about POUSSE | Mina Urasawa

POUSSE was opened by the florist Mina Urasawa in Kyoto in 1991 as her atelier and flower shop. In the fall of 2019, she ceased all flower sales to fully focus on her atelier activities, including creating and taking photographs of her floral art works and hosting flower arrangement classes. Urasawa is a native of Kyoto’s Nishijin district. The chic and flamboyant flower bouquets that she makes—the aesthetics of which were inspired by the Paris style and have been refined in Kyoto—are wrapped in signature ribbons and are highly sought after by her many admirers in Japan, who affectionately refer to her way of floral arrangement as the POUSSE style. She has had her works published in her own books as well as through other media outlets; she suggests novel ways of enjoying flowers, in line with her motto “adorning the table with flowers will bring greater happiness.”

POUSSE, the pronunciation of which is [pu:s], is a French word for plant shoots and sprouting. Urasawa has, however, coined her own pronunciation [pu:ze] to phonetically incorporate another term “musée” which means “art museum” in French, because she wanted the place to become a small art gallery only exhibiting creative works that exude youthful energy.

Urasawa was appointed as official creator of flower arrangements for the 2019 G20 Osaka summit. She was commissioned by Takashimaya to make flower arrangements and take photographs, which were then featured in the department store chain’s 2019-2022 Calendar of Roses. Urasawa appeared in NHK’s TV program Bi no Tsubo [Jar of Beauty], which aired in 2019. Her 2020 publication Kyōto no Hanaya POUSSE no Hana Nisshi [Floral Diary of POUSSE, a Flower Shop in Kyoto] was translated into Mandarin (entitled 京都24节气花艺日志) and published by China Machine Press for sale in China. She also teaches classes at NHK Culture Center’s Kyoto School.

Urasawa set out to master the European style of floral art in which flowers are typically bundled along a single surface. After her emotionally moving experience of visiting many flower shops in Paris and studying their arrangement techniques, Urasawa returned to Kyoto and tried to replicate them, but she felt something was missing no matter how precisely she replicated them. After much trial and error, she finally found a solution to this conundrum, which was to naturally integrate her traditional sense of coloration that she had acquired while growing up in her hometown of Nishijin, Kyoto. This was the birth of her novel style of flower arrangement, which would eventually garner people’s attention.

Urasawa was always meticulous about the colors and shapes of the flowers that formed the surface of each bouquet or arrangement she would create, and one day decided to put a ribbon across each of her floral creations to indicate its authentic value. This signature ribbon, which is POUSSE’s original ornament bearing the shop’s name, is a key branding tool for its flower bouquets. POUSSE is located in a place where many retailers have been in business for decades, so the same unique packages that they have been using to wrap their merchandise over the years function as visual cues by which people can easily identify those retailers. POUSSE’s ribbon decoration was introduced to help people remember the shop’s distinct signature so it will live on and be remembered for many years to come.