If you’re heading east on Poplar Pike on a Sunday afternoon, and you’re right before Forest Hill Irene Road, you might witness a party.

During this party, a Germantown parking lot is full of people watching a visionary work his magic, creating an elaborate tablescape or, if it’s the right time of year, adorning a Christmas tree.

That visionary’s name is John Mark Sharpe.

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Sharpe is a jack of home-and-garden trades and master of them all: He decorates homes, businesses and weddings; he arranges flowers and he sells most of what you need to try these endeavors yourself. People from as far away as New Zealand come to visit his store.

On Instagram, he’s nothing short of a sensation with 420,000 followers, including CBS’ Norah O’Donnell. He shares bow-tying videos, photos of weddings he’s designed, what he’s doing at his store and more. He starts most videos with a, “Hey, y’all,” his voice as sweet and slow as molasses.

But he can trace it all back to spending time with his grandmother.

A bow-ful beginning

Sharpe, 32, grew up in Memphis but, on the weekends, he’d visit his grandparents in Sardis, Mississippi. 

“I couldn’t wait to get down there and hang out with them,” Sharpe said. 

Sharpe said his grandmother, whom he called Gran, was a big cheerleader for him and all her other grandchildren.

“She was just … very encouraging,” Sharpe said. 

Gran loved to entertain. Gran and her grandson gardened, arranged flowers and cooked together. 

“She loved to take simple things and make them extraordinary somehow by just like touching them or doing something extra,” Sharpe said. “I just picked up things down there. We’d do church flowers. (Sardis is) your typical Southern small town. If someone died, we’d be cooking and taking them food.”

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Sharpe said they would rearrange the house and the furniture and they’d always decorate for the seasons.

“We always had a project going,” Sharpe said. “That’s kind of where the love for (what I do) came from.”

Sharpe started making wreaths and arrangements for his parents’ friends while at Bolton High School. Teachers would buy decorations from him.

“Back in the day, we’d do bow-making in the library,” Sharpe said. “I had a lot of support and community.”

In 2010, while still in high school, Sharpe decided to sell his bows and wreaths at a craft fair at the Cordova Community Center to see if people were actually interested in his work or if they were just buying because they felt “obligated.” Not even old enough to drive at the time, his parents took him and helped him set up.

He ended up selling out.

From there, he started doing other craft fairs, and then some stores asked if he’d make arrangements for them. He began helping other people decorate for Christmas, doing trees and garlands around doorways.

“It just all kind of organically fell into place,” Sharpe said.

Sharpe opened up pop-up booths around the Memphis area in Collierville, Germantown, Bartlett, Arlington, East Memphis and Olive Branch. His side hustle helped pay for his tuition at the University of Memphis.

“After college, I just was like, ‘Am I going to do this for real or not?’” Sharpe said. “So that’s when I decided to open up a storefront and kind of dive in.”

John Mark Enterprises today encompasses a broad operation that does weddings and events, sells flowers and has a retail storefront. Sharpe also has his own warehouse, mainly for receiving, but the company has also started selling online.

Sharpe will do flowers and decor for Memphis-area weddings. And now with a refrigerated truck, he can go as far as Tupelo or Jonesboro.

The store, the weddings, the trees

Kayla Barr and Blake Jolley worked with Sharpe when they got married in September 2021 at the Annesdale mansion in Memphis.

“We actually met with a couple florists. I had a planner who was helping me, and none of them really were that interested or really seemed involved in the process,” Barr said. “When we met with John Mark, he was literally amazing. I think our meeting was almost four hours because we just kept bouncing ideas off each other. He just really wanted to make sure everything was perfect down to what the corsage and boutonnieres looked like.”

Three days after that first hourslong meeting, Sharpe sent them a vision board for their ceremony.

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“It took a couple of other people weeks to get quotes back, some we didn’t even hear back from,” Barr said. “But John Mark got us quotes and a vision board and everything in three days. Once we decided to go with him, he was just great throughout the entire process. If I was anxious, he talked me off the ledge.”

Sharpe hung flowers outside in the courtyard and made the couple a flower wall to stand in front of for the outdoor ceremony. Inside, he created a flower chandelier and draped the entire staircase in flowers.

“I just feel like I don’t have enough good words to say about him,” Barr said.

Much like his grandmother’s house, Sharpe’s store changes with the season. It’s awash with pastels in the spring, American flags for the summer and velvet and papier-mâché pumpkins for the fall. But Christmas is Sharpe’s busiest season for retail. Christmas is also a big time for decorating houses, too.

