Meet Melissa Tinajero Of Full Bloom Season 2 On HBO Max

If you’d asked me a few months ago what I felt was missing from the reality television landscape I wouldn’t have hesitated with my response: a competitive floristry show.

I believed this was a far-flung dream until about a month ago when my partner commandeered control of our Chromecast and surprise-streamed the HBO Max show Full Bloom. After bingeing the first season, there was no question about watching Season 2. This is where Arizona-based florist and wedding planner Melissa Tinajero comes in. I was immediately hooked, rooting for Tinajero as she created a colorful miniature bouquet with a nail polish bottle base and told the story of adopting an eleven-year-old with her wife.

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Tinajero also caught my attention because she’s a plus-size woman absolutely killing it on television: a rarity in a body-shaming media landscape. The finale for the show’s second season aired earlier this month, and I got the chance to speak with Tinajero about flowers, her experience on the show, and her business, Moelleux Events.

“Florals were such an afterthought of my business,” says Tinajero. Her business was going to be all event and wedding planning, but one day she was going to do a photo shoot and couldn’t find a florist. “My wife tells me she that she worked at a florist shop in high school and could do it. Mind you, this is twenty years after high school. So we were doing (the florals) ourselves. Me being the person I am, I told her she was really stressing me out and needed to go faster. She told me that I should take over.”

After some hesitation Tinajero decided to give it a try. When the day of the event itself came, something surprising happened. “People started showing up and gasping, asking who did the flowers.” Wedding attendees were shocked that she had done them. A friend of Tinajero’s gave her name to a couple who hadn’t found a florist yet, and before long she was doing floral plans for weddings. “It was never supposed to be part of the business. It just happened.”

Tinajero is self-taught, and quick to share that she feels her lack of training sometimes gives her a problem-solving advantage. “What you don’t know, you don’t know. I don’t know if I’m doing things wrong because I’ve never been shown the right way to do them. I’ve never even watched a full tutorial on YouTube.”

She hesitates for a moment before saying, “I’m a little witchy,” and goes onto explain how this plays a role in her relationship to flowers. “I would go to weddings when I was new to coordinating, and the flowers were forever dying. It’s so hot here (in Arizona). Our sun is so harsh. I knew I had to figure something out. So I always have a humidifier with the flowers, I put oils in, and I tell them I’m grateful to be there with them. The flowers don’t wilt or die. People will send me pictures weeks later, and the flowers still look good. That just became my catch.”

She doesn’t do country club weddings. “I don’t fit the mold. They don’t want a pink-haired, plus-size, loud florist,” she says. “So I love outdoor weddings, (where there are) no walls.” She says this makes it easier to create something that is unique to the couple. Tinajero shares that she feels grateful to be part of the first day of a couple’s marriage.

Of her experience on Full Bloom, Tinajero says she learned plenty of tactical knowledge. “I got to work with flowers I’d never seen before. Simon (one of the judges) was so gracious with me, and taught me so many tricks. Another one of the contestants, Ron, did the florals for the Savage x Fenty show. I was the small fry.”

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She’s frank, however, that the show was “a very stressful process.” She felt her body was, at times, not taken into consideration during filming. Some of the large-scale floral challenges require that contestants use an aerial lift. “They didn’t have a big enough harness for me. In front of my competitors I had to say that it didn’t fit me because of the weight limit. All my team is eating breakfast, and I’m being shimmied into it.” Tinajero says this wasn’t the only time she ran into a fit challenge. “(One day) we got really bad rain, and (the wardrobe team) had to get us all rain boots and I told them they wouldn’t go up my calf.” She says she felt comfortable self-advocating, but concludes, “There were times on the show that I felt like the fact that I’ve lived in this body for 40 years wasn’t acknowledged.”

As a lifelong plus-size person, Tinajero says she’s learned to navigate these kinds of situations and has words of wisdom for other plus-size professionals: “We’re taught to shrink, and you need to have the voice and the confidence to get what you need. Don’t just deal with whatever people give you. You’re going to have other people tell you that you can’t do things. Don’t be the one in your own head telling yourself that.”

When asked what advice she might have for the greater professional world to help make the workplace less weight-discriminatory, Tinajero shared that the list was long, starting with a better selection of chairs and making more direct eye contact with plus-size colleagues. She moves onto a story about microaggressions. “I did a wedding market here in Phoenix that’s very boho and alt, and 90% of the people who came to my booth couldn’t believe that I had done the flowers. When I had some girls working for me who are super alt and thin and cute, people would stop and just say, ‘I love these flowers.’ It took a long time for couples to understand that I was the mastermind. Almost like I wasn’t cool enough. I didn’t fit the model of what they looked like. I’ve had more people reach out to me since the show and say that they don’t know if they would have believed that I was the one doing the flowers. Why? Because of my size? There’s a level of underestimation in the corporate world.”

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The final thing she points to is weight-based income disparities in the workplace: “At times, plus-size individuals don’t feel they can advocate for themselves financially and (the wage gap) gets bigger when you’re larger. My whole family is plus-size, and they tell me to just be grateful that I got an opportunity.” To that, Tinajero says, “No, they should be grateful they have me.”

Melissa Tinajero is the founder and lead creative at Arizona-based Moelleux Events. Watch her on Season 2 of the HBO Max show Full Bloom.