A few years after working as a self-employed freelancer, Siobhán Mangan felt her burgeoning creativity needed its own platform. She ran with that feeling and started LOAM Studio, a diverse floral design studio, in 2020. Inspired by her upbringing, self-employment and business ownership had always been a lingering concept in her mind. Having been raised in a household where her father owned his own construction company, she told us, “It was really just a matter of time!” She remembers her self-employed father, a construction worker by trade, regularly turning out incredible woodworking transformations around the house. Her mother worked on a farm but also enjoyed sewing and was always plotting her next creative endeavor. "I come from a family that works with their hands, maybe even obsessively so. Naturally, this imprinted on me, and growing up to become a floral designer made sense intuitively, almost like I couldn't help it.” 2020 was a challenging year for many, but for Siobhan, it was a time of introspection and self-discovery. As the world around her pivoted, she found herself even more motivated to continue creating her own schedule and producing work that reflected her tastes and curiosities.
Although this career path seemed almost predestined for her, she explored other options along the way. As she described it, she “classically and comically” earned a bachelor's degree in English and initially envisioned a life in academia but naturally gravitated to a career that required her to get her hands dirty. “My brain was academic, but my heart was much more blue-collar." Originally from Massachusetts, she moved to Texas about nine years ago and began working at a local event flower studio before moving on to a smaller boutique florist. Eventually, she started working as a freelancer and, after some time, decided to start her own business. Having a small business in a growing city of course came with its fair share of obstacles. Wanting to scale up in a tricky economy, the biggest obstacle has been in finding her inner resourcefulness and the funds to make the whole thing happen. "Money is always the perceived obstacle for me. I've had slow seasons where I questioned if I made the right decision, and then when the money comes, there's the obstacle of financial literacy and what's the best thing to do with it...but you know what Wu-Tang Clan said."
Siobhán has learned a lot throughout her entrepreneurial journey, primarily how to balance her work life and her personal life. "Freelancing full-time dissolved all boundaries and set me on a path of burnout, overworking while being underpaid, and so forth. Shaping my business meant that I could figure out a way to be self-employed while maximizing my non-work lifestyle, which ultimately aids in the quality of my productions." She also learned the importance of saying no and taking on jobs that align with what she wants LOAM to be, rather than having a business solely for the sake of it. Siobhán hopes to see LOAM stationed in a highly efficient workshop space in the future, ideally one with communal space that can accommodate other creatives who might need short-term workspace, and that can be used for classes and other kinds of programming. Achieving this will involve finding the right location and getting the financial resources in order, as well as a lot of flexibility and patience. Servicing an array of needs from weddings and corporate events to sets and production shoots, she also tries to offer donative classes to communities with less access to the art of floral, and said it would be a dream to have a place of her own to host those.