A shop, not a marketplace
Flora Bridge is a physical flower business with four stores across Istanbul, sixteen florists between them, two cold rooms and three delivery vans. Everything you order here is made by one of those people, not routed to a stranger.
We opened because we could not order flowers we trusted
In 2008 our founder, Zeynep Kaya, was working abroad in London and tried to send flowers to her mother in Şişli for her birthday. She paid $140 on a well-known international flower-sending website, chose a photograph of a generous garden arrangement, and what arrived was eleven carnations in cellophane, an order routed to whichever local shop bid lowest, thousands of kilometres from anyone who could check it.
That is not a story about one bad florist. It is how the industry is structured: the big sites are order-routing networks. They sell you a photograph, take a margin, and pass the job to whichever local shop will take it cheapest. Nobody in that chain is accountable for what lands on the doorstep.
So we opened a shop, and made a rule we have never broken: we only sell what we make ourselves, and we only photograph what we actually made.
What that rule costs us
It means our delivery radius stops at the edge of Istanbul, when we could promise nationwide or international shipping tomorrow the way the big broker sites do. It means we cannot list peonies in December at a price that would tempt you. It means when the market fails us on a Tuesday we have to email customers and explain, which takes a florist off the bench for an hour.
It also means that when you look at a photograph on this site, that is the thing you will receive. We think that trade is worth it.
What we are not
We are not a luxury brand, and we are not cheap. A $58 bouquet from us is a lot of good seasonal stems arranged competently. A $185 bridal bouquet is three weeks of planning and a florist's whole morning. Neither is a bargain and neither is a rip-off; you can see exactly where the money goes.
What we will not do, even when it costs us the sale
No stock photography
Every listing image is an arrangement our florists made, shot on the bench in daylight. If we cannot photograph it, we cannot sell it.
No silent substitutions
If we cannot get a stem, we email you a photograph of what we propose instead and you can cancel for free. We never quietly swap and hope.
No fake urgency
No countdown timers on prices, no "only 2 people are viewing this", no invented scarcity. When we say only six are left, six are left.
No cancellation maze
Subscriptions cancel with one button, immediately. We do not route it through a phone call, and we do not offer three discounts on the way out.
No orders we cannot deliver
Postcode checking happens before you shop, not after you have fallen for something. If we cannot reach you, we say so and recommend somebody who can.
No upselling grief
Sympathy orders get a stripped-down checkout. No add-on carousel, no "customers also bought". It is the wrong moment and we will not do it.
Where the flowers come from, honestly
Roughly 60% of what we sell comes through Istanbul's wholesale flower halls before dawn, which is itself a mix of domestic growers and Dutch auction stock. Another 25% comes direct from growers in Yalova and Antalya — Turkey's two biggest ornamental-flower regions — that we have bought from for over a decade. The remaining 15% is imported — mostly Ecuadorian roses and out-of-season peonies.
On imported flowers
We are not going to pretend that everything is locally grown. Ecuadorian roses are imported, and they are also, genuinely, the best roses in the world for cut-flower work — the altitude produces heads that domestic growers cannot match. When you buy a long-stem red rose from anyone in this country, it flew here.
What we can do is tell you which is which. Every seasonal product on this site is labelled, and the journal carries a month-by-month calendar of what is actually growing nearby so you can choose on that basis if you want to.
Waste
Flowers that pass their sale window go to two places: a weekly donation to care homes near our Şişli and Kadıköy stores, and our own compost, which goes back to one of the Yalova growers. Around 4% of stock is written off each month, which is low for this trade and mostly a function of buying tightly rather than optimistically.
Four stores, open six and a half days a week
You are welcome to walk into any of our stores, look at what is in the buckets and have somebody make you something on the spot. That takes about fifteen minutes and it is how we would prefer to sell flowers, if the modern world allowed it.
Flagship — Rumeli Caddesi No:12, Şişli, Istanbul 34381Plus Beşiktaş, Kadıköy and Üsküdar — full addresses on the contact page
Mon–Sat 08:00–19:00 Sun 10:00–16:00
