ABILENE, TX – IN EARLY MARCH of last year, Blair Truesdell, 26, was just settling into her exciting new life in Austin. She had just moved there from Houston to serve as the assistant manager for Manready Mercantile’s ATX outpost when the universe, known for its increasing level of fickleness, decided it had other plans for her.
“Ten days later, right after I had moved to Austin, the whole city shut down,” she recalls of the whiplash-inducing early days of the pandemic. “They told me to come back to Houston to run the Houston store instead.”
After packing up all of her things again and moving back to Houston, Truesdell kept herself busy keeping Manready’s Houston store running amid the backdrop of the increasingly worsening pandemic. When not at the store, she passed her time making dried-flower arrangements while being safely cocooned in her Height’s apartment.
“People eventually started asking me if they could buy them from me,” says Truesdell, who initially donated all of the proceeds of her arrangements to charities, soon turning her carefully dried and arranged blooms into a budding new business called Posey. “People were really enjoying it, and it grew exponentially overnight.”
