Abby is not your average 16 year old. She has her own idea about how she’s going to live and she’s not afraid to pursue avenues that haven’t been explored before. While other teenagers were learning Tic-tok dances during quarantine in March, Abby was making plans to start her own business.
When she was 14, Abby started dreaming of opening a flower shack where she would sell arranged, fresh-cut wildflower bouquets. The idea was born when her dad got flowers for his bees, and she was struck by their beauty and by the idea that others might want a share of that beauty.
Nearly a year and a half later, Abby took matters into her own hands and bought a significant inventory of wildflower and sunflower seeds herself. After many days of planning, planting, weeding, and waiting, much to her parents surprise, she had a sizeable inventory of beautiful flowers.
Her original dream didn’t stop short at flowers–it also included a mint green shack with a painted sign and chic chalkboards to display her prices. However far fetched this seemed to her family, with some paint, a couple of incredibly talented friends, and impressive persistence, this vision too became a reality.
For tiny Stewartstown, Pennsylvania, Abby’s Flower shack offers an authentic alternative to grocery store flowers. When interviewed, she reported that many of her customers are husbands who tell her how much their wives are going to love these flowers. She also gets many delighted children to convince their parents to let them choose a stem from the eye level sunflower buckets.
Though she set out to make a cute dream into a reality, thinking she would make money by sharing something beautiful with her community, soon after her business became a success, she found another purpose to add fuel to her fire. With her flower shack profits, she was inspired to start sponsoring a young girl named Mukami through Compassion International. When asked about what drives her when she’s working on her business, Abby always come back to Mukami. 
From happy customers, to the chic mint setup, to the profits that enable the sponsorship of a young girl, Abby’s Flower Shack has reached success that not even she predicted. She admits that she started out with doubts about her ability to achieve her goals, but has shown true entrepreneurial grit to get to where she is today.
In the future, Abby says she hopes to plant new varieties of flowers to help grow her business and provide more options for customers. She plans to meet with the school board this winter in hopes of starting her plants in the school greenhouse to kick off her selling season earlier. Her entrepreneurial fearlessness, creativity, and determination are not only inspirational, but a blessing to her community, in Stewartstown and beyond.
I think you gave a really good description of this business! I love how she took something so simple and made it into something successful. It was a great idea for her to choose this path because her products are natural and homegrown (which is appealing to a lot of people) and does not take a lot of money to start up, considering she only had to buy the seeds to start out. I love how Abby used some of the profits she made from her business to help support and sponsor someone else. That shows true selflessness and shows who she really is and what she values as both a person and a business owner.
I really enjoyed reading about this little business. It’s the simpler businesses like these that truly inspire me to start something of my own. Abby took her passion and admiration for beautiful flowers and successfully turned them into a business! I really like the fact that she was able to to direct her profits to another passion of her own—sponsoring a child! I think that when businesses have a driving factor to raise awareness for something else or support someone, then there is a completely deeper layer of meaning behind each purchase. Abby is definitely an inspiring young entrepreneur!
I think this business idea is awesome! I love hearing and reading about small businesses in towns that deserve recognition for their ideas and creativity! These types of businesses inspire me to want to start my own business. I love that she is using some of the profit to sponsor a child! I think her generosity helped attracts more people to her business! I think Abby is a perfect example of following your dreams and passion, and not letting your age stop you!
Wow – I LOVE flowers and think this is an incredible business. I appreciate the simplicity in her business and the raw purpose behind it to help Mukami through her efforts.