Menagerie Bears Good Tidings
Your friends have just had a baby and you want to send over something with more pizazz than a bouquet of garden-variety flowers.
How about a stork?
Sound silly?
Well, it didn’t to Judy Holderman when she first read about a couple back East who were staking the long-billed birds into the lawns of new parents to announce the birth of a baby.
Holderman, 35, an enterprising businesswoman, saw an opportunity to make money.
Six-foot-tall wooden animal characters could deliver personal messages: Birth announcements. Happy birthdays. Get wells. Marriage proposals. Welcome homes.
“I knew it would go over well in Orange County,” she said, relaxing near the pool at her Lake Forest home.
Within months, Holderman had sold Judy’s Bloomers, a plant and flower business, and launched Storks Plus in El Toro with just $500.
“I really wanted to do something different,” she said. “I had been going into office buildings for eight years taking care of plants. The thing is, plants don’t understand anything about vacation or time off.”
She collaborated with local cartoonist Jenny Campbell two years ago to create a colorful trio of announcement animals. The cast includes a rabbit in high-top sneakers and top hat, a bear wearing a bow tie and balancing a ball on its hind legs, and a stork who wears a baseball cap and carries a pink or blue bundle bearing the child’s name, date and time of birth.
The stork is Holderman’s bread and butter.
“I’m coming into contact with people during the high points of their life, when they’re ecstatic,” Holderman said. “I get (calls from) new fathers who are so excited all they can say is, ‘I had a baby.’ You try to calm them down, ‘OK, is it a girl or a boy, do you have a name yet? How many pounds does it weigh?’ ”
With that information in hand, Holderman prepares the stork, then sets out to make the delivery. Traipsing through strange neighborhoods in the early morning can sometimes be unsettling. Once, while making a delivery in Santa Ana, Holderman says, a group of youths surrounded her.
“I was really frightened. They identified themselves as members of a gang,” she said. “But they wanted to know what I was doing in their neighborhood at that hour of the morning. When I told them, they promised me that they would not let anything happen to the stork.”
Experience has taught her to never leave home without a crowbar and a jug of water. Both are used to soften up the rock-hard ground in front of new homes where the landscaping has not been completed.
“I’ll never forget my first day. I had set the stork up and just as I started to turn away, a gust of wind blew it over,” she said. “I thought, ‘what am I going to do? They’re never going to invite me back.’ But, luckily, there was a tree in the yard and I was able to tie it against that.”
Although at least two other companies in Orange County offer a similar service, Holderman considers florists her real competition. “When I was doing research on the business, I called around and found out how much the flower shops were charging for a bouquet of flowers,” she said. “I set my prices according to that.”
Holderman charges $37.95 for a five-day rental. The bear and rabbit are rented on a daily rate of $24.95. In a good month, Holderman says, she makes $3,000--not bad for a job that allows her the freedom to work when she wants and maintain a business selling potpourri at the Orange County Fairgrounds swap meet.
Storks Plus has been going so well, Holderman says, that she is working on plans to turn the business into a national franchise. “I think it would be a great job for housewives,” she said.
The business is as unusual as Holderman’s background.
An “Air Force brat,” she spent much of her adolescence in Spain and Turkey. “Turkey was absolutely incredible. It was a very different culture, to say the least,” she said. “I lived across the street from the prime minister, and we used to have snowball fights with his Secret Service.”
Holderman returned to the United States to attend the University of Michigan where she majored in marketing. Afterward, she landed a job working as a manager for a small aircraft company.
But soon she had the urge to start her own business.
“I had always had a green thumb with plants, so I called around to some restaurants to find out about the people who took care of their plants,” she said. “Many were unhappy with them and, by the end of the month, I had 15 clients.”
The move to launch Storks Plus has paid off. “I never have a bad day at work,” she said. “And when you don’t feel like going in, you just don’t schedule any deliveries.”
While most clients come to Holderman to spread good news, there are also those who call out of desperation. She remembers a male client who had just broken up with his girlfriend.
For five days straight, Holderman sneaked over to the girlfriend’s house before daybreak and left a different animal caricature on her lawn, bearing an inside joke between the two. But imagination and a sense of humor just weren’t enough to compensate for other shortcomings in the relationship, Holderman says.
“Unfortunately, the two never did get back together. But I was over there so much, the girlfriend and I wound up becoming good friends.”
