New business Coffee & Carnations joined the Prairie City town square earlier this fall, replacing the vacant space previously held by the Pella Regional Health Center before it moved to a new location in 2021. The shop is headed by Morgan and Melody Burkman with the rest of their family working as staff. Morgan explained how the firm came to be in the first place. 

“Well we aren’t 100 percent sure [how it started], I’ve always known I wanted to work in an actual flower shop because I used to work at a floral department in Hy-Vee and I knew I wanted to get out of the grocery chain and work in a flower shop,” explained Morgan. “I’m not really sure where we got the coffee part, we just like coffee.”

The unlikely combination has worked out great for the business so far due to the fact that when one product is busy, the other is normally slow. As a result of the business’ success, Melody quit her job of 30 years to do Coffee & Carnations full-time. She explained that it was a full family effort to get the shop ready for opening, as well as help from Dr. Gregory Ingle who worked at the old doctor’s office. 

“We started the process, the thing that took the longest was getting the loan through the government through the small business organization and that took probably nine months and then we just kinda went full bore on here and ripped everything out,” began Melody. “Dr. Ingle and my son Cameron probably did about 90 percent of the work and they did a wonderful job, it’s very homey and people love it.” 

Thus far, it has stayed exclusively family-operated, but Melody expects to hire extra help when business picks up as the business moves to full-time. 

Coffee & Carnations held their grand opening ceremony on Saturday, Nov. 5th to celebrate going full-time; it was also dedicated to Ingle and all the help he did to bring the coffee shop to fruition. The interview took place before the event, so Melody shared her excited feelings about it being a surprise for Ingle. 

 “[Ingle] doesn’t know, he was let go by Pella earlier this year,” she began. “It’s been a hard year for us getting going and him having a whole new change to deal with and he’s done a lot for the community in the 40 plus years he’s had the doctor’s office and we want to recognize him for that, we wouldn’t be able to do this without him either.”

The grand opening event was a success for Coffee & Carnations; both Melody and Morgan shared their aspirations for the future of the business. 

“We already talked about expanding further into where the doctor’s office was, we have some different ideas we aren’t real sure about what we want to use the extra space for yet,” elaborated Melody. “I know we want to use some of it for meeting places and also a place for local artists and vendors who want to sell their creations here, and we’d love to do that.”

Morgan added, “We also plan on possibly renovating the upstairs to make little apartments for the community.” 

Coffee & Carnations is now open from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. everyday except for Wednesday. Make sure to support them and other local businesses to help enrich the community.