Huntington’s Hometown Flower Co.: A Fondness For Flowers
What began as a passion project for a third-generation florist has grown into a blooming business.
Hometown Flower Collective was founded in 2019 by Jaclyn Rutigliano. Flowers are a part of her heritage; her grandparents started a flower shop in Queens in the 1940s, and her parents moved it out to Long Island.
Rutigliano was not initially following in the family tradition – she had a successful career in marketing and public relations. But after doing some flower design in her backyard as a method of stress relief from her job, she realized she wanted to follow in those footsteps, partially using the skills she learned in her nine-to-five.
“Entrepreneurialism really runs strong in my blood,” Rutigliano told the Press. “So we decided to form a group of our own farmers to work with our own sourcing. We knocked on the doors of farmers really like January or February, so dead of winter, right here on Long Island and told them, ‘We’re willing to buy whatever you grow, whenever you grow it.’ That’s how we got started.”
Hometown Flower Co. started as a flower truck in 2019, selling locally grown flowers with a unique design out of a 1976 Ford pickup truck. In 2023, they opened their store at 333 Main St. in Huntington.
“We have a mission to kind of introduce locally grown flowers and return artistry back to floristry,” Rutigliano said. “To understand there are people behind these flowers, who design them, grow them and nurture them. Our goal was to kind of create these really fun and unexpected encounters with flowers just to kind of get people to fall back in love with them.”
Since they work with all Long Island-grown flowers, Hometown Flower Co. is technically a seasonal business – but they’re booming in the winter as well, with a particular emphasis on dried flowers to give them a second life. They also host workshops to get people up close and personal with the flowers and foster a sense of love for nature when it comes to picking flowers for any occasion.
While Hometown Florist Co. maintains a, as one could guess, hometown vibe, they also do flower arrangements for major events just as commercial florists do, including weddings, birthday parties, and more.
“We like to say it’s really just to connect people in unexpected ways to locally grown flowers,” Rutigliano said. “Part of the reason why I had such a disconnect with flowers growing up was because it was sort of the rise of 100 flowers and supermarket flowers and people just sort of lost touch and they viewed flowers as just any other product or commodity, and forgot the value behind it. So we want to bring back that magic for flowers.”
