Our Story

Youquet was the result of too much time spent trapped on the couch.

In 2023 I (Kristen) had a surgery whose after-care instructions were to try not to move around too much, so for a couple weeks there was little to do but watch TV, read, or think.

One of those thoughts, inspired by someone in a movie giving yellow roses as a symbol of friendship, was about whether flowers might also represent personality traits. And if they did, I wondered, how meaningful would it be to be able to make a picture of someone that had nothing to do with their physical appearance — something that says absolutely nothing about who a person is — and everything to do with who they were? How much would someone love to receive a little illustration of flowers that showed them the person who had it made for them really knew and appreciated who they were?

At some point during the couchbound flower gathering/trait researching process I saw a link for a Myers-Briggs personality test and took it, both out of interest and to procrastinate. And I’m glad I did, because it got me thinking about how fun it would be to have the MB types as graphic flower arrangements. I imagined an INFJ mug on someone’s office desk as an efficient message to co-workers wandering past that they would, or would likely not, make an effective team.

One of the early people to be as excited as I was about the prospect of using flowers to celebrate the beautiful complexity of a person was Richard, the “older kid” I’d gotten to know when I was a teenager living a street away from him in the small German town of Neckarsteinach. Richard happened to have gone into professional web design as an adult, so we put my people-as-flowers idea together with his creative and elegant web design, and voilà — Youquet.