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My view of the American dream was that you could come to America and you didn't have to be college educated, you didn't have to be a doctor. But if you come here and you work hard, you can have a good life. And that's what the American Dream I think was, and that's what I think it should still be. My name is Adam Brand and we're at M and S Schmalberg flowers, a fourth generation family business in New York, founded in 1916. So we are 110 years old. M and S Shmalberg is a custom fabric flower manufacturer based in the garment district in New York City. Every client is different.
We did flowers for the Gilded Age and everything was custom. We did flowers for Bridgerton. They probably came here, went through these boxes and pulled 500 flowers. We have an order right now for Vera Wang for 200 oversize flowers. And anyone who wants can come and buy this flower for $20. Something like this for $50. Something like this for $10. People come here and they buy a flower or two. And I know it seems small, but it helps us. This has become a legitimate part of our business.
There are over a thousand flower molds in this factory, many of which are over a century old. So now we have a cut out petal. There's no detail yet other than whatever detail the fabric has. Floral details are added to the fabric using an old fashioned iron press or a hydraulic press. And it doesn't take that long. The heat and the pressure. People think that larger flowers should cost more, but in reality, the little ones are more of a pain. This is where we put everything together. A lot of what we do is playing around.
You never know who it's going to inspire, so you can't automate this. Everything we do is so different. There's no way to. The company was started in 1916 by Adam's great uncles, Polish immigrants named Maurice and Sam Schmalberg. The business was eventually taken over by his grandfather, Harold Brand, who immigrated to the U.S. in the 1940s. My grandfather, Harold, was a Holocaust survivor. When the war was over, everything was gone. He lost his siblings, his home, everything.
Adam's father, Warren Brand, joined the business full time in 1977. Adam entered the business in 2010. Warren has been slowly stepping back from the company since 2019, and Adam now oversees M and S Schmalberg's daily operations. My grandpa was a hard worker and this little hole in the wall business, because that's what it was, was able to provide for our family.
