Entry 01 Chas Thompson Thomas
Talks with Portland floral designer Chas Thompson Thomas. Video excerpt below.
“Career is freedom, it’s a lifestyle. I don’t have a job; I have a life and it always involves flowers.”
“My name is Chas Thompson Thomas. I’m 32, I think. I live in Silverton, Oregon. ”
A. Tell me a bit about who you are and what you hold dear.
C. I think more than anything, authenticity. Whatever that looks like and whatever that means, it is what I really gravitate towards and what I always come back to when describing who I am and what my business is.
A. How do you define authenticity? What does it mean to you?
C. It means weird, I think. It's funny because growing up I was always the weird kid. Even in high school, I was voted most unique—back then I was so embarrassed by that because all my friends were voted most outgoing, most athletic, you know, all these things that you can attribute to being positive, then I was most unique. I always kind of hid in that truth of, oh, I’m different. Then as I got older, I really leaned into that, oh, I'm different, this is cool! So, I think being different somehow became associated with being authentic and now I like that in other people and other businesses. You can tell when people aren't doing what is perceived as the norm or the standard, they're being authentic.
A. Are weird and unique interchangeable, do they mean the same to you?
C. Yeah. When I was a talent agent and I was working with kids, to be a model in the industry, what's different about you is what you're celebrated for, you know. I loved working with kids because thinking back to how I was teased for being different, it was cool to be able to offer them an opportunity because they were different. Like the kids with the gap, it was oh my, your gap is fabulous! Or the kids with the mole, that’s so beautiful! Meanwhile you know they’re going to school and being called guacamole or whatever. That's how it all became weird, different, it’s all good!
A. What is your favorite indulgence?
C. My favorite tactile indulgence is paper material, I know it’s so random but there's something about flipping through a magazine and feeling the grade of the paper, something about sending out snail mail that I just really love so much.
A. What are you currently inspired by?
C. It's funny because people ask me that a lot, probably more than you would think, especially relative to floral design. What inspires me changes, I feel like, every year, not because I plan it but when I go back and look at my work, I can see it. Today and this year, I've been really inspired by spring and I think it's because 2020 was so heavy and gloomy that I just wanted levity and air in all my work. Looking back, even at great dried arrangements, I can see that there's life, it feels like a spring and a fresh start.
A. What do you think of as career?
C. Wow, that's a good question. I feel like it's two parts, career in the traditional sense: you go to school, you study to be something, and then your career is a plan for you. As I’ve gotten older and kind of veered away from my traditional education, career looks like entrepreneurship, like almost those two words are interchangeable to me now. There is no end goal, whereas before, career was very much measures of success: I'm going to be an assistant, then I'm going to be the director, and then I'm going to be the president—that's what career was supposed to be. Now, there's more freedom, you know. It's entrepreneurship and it's freedom. Career is freedom, it’s a lifestyle. I don't have a job; I have a life and it always involves flowers. I'm here doing video today but there are still flowers involved, I brought you flowers not because it's my job, but because this is my life. I wish I had known that at a younger age, not to pick a job but to do what you want in your life and then the money will come.
“ To me floral design is an art form. It’s my therapy, almost. If it wasn’t floral design, if it was painting, I wouldn’t only paint because I was being commissioned, wouldn’t you still paint for your joy and just because that’s what you do? ”
A. Could you share a bit about what you do for a living as you perceive it?
C. To check a box, I'm a floral designer. What that looks like to me is different every week. I go to the flower market regardless of whether I have a job and I buy what inspires me. That’s what I do, but I never think of it as going to work, it’s never like my job starts right now and it ends right now. I never think of it in terms of what I do, it's more that this is who I am, and this is what my days look like. It just so happens that this is also how I make a living.
To me floral design is an art form. It’s my therapy, almost. If it wasn’t floral design, if it was painting, I wouldn’t only paint because I was being commissioned, wouldn't you still paint for your joy and just because that's what you do?
A. If you weren’t a floral designer, what would you do for a living?
C. Before this, I was a talent agent. I worked with models and actors, I was in L.A. having success at a young age and living this fast-paced lifestyle, which was cool having grown up in Oregon—it was like I’ve made it kind of thing. I got to know a lot of people in the industry down there and I really had this idea that I wanted to be a stunt car driver. Had I not gone on this different path, I would've stayed in L.A., I would have become a stunt driver, and I would still be down there. Truthfully, the only reason I didn't look further into getting an agent to be a driver was that in my mind, I could listen to whatever I wanted to in the car, while I was driving, but they told me I couldn’t have music on, I’d be in there and they’d be directing me on what to do—that crushed the fantasy for me.
