About

History of Stadium Flowers…

After 15 years as manager of a Tacoma Safeway store, in 1947 Dorrie and Elaine Ransick moved to Everett and purchased the Broadway location as an existing grocery store. Dorrie was 32 and Elaine 28. They renamed the store Stadium Market because of its close proximity to the Everett Memorial Stadium. Everyone told them they were crazy because at that time the location was too far south of downtown. From the beginning, they had a thriving grocery business.

Then, in 1960, Safeway built a store a half block away. This severely impacted their small grocery business. It was the decade of the ‘supermarket.’ Elaine decided that to survive they needed to branch out. She had always loved flowers and felt if you could reduce the price that they would sell more. Her theory proved right. Elaine first carried flowers only on holidays; a lily for Easter was her first venture. Eventually, she began to carry cut flowers by request, and then came up with the concept of offering flowers on a more mass market level by selling loose flowers in buckets. By 1971 they had a full time designer and delivery truck.

In 1972, Dorrie passed away at the age of 57 leaving Elaine with the responsibility of the business. Cheryl, her daughter, and Spark Van Winkle, her son-in-law, came to work to help Elaine. They remodeled and updated the Broadway store. Elaine sold the business to Cheryl and Spark and retired in 1978. They phased out the groceries making it a full service flower shop, and renamed the business Stadium Flowers in 1988. The original store at 3632 Broadway was completely leveled, rebuilt and now is 6,000 square feet with the longest set of Borgen cooler doors in the United States. The building spans six city lots. This was done in 2002.

D’s Drive Inn at 20728 Hwy 99 in Lynnwood was purchased in 1976. They remodeled it creating the second full service flower shop location.

Cascade Wholesale was built in 1991 as a wholesale cut flower business selling to the Stadium Flowers stores. Cascade also services other retail florists and handmakes cut flower bouquets for grocery stores. All the flowers are trucked or flown in and processed in the wholesale division with a state of the art water and bucket cleaning system. The delivery area is north to the Canadian border and as far south as Renton. The Corporate Business Office, Call Center, Design Center, Dishgarden Division, European Garden Division, Bouquet Making Division, and Wholesale Sales Division are all located in the Cascade Wholesale building. So, a small family business built on years of hard work, surviving tough and odd trends, is today a thriving business.