By Dave DeWitte
CEDAR RAPIDS – Wedding season means long hours and quick decisions for a 25-year-old entrepreneur two years into his first business venture.
Covington & Company was born in October 2012 when Adam Covington bought Garden Gate Floral & Gift Shop in the Paramount Building of downtown Cedar Rapids. Mr. Covington had worked previously in the floral trade, and Garden Gate’s previous owner, Rebecca Pflughaupt handled floral arrangements for a limited number of weddings before she sold him the business.
When Ms. Pflughaupt mentioned to a client that Mr. Covington had the trappings to fully stage a wedding, a door seemed to open for the recent Iowa State University graduate.
Should he step through it?
“I knew it was a way into the business, and if I didn’t do it this time, I might not have another chance,” said Mr. Covington, who has “always enjoyed the planning side.”
Mr. Covington planned the wedding, and it quickly became clear that he had more than just a flair for planning events. He’s planned dozens of weddings and helped stage events for organizations as large as the Cedar Rapids Metro Economic Alliance and Rockwell Collins.
As the 2014 wedding season began on the first weekend of May, Covington & Company had one wedding and two business events. The hours stretched from 6 a.m. Friday until 1 a.m. Saturday for one event, then from 6 a.m. until midnight on Saturday.
Mr. Covington is a hands-on event planner, tending to hop back and forth if he has more than one event occurring simultaneously.
Getting things to look perfect is the name of the game.
“Usually, I have in my mind what things should look like,” Mr. Covington said. “When I’m working on something and it’s not going right, I can get kind of cranky.”
Mr. Covington’s two chief assistants are there to remind him if his mood gets out of check. One is his father, Darwin Covington, who builds many of the temporary structures needed for staging events. The other is his sister, Ashley Haner, who handles many of the drapings, table settings and other event details.
One of the first things Mr. Covington did after deciding to launch the wedding businesses was to relocate the business from the Paramount Building to the Hubbard Ice complex.
The business expanded from about 800 square feet to some 6,000 square feet – large enough to provide a 1,500-square-foot display space to showcase table settings and linens, and 4,000-square-feet of warehouse space to house an extensive collection of event furnishings.
The showroom at 225 K Ave. NW, Ste. G, allows Mr. Covington’s customers to see in person rather than visualize how different table arrangements will look.
The warehouse inventory began as Mr. Covington’s personal collection of vintage furniture and furnishings, which he’d previously kept in storage. It now encompasses many contemporary pieces. Chandeliers, ornate candelabras and steamer trunks vie for space in the warehouse with tables, chairs and glassware.
Having the exact color and fabric of linens and drapings has become a specialty of Covington & Company. The size of the collection allows Mr. Covington to not only accommodate more customer preferences, but to rent out linens and accessories to customers planning their own events.
Mr. Covington graduated from Iowa State University in 2012 with a degree in landscape architecture. His career as a landscape architect’s assistant lasted only a few months.
Just as he had feared before graduation, Mr. Covington felt was trapped behind a desk working on design plans that might take months or years to execute.
Event planning and floral work provides Mr. Covington opportunities of immediate creative gratification and plenty of customer contact, he said. Within hours, he can bring a creative vision for a room to life.
While he has no intention of going back to landscape design, Mr. Covington doesn’t regard his degree wasted. Interior design classes that Mr. Covington took at ISU have helped him stage events. Landscape architecture classes also taught him computer-aided design, and he now uses similar CAD software to produce accurate diagrams of table settings and room setups. They make his staff’s work at events go more quickly, and helps clients visualize their events.
When he began planning events, Mr. Covington wasn’t exactly sure how to market himself as he didn’t know who his customers would be.
Weddings quickly dominated, and Mr. Covington finds his primary market to be young women planning their weddings, often the first big event they’ve planned in their life. Referrals have become his best source of business.
Moving away from downtown left Mr. Covington with mixed emotions. He knew he’d miss out on the walk-in traffic of a downtown storefront, but found that most of his event customers and large floral customers would make an appointment in advance anyway.
The new location on K Avenue NW takes a little work to find, but isn’t far off the well-beaten paths of Interstate 380 and First Avenue in Cedar Rapids.
Mr. Covington hasn’t forgotten that he bought a floral business. He has an entire room with refrigeration for preparing and storing flowers.
“The flower shop is still the day-to-day stuff,” he said. “We’re always working a couple weeks out to make sure we have what we need for the upcoming events.”
