This story appears in the May 2026 issue of Utah Business. Subscribe.
Before Pressed Floral became one of Utah’s fastest-growing companies, it lived in a shed. Inside, flowers dried between the pages of books as Sarah Ebert put together art pieces made from pressed wedding bouquets.
Ebert was 19 years old when she founded Pressed Floral. Seven years later, the company has grown to more than 50 team members across two locations, built around the idea of preserving the sentimentality of life’s most important moments.
She says, “I vividly remember telling my dad one time: I want to be creative, but I also want to be an entrepreneur.” At the time, the two felt at odds. Now, she sees that being an entrepreneur is actually one of the most creative things you can do.
Although she is no longer the one pressing every flower by hand, Ebert’s work remains deeply creative as she solves the puzzles that come with navigating a growing business.
The first flower
In 2019, Ebert was preparing to enter the finance program at Brigham Young University while juggling four jobs, including one at a bridal shop. Surrounded by wedding dresses and with her sister planning her own wedding, Ebert’s brain was full of imagery of brides and bouquets.
“It was one of those late-night epiphanies,” she says. One night at three in the morning, she conceptualized preserving a pressed wedding bouquet between two panes of glass, suspending it in time as a piece of timeless art. When she couldn’t find anything like it online, she quit one of her jobs to pursue the idea.
After finding a few pre-pressed flowers, she created her first piece. It wasn’t perfect. Neither were the centerpieces she practiced with from her friends’ weddings.
“I ruined everything I touched,” she laughs.
But by the time her sister got married, Ebert was able to create a beautiful piece of artwork from the bouquet. Shortly after, Pressed Floral officially launched.
From shed to scale
“It picked up like wildfire,” Ebert says. After hosting a giveaway the week she started posting about the business online, she booked five brides.
As her university classes started, Ebert put a Lifetime shed in her apartment parking spot, with an extension cord running from her dorm room for power. She collected flowers from receptions, pressed them late into the night and hand-delivered finished pieces.
Eventually, she reached her limit.
“It got to the point where I was capped at the amount that I could physically do. I was staying up till 2 a.m. to accomplish orders.” She realized for this to work, she needed to teach people how to design like she did.
At first, it felt like her work and design style couldn’t be replicated. Finally, it clicked with one of her sisters, and Ebert knew her business could keep growing. Around that same time, Pressed Floral opened its first brick-and-mortar location in Provo, Utah.
Pressed Floral found its audience on TikTok and Instagram in 2021, when it was easy for content to go viral at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The internet had never seen something like what Pressed Floral was doing, and people loved it.
In 2024, Pressed Floral was recognized as one of the fastest-growing companies in Utah Valley, with a three-year growth rate of 2,628%. The viral moment has passed, but storytelling on social media has remained an integral part of Pressed Floral’s marketing. “Every single product has a story,” Ebert says. “Being able to have an art piece that represents not only that day, but can also age [with you] is so special.”
A wedding. A loss. A milestone. Every arrangement Pressed Floral preserves carries a meaning with it, and when that meaning is shared on social media, it invites connection. People see a beautiful product and also see themselves in the sentimental blooms.
That resonance has opened unexpected doors, leading to collaborations with people like Simone Biles, Brock Purdy and members of “The Bachelor” franchise.
Growing pains
Rapid growth doesn’t come without friction.
When a car crashed into the building, Ebert decided to take the opportunity to move to a larger space in Orem. Soon after, Pressed Floral expanded again, this time across the country. In 2024, it opened a second location in Atlanta, Georgia to better serve its East Coast customers, which make up 70% of the client base. Along the way, Ebert continued adding people to the Pressed Floral team.
“It was a lot to learn at once,” she says. She encountered two main challenges: learning to lead a growing team and protecting the inherently fragile pieces during shipping.
“We were dealing with something that can’t easily be replaced,” she says. “The sentimentality of the original wedding bouquet can’t be replicated.”
The team iterated through packaging solutions again and again, first in Utah, then from scratch in Georgia. Ebert even moved to Atlanta for 13 months to solidify the system out east.
The power of good mentorship
As the company grew, Ebert sought guidance from mentors. “There’s always somebody who’s already done it,” she says. “And they’ll have some really good advice for you.”
For her, one of those people was McKenzie Bauer, co-founder of Thread Wallets. Ebert remembers sitting down with Bauer in 2022, talking about how to best manage Pressed Floral’s growing team. Bauer offered advice that Ebert has held onto: define team values, prioritize regular one-on-one meetings and create opportunities for your team to truly connect.
Ebert has carried those principles forward, shaping the culture of a company that has created thousands of preserved moments. She is grateful for the risks she took, from building her first brick-and-mortar store to expanding to Georgia.
“I was confident in what I was building,” she says. “If I didn’t take that first risk, I’d still be in my shed.”