July 17, 2026
Classrooms to Careers: Ferris State Management student gets hands-on look at Masterpiece Flower Company's Mother's Day rush
Mother's Day is one of the busiest stretches of the year in the floral industry, and Ferris State Management student Henry Mast got a firsthand look at just how busy.
On May 8 and May 9, the two days before the holiday, Masterpiece Flower Company shipped more than 100 loads of flowers headed to shops to make mothers across the region feel appreciated.
"Managing fleet logistics, product quality, equipment usage and delivery routing in such high volumes made the weekend extremely tight," Mast said.
Mast, a Caledonia native expected to graduate in spring 2027, is spending his internship on the operations side of one of retail floral's biggest weekends of the year.
Floral sales are traditionally among the highest around Mother's Day, and garden center product peaks alongside it, driving up shipping volume across the board.
One inefficiency Mast flagged during his internship: empty cart retrieval. Masterpiece ships products to stores on rolling carts, but delivery drivers dropping off new shipments often don't have room on their trucks to bring the empty ones back — a bottleneck that leaves some stores holding more than 50 carts at once during the high-volume spring season.
Ferris State's Management program, in the College of Business, prepares students for operations, logistics and supply chain careers through hands-on coursework and internships like Mast's. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports logisticians earned a median annual salary of $80,880 in May 2024.
The flower business, Mast said, runs on a timeline most customers never think about. Plants start as bare cuttings and take weeks to reach full bloom, and the company forecasts every batch from planting to harvest.
Some of that forecasting covers what the industry calls a "toss rate" — the share of plants discarded during the growing process — which Mast said looks high in isolation, though Masterpiece's forecasts already account for it at that scale.
Mast said the most valuable skill his management coursework prepared him for wasn't a specific process but a mindset.
"There is no guideline in the field when a certain plan does not work out," Mast said. "Thinking on the fly when others are dependent on your work can save time, money and resources."
