The flowers are not mine. The workshop is my father’s.

Shantou, in Guangdong, makes a large share of the world’s artificial flowers. My father opened his workshop there on 3 January 2019. There are around fifty people in it.

Most workshops here compete on the same question: how many stems can leave the building in a week, and at what price. It is a reasonable business. It is also why most artificial flowers look like artificial flowers.

My father chose a different question. He was more interested in whether a flower survives being picked up.

That turned out to be difficult.

Building something that holds up close costs more. More steps, slower hands, more stems thrown out at the end of the line.

I am not going to itemise how it is done. I did not do it, and I have not stood over it long enough to describe it in a way I could defend. What I can tell you is what the extra cost buys, because that part you can see for yourself: colour that is not flat across a head, no two blooms on one stem alike, petals still attached a year later, and a stem that holds the angle you bend it to. Those are the four things I check before anything goes on the site.

That is a hard thing to sell into a market that buys by volume. The flowers were better than the price bracket they competed in needed them to be, and better is not a business model on its own.

I left after school and went to Shenzhen, mostly because I did not want to be managed by my family. I worked there for three years.

When I came back, artificial flowers were everywhere. The workshops around us selling wholesale had done very well out of it. My father’s had not. He was making a better flower than most of them and the orders were going elsewhere.

I could see how that ends. A workshop with fifty people in it does not survive on being right. LifelikeBloom is an attempt to sell the same flowers to a different person, through a different channel, before that happens. Some people would rather have three good stems than fifteen ordinary ones. They were never going to walk into a wholesale market.

My father thinks it is a waste of time. He is not being unkind about it — there is no money coming in yet, and from where he stands that is the whole of the evidence so far. He may turn out to be right.

I am not a manufacturer and I am not going to pretend to be one. What I do is narrower, and worth stating precisely.

I decide what goes on the site. There is far more available to me than what is listed here. Most of it is fine, and fine is not the point. What survives the edit is what holds at thirty centimetres — the distance a camera shoots from, and the distance somebody picks a stem up and turns it over at.

I write what I know, and I leave out the rest. Most of what is on this site comes from growing up around it, but I have kept the claims to what can be seen in a photograph or felt in the hand. Where I would have to take somebody else’s word for it, I have said nothing instead.

There is one workshop and I have not changed it. That is the least impressive sentence on this page and possibly the most useful one. It is why the burgundy you order next spring will match the burgundy you ordered this autumn. Sites that buy from a dozen suppliers cannot promise that, and most of them do not mention it.

The flowers are made in my father’s workshop and posted to you from there, in 7–12 working days.

There are no extra charges to pay at the door. If a courier ever asks you for money on delivery, that is my mistake and my bill, not yours.

If something arrives damaged, send me a photograph. That is the whole process, and nothing has to go back to China. Your right to change your mind within fourteen days is separate from that, and it is set out in full on the returns page. Nothing I have written here shortens it.

Payment runs through a provider that gives you buyer protection independently of me. If a parcel does not arrive, or is not what you ordered, your route does not depend on whether I am reasonable. I intend to be. You should not have to rely on it.