POULSBO — When a flower shop she’d hired botched a family funeral and wouldn’t make it right, Tami Mathison wanted, you might say, a nice arrangement.

“I had a bad experience with a flower shop that botched a family funeral and wouldn’t fix it,” she said. “It made me mad, so I decided to open my own shop and treat my customers like I wanted to be treated.”

Her model, she said, was an old-time floral shop, the kind she remembers Ruby Watland started with a few friends back in the 1950s. Watland was the first to set up a florist shop in Poulsbo.

“It was a wonderful shop as I remember it. There was just this sense of great personalized service, and that’s what I wanted to create,” Mathison said.

She opened the shop just eight months ago when many retail shops, not just florists, were closing their doors in Poulsbo. Mathison wasn’t discouraged because she had an impressive track record of running other small businesses with her husband, Terry. Now she’s betting she’ll be here for a while.

“Nothing scares me, so I just went online and learned about the florist business,” she said. “Every business has a certain bottom-line financial structure. I learned it and then decided what would work best for our shop.”

Mathison started the business from scratch because “otherwise you are just cleaning up someone else’s mess.” For florist shops, she said, the most important elements are keeping costs down and giving customers a level of service they don’t expect.

Controlling costs came first. With the economy soured and small retailers failing, she found a good location and bargained the rent down. She also found a shop across the Sound that was closing and promptly bought its stock and fixtures. Six 26-foot-long moving trucks were needed to bring the haul to Poulsbo, but it gave her all the coolers, containers and plants she needed to get started. Fortunately she also had storage space for the rest.

Employee costs can run high for florists, but Mathison has just one daily designer and keeps four freelance designers on call. The day designer, she said, is the most diverse, but the others have special talents.

“I match the designer to the kind of work that’s required and it gives customers more than they usually expect,” she said.

Although the shop specializes in roses, one designer focuses on Asian arrangements, while another has extensive experience in high-end weddings. Mathison wants them to concentrate on what they do best, and hires others to do manual tasks.

“You can be swamped on Friday for no apparent reason and the next Friday can be dead. Other than holidays, there’s just no predicting,” she said.

Because of fees and other restrictions, Poulsbo Flower Shoppe is not affiliated with a teleflorist service, but she has also worked hard to delight the out-of-town customers who call.

“It means they appreciate the benefit of working with an independent shop, so I go out of my way to create a good relationship with them and provide a unique arrangement,” she said. Typically she will even photograph the display and email it to the customer to be sure they are happy with it.

Because Mathison is hard-nosed about costs, she also found creative ways to get word of the shop out to the public.

Every week she donates arrangements to Martha and Mary for the front desk, to the fire station, and to the parks and recreation office because “they serve the community so thoroughly and catch so much flack that they deserve to have a reminder of how much we appreciate what they do and its importance to the community,” she said.

She has also donated flowers to a variety of causes, and during the recent spate of bank robberies, she sent flowers to each of the tellers that had been affected.

“They are happy to have these flowers even though they are almost ready to wilt, and I’m happy they can spread some joy,” Mathison said.

One of her most successful marketing efforts is a “Random Act of Flowers” which is an arrangement she will give away at most unlikely spots such as parking lots, in line at the bank or elsewhere around Poulsbo.

The reason people buy flowers is to have a moment of happiness, Mathison said, and giving away a few random moments of happiness is good for both the community and the business.

“But my husband says the flower shop just gives a mask of legitimacy to my urge to give things away,” she said.