A. Would you mind sharing a bit about you before floral design?
C. Yeah, so, I grew up here and long story short my older brother had lived in New York for a long time, and he said: when you graduate high school, move to New York; I said I couldn’t do it—even to this day New York is not for me—but I said I'll meet you halfway, so I picked Chicago. I only applied to one school that I liked, I got into the one school I liked, and I moved there. I graduated high school at 16, started school in Chicago—loved it, great experience. At that time, I wanted to be copywriter. Fast forward again, I wanted to be in creative development working on reality shows, so, I thought okay to do this I either need to move to New York or move to L.A. I moved to L.A. because at least then I'd be on the West Coast, closer to home.
I moved there [to L.A.] with no money, no job, and my parents said they’d give me three months to find a job or move back home. I didn't have a computer at the time, I didn't have a car. I was living in L.A. and interning all over the city, at HBO at BET, at Stars and I'm taking the bus—which in L.A. is the uncoolest thing that you can do but that's what I did. I would walk from my little condo that I shared with another girl, from Wilshire to UCLA. Every day I had to apply to five jobs online because I thought if I did that, I’d ultimately get a job—I still have those calendars where I wrote down the little jobs I applied to. Finally, I get one at a talent management company to be an assistant, that was my in. I started there managing child actors in L.A.; the person I was assisting, who was the manager, quit and instead of finding a new manager, I got promoted. At that time, I had just graduated college, I was 21, living in LA and in this position that takes people years to finally get to. So, there I was, 21, thinking I was the shit, I had made it in life, right? I was doing that, I was getting really good at it, I had kids on lead shows on Disney, I was really happy with it. Then I started getting pushback from casting, like, oh, these kids are so coached because, of course, they were child actors whose parents were also actors and so they just were very polished. Even six-year-olds did interviews way better than I ever could because they just were on it. So, casting said, do you know anywhere we can get just outdoorsy, just active, normal kids and I said, yeah, Oregon! That’s where I grew up, that’s how kids are like there. So, I reached out to agencies here and said hey, let's build a bridge, let's get some of your kid actors to come down to L.A., it'll be great. The agency I connected with ultimately said, well, you're from here come in next time you’re in town.
Months went by, then I was home for Christmas, I went in and told them what I was trying to do and they said hey, we have a youth division at our agency and the person running it is not into it at all, she likes hair and make-up, so we're going to either close the division or it can be yours. I gave my two weeks’ notice in LA, sold all my stuff, got in my car, drove up here and then I was a division director at an agency. At that time, I was 24, I felt like, oh, I’ve made it again. I was having a really fun time, and, on the side, I was feeling like it was a really fast paced life. I was trying to find something I could do that was just for me, like a quiet hobby.
Flowers. I had always loved that, I grew up gardening with my grandma, so I tapped into that. I started at a grocery store in the floral department, it was fun, and I learned a lot. Valentine's Day was crazy, it was in Lake Oswego, so guys would come in and say here’s 200 bucks, I'm going to do my grocery shopping, I need a bouquet for my wife—I didn’t know what I was doing, I was putting stuff together and I had to be fast, right, I learned that. Time went by, I was still at the agency. Then I got a job at the floral market, that was the best training ground ever because I worked for the lead salesperson at the floral market. I started work there at 3:00 am, until 8:00, then I would go to the agency from 8:30 till five, I did that for 2 years and it was great. I learned so much about flowers because the salesperson would just give me a list to pull all these things and I had to hurry because the trucks would go out, that's how all the florist in Oregon get their flowers, there's one market and then they ship stuff. What is a polar rose, what is lisianthus? I learned really fast, which has served me so well today because I know so much about flower varieties and their names. Time went by, I worked for Sammy's in the Pearl and I was having a lot of fun with this flower thing. Meanwhile, stuff at the agency was kind of corrupting a little bit, there’s some stuff I didn’t like. Then my friend was engaged and wanted me to do the flowers for her wedding, I had never done flowers for a wedding before, but I said yes. I went to do the flowers for her wedding and there's this groomsman walking across the way, ends up being Tyler, who’s my husband today. We met at that wedding, my first wedding that I ever did flowers for. Fast forward, we got married on the same day that we met at that wedding so anyway, a little side story. From that wedding I just got more confident. I was getting more floral inquiries and I realized I couldn’t do both forever, so there came a point when I felt confident enough that I could leave the agency and I could do flowers full time, that was four years ago.
All of it was an accident. I never even thought about flowers as a career, ever. I still don't think of it as a career, you know what I mean, that's what I think is so cool about being a creative is that there is no work-life balance, there's just your life.
“The further I get in my career the more freedom I have. So, I think, instead of thinking about career I think about what will put me in a position to have more freedom”
A. Now that you’ve essentially described career as a lifestyle, I’d love to know, do you ever think of the concept of career or about where your work/job is leading you?
