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

In 2023, I (Kris) had a surgery whose after-care instructions were to try not to move around too much. For a couple weeks, I had little to do but watch TV, go online, read, or think.

One of those things I found myself thinking about was whether flowers could be used to represent personality traits. I was inspired by seeing people in movies give yellow roses as a symbol of friendship, and thought — if flowers can represent a feeling or a sentiment, couldn’t they represent traits, too? And if they did, what an incredible thing it would be to give someone a bouquet that said nothing about how they looked and everything about who they are. How loved would someone feel if they received a little illustration of flowers that showed them the person who had it made for them really knew and appreciated who they were? In my head a thing already existed: a Youquet!

Anyway, I got excited, and over the following months I researched what flowers symbolized what traits and put together what flowers best represented the range of beautiful traits people have.

 

As it turned out, flowers did symbolize personality traits — I just had to look into it to find that humanity had already figured this out over thousands of years. Different cultures at different times settled on flowers representing things like courage, resilience, honesty, creativity, and compassion — and more. And because different flowers came to mean different things, I was able to assemble a list of flowers to represent a comprehensive range of the many traits that make people wonderful.

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.

I hope you enjoy it, Kris