You in EWE is our ongoing series spotlighting the distinct style and daily rituals of local creative forces. It’s an honest look at the personalities shaping our culture, seen through the lens of their Framed Ewe eyewear.

If you want to see how our community is styling their eyewear out in the wild, tap into #youinewe on Instagram.

Can you introduce yourself and tell us what you’ve got going on?

My name is Malori Maeva, and I am a florist and business owner. We have been in business for 13 years, lucky 13, and we do mostly events and weddings.

What has Phoenix, as a community, been like for you over the years? How have you seen the city change?

Being based in Phoenix has been a huge boost to my business. I’ve learned that over the years working with friends who own businesses in other cities and other states, we’re really supportive of small creative people here. A lot of other markets are really competitive, and I feel like we all have each other’s backs.

The connections that I made a decade ago still come back around. Phoenix is big, but it’s also really small, and our creative community is really small. You kind of have the gift of knowing everyone. And if you’re cool, you get to keep knowing everyone, and if you’re not cool, it kind of weeds you out. So it’s a great community to be a part of.

What inspires your floral designs? What helped you form the creative language you speak through your work?

It has changed over time immensely. When I was newer and still trying to figure out my style, most of my inspiration came from people who had come before me and were really popular in the floral industry. I tried on a lot of different styles to figure out what suited me.

Now I find most of my inspiration off of a screen, being in the real world. I love traveling to different cities, seeing new things, seeing architecture, and seeing the different colors being used in different places.

I love an art museum. I love a contemporary art museum. I love a weird museum. I’m going to Paris this fall, and I found out they have a museum of skin diseases. I’m so into that. All of that is inspiration.

You bring it back, you see the composition of things, the colors of things, colors that go together. It’s not always what you might expect, but those are my favorite places to pull inspiration from.

Why is supporting local businesses important to you specifically?

Supporting local businesses is the most important to me, especially in the current political climate. Being rooted in your community and knowing your neighbors matters. I feel like we all kind of romanticize a Gilmore Girls life. We know the coffee shop owner, we know the hardware store, we know the mayor. We are deeply ingrained in our community, and the only way to do that is to be part of your community. Go to your local shops. Go to the places where you know the same person is working at the counter. They know your order. They know your preferences. You have an actual relationship with them.

We’re also lonely, tucked behind our little doom-scrolls nowadays. Getting out of that and being part of the small-business scene in our community has been, for me, the best antidote to all of the darkness in the world right now. It also feels good to keep money in our community. When you spend money in a small business, when people hire us, I have a staff, and they have health insurance and PTO. Those dollars are going directly to people who live here, who spend money here, and that all keeps us going as a team versus when we’re spending money with billionaires and trillionaires, and it’s just floating into their yachts somewhere on the ocean.

Are there any local businesses you’ve been loving lately?

That’s tough because there are so many. I just moved to a new neighborhood, and I’ve been exploring local businesses around my new house. I love that Phoenix is so pocketed. I’m truly a 10-minute drive from where I used to live, and I’m like, wow, brand new, never been here before.

I’ve been loving Luana’s Coffee Bar. It gives ’90s Friends, comfy chairs, good coffee. They said I could bring my dogs in and hang. What more do we want? I’ve been going to Le Diner Saur in my new neighborhood, grabbing little sweets and treats when I’m in the mood. I’ve been hitting up a lot of Bacanora, which everyone knows about, Valentine, Restaurant Progress, the go-tos. And one sleeper hit that I feel like does not get the credit it deserves is the Frybread House. Incredible. Iconic. I used to live in this neighborhood and go all the time, and then when I moved 10 minutes away I was like, wow, so far, I can never make it over there. And now it’s in my neighborhood again. Obsessed with it. I only talked about food, but food is everything to me.

Malori wears the Folc Moog

What do you want people to feel when they look at your work? What emotion or philosophy do you want to convey?

I think I’m a little bit unique in my approach to running my business and the energy that I try to put out into the world with it. My dad died nine years ago, and I was a few years into my business when he passed away. That was obviously a big life moment for me, and ever since then I’ve really tried to craft a space here that feels safe for people.

Our work is not our lives. I am Malori, and I also own this business. We are not one and the same. I really try to foster an environment here where myself and my team get to be humans outside of this building. My hope is that that sense of adventure, freedom, playfulness, experiencing the world, really living your life, having hobbies, and spending time with people that you love comes through in the work we create. I want it to feel like a collage of all of these experiences we have being people. Life is very short, and it shouldn’t be all about your job. That is our number one here, and everything else that we do comes from that.

Tell us about the frames you chose from Framed Ewe and why you picked them.

I love Framed Ewe. I actually think that Christy and I started our businesses right around the same time, so we’ve kind of always had this parallel play of watching each other grow over the years, which I have really enjoyed from my vantage point.

I have a million pairs of frames from Framed Ewe, and when I went in to pick these out, I was like, "You put on my face what you think I should have on my face." She pulled a collection of things for me. Usually I go a little wild. I love a fun color or crazy shape, and so these are a little more normal than what I usually do. But she and I talked about doing a little bit of a tinted frame. There’s a little blush hue at the top that fades into clear, and I feel so cool in them. I feel like, "Am I cool enough to pull them off?" But I don’t care. I love them so much. I’m blind. I want it to be fun. Gotta wear them every day.

Any final thoughts for the people in the community?

Based off of everything we’ve talked about today: shop small, get out into the community, get to know your friends and your neighbors, and be a part of Phoenix. It’s really cool.