No, I don’t, and I don't have a plan, I think. Not in a way that I long for it or I’m critical of myself for not having it. The further I get in my career the more freedom I have. So, I think, instead of thinking about career I think about what will put me in a position to have more freedom and I’ve always thought about it that way, always.
The real deal is I grew up with not a lot of money. We weren’t poor but lower middle class and so I had the things that I needed but not extra. I was in elementary school, it was summertime and we lived close to a nursery, so I got on my little bike to the nursery—it was a husband wife that owned it—I asked if I could work there. I was young, 7 maybe, they said okay and so I had to water their plants and they paid me in honeysuckle—like those sticks of honey—some money and plants. I did that for kind of a long time, because I wanted to buy a frog at the pet store. So, I worked there enough, I had the money to buy this frog, went on my little bike to buy the frog, and came home with it. It was like a fire belly frog, green on the top and orange polka dots on the belly, my parents knew I didn't just find it, so they asked where I got it from, and I explained I had a job … Of course, they shut that down, so then I got another idea, I picked berries and would go to my neighbors and sell blackberries to them until my parents found out and shut it down, too. Then I would sell my mom's cans of Coca-Cola outside and then that got shut down. So, I've always been in the spirit of entrepreneurship, if you want something figure out a way to make it happen. To me, if you want something, you work for it, you get it and then you have the freedom to do what you want. Career is working until you get what you want—I've worked this month, now I can go to Greece if I want; or now I've done this much, I can do nothing for the next two months if I don’t want to, or I can go to the zoo every day with Charlie if I want to. You work to put yourself in a position where you can make whatever choices you want.
A. Do you ever talk about this, about career?
C. No. I don't even think about it. I would be curious what my husband thinks about career because I bet he has a very different idea, maybe people think about it differently based on how they were gender socialized growing up.
A. Do you think your family—whether your parents or siblings growing up, or now your husband or kid—have had any influence in how you perceive your career?
C. I don't think so, no. I think Tyler, my husband, has been jealous of me and I think in his own way he's communicated that because he sees that I don't have the pressure that a career can put on you and I don't have the expectations coming from an outside source. It's kind of oppressive, really, if I think about what career means or what it’s supposed to mean. It's oppressive and it's a lot of pressure and expectation that I'm free from. I think he sees it. The only time I’m ever thinking about career in any kind of terms is relative to that tension that's created when he's talking about his job and it's so different from my job.
It's different being a mom, too, and I will be curious to see how I navigate that as she gets older and can have her first job. I don't know what language I’ll use to talk to her about jobs and goals. That's kind of how it was presented growing up, your goal and your career is always focused on this thing, whether it's a title, or a desk, or if you want a corner office. There was always something tangible about it and now I think it's just so fluid, there is no picture of what it looks like.
“Friends are hard to make now, right, because you just don’t have the same kind of interaction that you have with people when you were growing up ...”
A. Do you feel like your friendships have been influenced or affected by the career path you’ve chosen?
C. I wasn’t here at that age where I feel like people really get close to their core group of friends, when you're first able to go to bars and you have your first serious relationships… that all happened in Chicago and those friendships never really blossomed beyond those four years I was there because then I moved to L.A. and those friends I went to school with, because of the school I went to, went on to get their PhDs and then they moved further East Coast to pursue those careers. Being back here and reuniting with friends that I grew up with that didn’t go to school—some of them got married right out of high school, had kids—we didn't really have the same connection because I was footloose and fancy free focusing on a traditional career at that time. I had to build new relationships through becoming older, some of them by being in the wedding industry or in the photo industry. Friends are hard to make now, right, because you just don't have the same kind of interaction that you have with people when you were growing up; when you're in school you see each other every day or, if you work in an office, you see each other every day. I don’t have an office, so the friendships I make, a lot of times, they can only go so far—you’re not quite an acquaintance but I’m not getting you a Christmas gift either, we're somewhere in that in-between space, I know many more people that fall into that group. There are people I really like a lot and I stay in touch with, but I wouldn’t say they’re my BFF and we have a matching tattoo, because I've had so many different lives in one lifetime.
I also wonder, I don't have a team and don't have a brick and mortar—which are things I don't want and I'm very consistent with that—but I wonder if that adds to this idea of being a lone wolf. I'm just used to being solitary so, if my work is solitary then why wouldn't my social life also be kind of solitary, you know.
A. Throughout the changes and evolution of your career, what do you feel are the parts of you that have not changed?
B. I love that question! The part of me that has not changed is my interaction with other people. How I feel about other people and what they have to offer and that goes from, you know, photographer friends that have a lot to people that have not. I think of all those interactions and all those relationships as the same and equally valuable. It doesn’t matter where I’m at in life, financially, emotionally—it’s always a human connection that I value equally and consistently.
