Father-daughter business owners celebrate shop's 30th anniversary

Mike Moscato owns River City Florist and Gifts with his daughter, Lauren Moscato. The store celebrated the 30th anniversary of being owned by the Moscato family on Friday.
Mike Moscato owns River City Florist and Gifts with his daughter, Lauren Moscato. The store celebrated the 30th anniversary of being owned by the Moscato family on Friday.

Lauren Moscato is a painter, but she paints not with ink or dyes. Instead, Moscato paints with flowers.

Late one June afternoon, she placed a black flower pot on a work bench at River City Florist and began sculpting her masterpiece.

First, she placed a benign green foam block inside, then cut each of the four corners. Gradually she added spirea, which looks like a twig adorned with cotton balls, and an evil looking red and brown flower called leucadendron. She finished her creation by layering in flowers in shades of lavender, pink and various greens.

"Weird is what I'm going for," Lauren said. "Weird with texture. You want things to draw your eye through an arrangement."

Over the past seven years, Lauren honed her skills working for her mentor, drinking buddy and now co-owner. Her father, Mike Moscato, bought the Jefferson City flower shop for a few thousand dollars three decades ago, and the shop celebrated its 30th anniversary in the Moscoto Family on Friday. Now co-owners, the pair formed a succession-plan so Lauren will gradually take over the shop from her proud papa over the next six years.

Mike is a Chicago native who bleeds Cubbie blue. He's so dedicated to his Cub fandom he bought airfare and a ticket to Game 7 of the 2016 World Series on a whim. When he was 15, his parents moved him to Jefferson City, but he hated it, always yearning for the Windy City.

When he turned 18, he got a job at Busch's Florist for six months then worked for five years at the Callaway Nuclear Generating Station. Mike is a blunt man. At the time, he said he was young and threw away all the money he made at the power plant.

So, he worked odd jobs as a young man in his early 20s until one day he found himself at a flower shop on Jefferson Street. Mike worked initially as a delivery driver. After proving himself to the shop's owner, he then quickly rose through the ranks doing plant maintenance for the shop.

Eventually, he said he bought the business for $10,000-$20,000. At the time, he was just 27 years old, but he wanted to run the store better.

"I knew I could do a better job," Mike said. "It wasn't a temporary deal. This was my business, and I was proud of it."

When Mike Moscato bought the business 30 years ago, it employed just four people. Today, 16 employees work at the shop. At the time, the shop's top seller was fresh flowers. Today fresh flowers are still the shop's top seller, but gift ware comes in a close second.

Walk in the shop and you'll see far more than flowers. A wine cooler sits in the back of the main lobby, some adorned with logos of the Kansas City Chiefs, St. Louis Cardinals and, of course, Chicago Cubs. Not far to the right are tables full of candies and even facial creams. In the back, wind chimes and other pottery sit in an old green house, and just outside, are nutcrackers painted in the colors of the University of Missouri Tigers and even the University of Kansas Jayhawks.

Sometimes, the shop even sells beef from local farmers. Mike said that diversification of products at the shop is partly how it has stayed affloat over the years.

"It was doing maybe a 10th of what it's doing today," he said. "It's provided me a really good living."

Mike wants to retire in the next six years. So quietly, a succession plan began.

Lauren, 26, came to work at the shop because she owed her father money - not much, she said, but enough to force her to join her dad for a while.

"I keep track of him," Lauren joked, "and I do our social media." 

She also orders the flowers and makes arrangements sold in the front of the shop and designs arrangements sold to customers for weddings and funerals. As a kid, she never thought about working at the shop, but she occasionally tagged along on deliveries. As she grew older and her father worked late, she'd come in and make arrangements to keep her busy.

"I didn't think about working here until I started working here," Lauren said. "Then I realized I enjoyed it and that I was good at it."

Neither Moscato went to college or has any formal business training. Mike said he's learned well over the years, and Lauren learned management skills from her father.

"School of hard knocks," Mike said.

Lauren's work space is in the basement where the shop keeps its flower coolers and vases in countless colors. Mike generally mans the upstairs part of the shop. As he prepares for retirement, her father is gradually transferring ownership to her. Until then, both enjoy being around each other.

"I think we're very alike," Lauren said. "Our personalities are alike. The way we choose to run the business is very similar. We get excited about the same things. He's also my drinking buddy."

Today, Lauren owns about eight percent of the business, and her father plans to give her four percent of the business each year until his retirement. Lauren thought at one point about opening another shop, but she said there's a lot of work that goes into it. Instead, she just wants to keep working hard to sustain relationships her family has with clients.

The reason "we've done so well for so long is that we're both here working it," she said.