THE FLORIST'S FLORIST: Studio Mondine's Amanda Luu on Ikebana, preserving a 600-year-old craft, intimacy with nature, and a tech-forward studio

Episode notes

In this episode of The Trades Show, host Briana Ottoboni sits down with Amanda Luu, florist, founder of Studio Mondine, and a lifelong student of Ikenobo Ikebana, inside her San Francisco home. Their conversation traces Amanda’s circuitous path into flowers — from a degree in economics and environmental policy and a career in marketing, to the ten-minute commutes she spent gathering leaves and grasses from parking lots, to the apprenticeships she took on for $11 an hour to learn the craft hands-on, the way a cook stages in a kitchen.

Amanda shares the quiet “portal” winter after she quit her job at the end of wedding season, where working with dead branches and gleaned material pushed her toward the minimalist forms that became her signature and eventually led her to formal Ikebana study — the 600-year-old Japanese practice whose oldest school she now trains in, learning to express the life force of a single stem and to read an arrangement as a landscape. She’s candid about what it takes to keep a tradition alive when the average practitioner in the West is 72, and about the wordless correction of a teacher whose lineage runs back centuries, passed down through the kanji characters in a student’s name.

And in a turn you might not expect from a craft this old, Amanda makes the case for being a tech-forward flower studio — running a logistics business underwritten by data and flower “recipes,” and rendering arrangements that don’t yet exist in Canva and Gemini so a wild idea can be tested in the room before a single stem is sourced. Whether you’re a florist, a maker drawn to slow practice, or someone curious how a centuries-old art stays alive in the age of AI, this episode is a masterclass in finding your own voice in a craft, building a studio that lasts, and cultivating an intimacy with nature that feeds everything else.

The Trades Show is an interview series on location with modern artisans exploring what it means to be human: the ability to create with our hands.