A luxury boutique sold this Indiana woman’s lighted arrangements for $89 apiece for nineteen years. When it dropped her without a phone call, she decided to sell the last 426 herself — for $39.
Paula Grote, 68, has been building them in a shed behind her house since 1996. The part that stings is not the money. It is that for nineteen years she was not allowed to tell anybody they were hers.
The order that never came
Every year since 2007, the fall order landed in the second week of March. Paula Grote knew it the way a farmer knows planting week. She would have the wire in, the batteries in, the women scheduled.
This March, nothing came.
She called on a Tuesday. Nobody picked up. She called the man she had worked with for nineteen years, Ken Doerr, on the direct line she had written on a card taped to the wall above the phone. The number was out of service.
Three weeks later an email arrived from an address she had never seen. Two paragraphs. We are consolidating our sourcing. A signature at the bottom with a name she did not recognize.
She found out later that Ken had been gone since April of the year before. Nobody had thought to tell her.
“Nineteen years, and it ended with an email from a man I’d never met. I don’t think he knew there was a shed. I don’t think he knew there were five of us in it.” Paula Grote
By then the shed was full. Paula had built the fall batch the way she built it every year — on her own money, months ahead, because the order always came. Shelf after shelf of finished bundles, boxed and labelled, with nowhere to go.
A shed on County Road 7
There is no shop. There never was. No sign at the road, no website, nothing in the phone book. Just a metal building behind the house that Paula’s father put up in 1978 to keep a combine out of the weather.
Paula started using it in 1996. She was thirty-eight, working part time at a florist in Goshen, and she had gotten tired of watching flowers go into the dumpster on Thursdays.
“They came in from three thousand miles away and they were dead by the weekend,” she says. “I kept thinking there has to be something you can put on a table that you don’t throw out.”
The first one she made was for her aunt, who had moved into a small apartment where candles were not allowed and who kept the overhead light off because it was too bright. Paula wired a strand of warm bulbs down through a bundle of greenery, hid the battery box in the base, and set it on her aunt’s side table.
“She put it on at dusk that first evening and she never turned the ceiling light on again,” Paula says. “She called me the next week and asked if I could make one for the woman across the hall.”
Why you have never heard of her
In 2007 a buyer found her at a regional gift show in Chicago. He worked for Fenwick House, a home boutique with three storefronts — the kind of shop with wide floorboards, a bell over the door and a man at the counter who will tell you about the artisan without ever giving you a name.
The arrangement was simple. Fenwick would take everything she could build. Fenwick would put its own name on the box and its own tag on the stem. And Paula would not sell to anyone else, ever — not at a fair, not to a neighbour, not to anybody. That last part was one line in a contract she signed at a kitchen table in 2007 and did not think much about at the time.
In the window, on a wooden riser, with a small card beside it, one of Paula’s bundles sold for $89 .
Of that eighty-nine dollars, Paula saw a fraction. She will not say what the fraction was. “That’s between me and a contract that doesn’t exist anymore,” she says. “And it was never the interesting part.”
“Everybody who builds for a shop like that knows what the split is,” she says. “You tell yourself the shelf is worth something, and for a long time it was. The order came every year. Five women got paid. That was the deal.”
If you have ever stood in a shop like that, turned over the little card and put the thing back down because of the number on it — there is a fair chance you were holding one of Paula’s.
Five women, one bench, thirty years
The shed is not a factory. It is a bench, a wall of bins, a space heater and five chairs.
Bev Nusbaum has been coming since 1999. Dee Hollenbach since 2003. Charlene Ritz since 2011, Sandy Kreager since 2016. They work mornings, they bring their own coffee, and between them they have put together somewhere north of two hundred thousand pieces.
What the hands actually do, in order:
- The wire goes in by hand. A single warm-white strand is threaded up through the stems from the base, bulb by bulb, so no wire shows from the front.
- Every light is seated by hand. On the bloom varieties each bulb is set inside the flower itself, so the petal glows instead of a wire glowing next to it.
- Every bundle is tied and fanned by hand. This is the step nobody outsources well. It is why a bundle stands full instead of standing thin.
- The battery housing is fitted into the base by hand and wrapped, so it disappears into a vase instead of hanging over the rim on a cord.
- Every single bundle is switched on before it is boxed. Thirty seconds, every bulb checked lit end to end. The initials of the woman who checked it go on the carton flap.
That last one is not a marketing line. It is the reason the contract lasted nineteen years. A shop like Fenwick will send an entire pallet back over a handful of dark units, and in nineteen years it never sent one back.
The part nobody tells you until it is dark
In daylight, a lighted bundle is a nice bundle of greenery. Paula will tell you that herself. She has never once claimed her arrangements fool anybody at two in the afternoon.
The thing happens at dusk. Turn the room lights off and a hundred warm points come up inside the branches, and the piece stops being decor and starts being a light source. It throws a low glow across a tabletop the way a candle does, and it does it without a flame, without a cord, and without anybody getting up to flip a switch.
And it will sit there all evening doing it. No flame, no wax, nothing that gets hot, nothing to blow out before bed. You can leave it burning next to a garland, a curtain or a tablecloth, with grandchildren in the room and a cat on the table, and none of that is a thought you have to have.
“In an apartment where they won’t let you light a candle, that is the whole product,” Paula says. “My aunt wasn’t allowed a match in that building. She still got her evening.”
How to tell one of hers from a $12 one
There is a test you can run in two seconds the day it arrives, and Paula would rather you ran it than took her word.
Bend a branch to one side and let go.
