MINNEAPOLIS — Koehler & Dramm Wholesale Florist, here, is celebrating 60 years in business on Aug. 15 with a family-friendly carnival party from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. at its facility on Hennepin Avenue. It is a free event for customers and their families and includes food and refreshments, carnival games and a dunk tank where you can sink the sales reps.The floral management team at Koehler and Dramm: Eugene Brunk, general manager, Lee Spence, president and chief executive officer, Michael Weinmeyer, sales manager and Heidi Brezinka, sales representative and team lead.

“We’ll pause to celebrate with a customer fun day on August 15 and put on an extra special two-day fall and Christmas design show on October 10 to 11,” Koehler & Dramm President Lee Spence told The Produce News. “We are working on some new ways to make shopping and ordering easier for our customers, as well as some new programs to give them more opportunities, which we plan on introducing yet this year.”

Spence said it “sometimes seems surreal that Koehler & Dramm Wholesale Florist is celebrating its 60th anniversary in 2015. The old adage, ‘Time flies when you’re having fun,’ must be true, because I have been here nearly 30 of those 60 years and it feels like just yesterday that I first set foot in the door.”

Koehler & Dramm was founded in 1955 as a partnership between Leonard C. Koehler and Eugene R. Dramm. At the time, Koehler was a general manager of a Chicago wholesale florist company and Dramm was president of Dramm Roses Inc., a rose grower in Elmhurst, IL. They formed a new wholesale floral company, Koehler & Dramm, which was originally based in Chicago. The company branched out to Minnesota and today it is an employee-owned operation that occupies a 65,000-square-foot building, including 14,000 square feet of refrigeration and the Institute of Floristry, and it serves the entire upper Midwest.

“We have grown through initiating many changes that our industry has supported and adopted,” said Spence. “Our growth is attributable to working toward our goals every day and staying true to our mission and our vision, but we refuse to rest on our accomplishments. Our past achievements have helped us build a strong foundation, but the future is far more important, and we try not to lose sight of that. We can only be the best if we do what’s best for our customers. That’s what 60 years means to us, and that’s what we continue to strive for every day.”