 100% believe that those were all a direct result of what I learned at Temple.
“At the time, school can seem like just another class, just another project. But when you look back, you start realizing, ‘I know how to do this because of that project,’ or, ‘I learned this skill because I worked with this specific group of people.’ It’s as much the education I got from the professors as it is the other professionals in the program. They taught me all those things that I know today because of that program.”
Today, The Pressed Bouquet Shop by Element has served over 17,000 clients across all 50 states. “That is just so mind-boggling,” Amelia said. “There are 17,000 couples that have trusted us with the most monumental flowers of their lives.”
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