If it stays where you put it, there is wire through the core of the stem. If it springs back, it is molded plastic with a light glued on, and there is nothing you can do to make it look full.
That wire is also why a bundle of hers can be opened out. Fan the branches wide and a 15-inch piece covers most of a side table. Leave it tight and it is a narrow thing for a windowsill. A plastic-core bundle arrives in one shape and dies in that shape.
The colour of the light is the second giveaway, and it is the one people notice without being able to name it. A cheap strand runs blue-white because blue-white diodes are what you get for nothing. Paula’s run at roughly candle colour. Put the two in a room together after dark and one looks like a nightlight in a hospital corridor and the other looks like something burning.
Then there is the part that hangs over the rim. Most lighted stems ship with the battery box on the end of a cord, because a housing that fits inside a base costs money to tool. “That box is the whole problem,” Paula says. “You spend forty dollars and then there is a plastic brick hanging off the side of your grandmother’s vase.” Hers sits in the base, wrapped, below the rim of anything with a three-inch opening.
What is actually in the box
- Height 13 to 18 inches tall depending on the variety, and about as wide again once you fan it out.
- Already bundled Six stems on the greenery pieces, twelve to twenty on the blooms, tied at the base. It arrives arranged instead of as a pile of loose stems in a sleeve.
- Up to 100 warm-white bulbs Depending on the piece, and all of them at roughly candle colour. Not the blue-white you get off a hardware-store strand.
- Three AA batteries In a housing built into the base. Ordinary batteries you can buy anywhere and change yourself.
- No flame, no heat Nothing to blow out and nothing that warms up, so it can sit against a garland, a curtain or a tablecloth all evening.
- About eight evenings per set At six hours a night on alkalines. Lithium AAs get you closer to two weeks.
- Wire through every stem It holds whatever shape you bend it into, which is how you get it to stand full.
- Switched on before it is boxed Thirty seconds, every bulb checked lit end to end. The initials of the woman who checked it go on the flap.
“It’s been on that windowsill six years”
Paula does not have a customer list. Fenwick had the customer list. What she has is the handful of people who tracked her down anyway over the years, usually because a neighbor told them where the shed was.
One of them is a woman in Warsaw, Indiana, forty minutes east, who bought a greenery bundle at Fenwick in 2019 and then drove over two years later wanting a second one. Paula had to turn her away. The contract did not allow it. She wrote the woman’s name on a card and kept it in a drawer, and this summer she called her.
“She told me the first one had been on the kitchen windowsill the whole time,” Paula says. “Same hour every day, six winters. She said her husband got so used to it coming on that he checks the clock by it.”
What is left, and how many of each
All six of Paula’s pieces are in the shed. What differs is how many. The fall batch was built for Fenwick’s autumn and holiday floor, so the greenery runs deep and the spring pieces are down to what was left over from an earlier run.
Six pieces, 426 boxes, one shed. The greenery runs deepest, the spring pieces are down to a handful. When one runs out it stays out, because the batch that would have replaced it was never ordered.
Why $39 and not $89
The arithmetic is the whole reason this story exists.
Eighty-nine dollars bought a great deal that had nothing to do with the arrangement: a storefront on a good street, a window display, a wooden riser, a printed card, a wrapped box and everybody’s margin along the way. Of all those lines, the smallest one was the shed.
None of that exists now. So the number can be almost anything, and Paula set it at $39 — enough to cover the materials, the five of them, the carton and the postage, and nothing on top for a window.
“I make more on a thirty-nine dollar one sold from here than I ever did on one that left in a Fenwick box,” she says. “That’s not me being generous, that’s just what happens when nobody’s in between. And the woman buying it pays less than half. The only one who loses is the outfit that couldn’t pick up a phone.”
“I’m sixty-eight. I’m not going to sit on four hundred boxes and wait for somebody to rescue me. I’d rather every one of them ended up switching on in somebody’s window this winter.” Paula Grote
From the people who found the shed
“I bought mine in a shop years ago and had no idea it came from two counties over. I drove out there this spring after I read about it. She had it boxed and initialed before I got my checkbook out. Same as the first one, and the first one still works.”
Janet R., 58 — Warsaw, Indiana“My mother is in assisted living and they will not allow a candle of any kind, not even the battery ones with a wick on them. This gives her room the same warmth and there is nothing burning. That is the entire reason I bought it and it does exactly that.”
Diane W., 54 — Springfield, Missouri“First thing I did was bend one of the branches to the side. It stayed put. I have a $14 one from a big box store sitting next to it and that one snaps back like a straw. You can see the difference from across the room once it is dark.”
Cheryl M., 47 — Zanesville, Ohio“Fair warning, no vase comes with it, which the page does say. I used a stoneware crock that was my grandmother’s and honestly it looks better than anything that would have come in the box. Three AAs, tucked down in the bottom, you cannot see a thing.”
Lorraine K., 63 — Cedar Falls, Iowa
No second batch · No reorder · No boutique
How to get one
The 426 are on the shelves in the shed on County Road 7. They are listed at Backroad Goods, which handles the orders so that Paula and four women can keep doing the part they are good at.
Shipping is free, every piece goes out checked and lit with initials on the carton flap, and every one carries a 30-day money-back guarantee. If it arrives with a dark section, or if it does not look like it does in these photographs, send it back.
“Nineteen years I built these for somebody who put another name on them,” Paula says. “Four hundred and twenty-six left, and every one of them goes out with mine. I’d like them in windows, not on a shelf out here.”
Take One Before The Shelf Is Empty