“We’ll do the full tree, mantle setup, staircases, doorway, whatever (customers) want,” Sharpe said about decorating homes for his clients. “Light fixtures, we’ll add a little tinsel into. (We’ll do) dining-room table arrangements and set the dining-room table.”

For Sharpe, more is more. When he’s designing a tree, he tells people it doesn’t really matter which type of tree he gets because by the time he’s done with it, you can’t see the tree itself anyway.

“I don’t really know if you need a designer tree to begin with,” Sharpe said. “You can make it a designer tree on your own with your ornaments, picks and ribbons.”

Planning for Christmas of next year begins before the current holiday season begins.

“The first big bulk of our buying, we’ll go and knock that out before Christmas,” Sharpe said. “I’ve learned through all this, through this business, it’s just how the world works with shipping and everything. You just have to start early.”

Sharpe will travel to Christmas markets in Atlanta, Dallas and Las Vegas, alongside others, to source products. 

“It’s kind of cool to find those and go and search the market and find unique products to bring to the customer,” Sharpe said.

Sharpe also designed his own line of ribbon and traveled to India to have it produced. 

“That’s been an adventure,” Sharpe said. “We just went over there and just started asking questions and exploring. I didn’t know anything or where to look for anything. But we found who we needed to find.”

Making magic

Last year, Sharpe was selected as one of more than 300 volunteers from around the U.S. to travel to Washington, D.C., to decorate the White House for Christmas. 

“It was a fun experience; (I) got to meet a lot of people,” he said. “There really weren’t that many ‘designers;’ it was just people from all over the country. I thought I’d get there and it’d just be full of all these artists and designers or whatever, but that’s not necessarily the case. And (there were people of) all ages, which was kind of cool. It was just a big honor to be there.”

With his hand in many pots, Sharpe stays busy. A typical day for him starts before the sun is up.

“I don’t do well sitting still or idle,” Sharpe said. “Every week is different, which I love because every wedding’s different, every bride’s different. Every arrangement that we make, they’re always different.”

On Instagram, Sharpe said he shares what he does to help other designers, artists, creatives and even people just decorating for fun.

“(People online) message me and talk to me and all this, and they’re like, ‘I did it this way,’” Sharpe said. “It’s so fun to interact with others who are in this world and kind of pull some creativity or energy from them, too.” 

Sharpe said he likes to hear what everyone else is thinking and what their ideas are.

“We may not do it, and we may do it or we take that idea and combine it with someone else’s,” Sharpe said. “Then it becomes a cool concept.”

Sharpe said he thinks it’s important to be open to receiving inspiration from other people. 

“I think some people get wrapped up in the business side of it — which I get, you have to make a living and all that, this is how life works — but you do so much more when you work together,” Sharpe said.

Sheril Greenstein, an event planner who owns Shindigs by Sheril, has worked with Sharpe for a few years. They’ve done weddings, parties and more together. She said he’s a good team player.

“He always just makes it happen,” Greenstein said. “You don’t have to worry that it’s not gonna be done right.”

Greenstein said Sharpe has covered the ceiling above the dance floor with flowers for one of her events and hung the centerpieces over the tables at another. When she comes up with an idea, she said, he figures out how to do it.

“It takes a really creative mind to always do something different,” Greenstein said.

Greenstein said Sharpe can’t be pinpointed into a certain look or design and he can think outside the box.

“He’s more than his ribbons and his Christmas design.”

Sheril Greenstein
Owner, Shindigs by Sheril

“He’s more than his ribbons and his Christmas design. That’s what so interesting about him. He has so many different ways that he can be,” Greenstein said. “You see his wreaths and his Christmas and his ribbon, which is one niche, but then the wedding he does for me is completely different.

“He’s just not cookie-cutter, and I think that’s why I really love working with him.”

Sharpe is 32 years old, and Greenstein said it’s amazing the business he’s come up with.

“He’s way beyond his young years, that’s for sure,” Greenstein said.

Greenstein said Sharpe has done well at sharing what he does online.

“People love to watch him on his Instagram, and he shares a piece of his life and what he’s doing,” Greenstein said. “You feel like you’re his friend. You become his friend, and you feel like you know him just from watching him.”

At the end of the day, though, Sharpe is still that little boy helping his grandmother decorate her house. The alchemy of turning something simple into something more continues to fascinate him. 

“I love to do what my grandmother did, take something ordinary and make it extraordinary with simple touches and things like that,” Sharpe said. “Just by adding your own personal touch, it just changes the look of it.”

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