(Disclaimer: I have no connection to Farmgirl beyond being a happy customer. I feel like every time I carry my bouquet home I end up gaining them another customer though because people always ask me where I found such nice flowers!)
At any time, about 80% of our flowers come from California, and the majority of those are grown within a couple hundred miles of their final destination. Thanks for your comment!
Perhaps I'm jaded by my experience in the industry (parents = florists and I worked for FTD in the past), but that seems like enough to get just a handful of orders. Broadening to the entire market might be a struggle. You've got many local florists, drop shippers, and supermarkets to contend with.
I love the website. I can see that perhaps having and beautiful app + trendy website might give you traction in a younger crowd, a group that purchases fewer flowers today. A focus on quality will give you a leg up over a huge percentage of local florists, for many quality just isn't there.
Are you opening locations in each locale wish to serve? That's capital intensive and leads to procurement issues.
If you gain traction, I hope you're ready for what Valentines/Mother's day bring.
We see delivering products (of any kind) in as fast as possible more inevitable than as our differentiator. For a large group of consumers, Uber has contributed to the shift of consumer expectations to mobile, instant and high quality.
We actually don't think of local florists as competition. Rather we partner with the good ones, provide the tools and training to make awesome arrangements, and bring in the urban logistics to make on-demand delivery possible. As you said, vertically integrating all of this new infrastructure would be way too capital intensive. There's a fairly new entrant to the market doing that now and it's taken a long time to hit a $4mm run rate.
On the consumer side of things, you're absolutely right. Great branding and awesome customer service will solve a ton of problems. Worst case for BT, a little bit rubs off on the incumbents and customers still win. Thanks again for your comment.
If you're in NYC I highly recommend Starbright[2]. They have arrangements as nice or nicer than a fancy florist like Ovando, but the prices are way better.
[1] http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/video/full-bloom-online-flow... [2] http://www.starbrightnyc.com/
Existing online shops give florists a lot of leeway in the arrangements they put together. BloomThat, however, works very closely with our partners, providing exact specifications for each arrangement.
By keeping the offering limited and holding everyone to a high standard, we're able to ensure quality across the board.
And as Chad said below, they hold all florist to a high standard "to ensure quality across the board."
You should use ~2 widely known things and a known relationship (senators are to the senate as morks are to morkdom), or 3-4 well known things to show a new relationship.
I ordered a bouquet from ProFlowers 5 years ago using a throwaway email (spamgourmet). Fast forward a few months and I'm getting unsolicited spam from businesses completely unaffiliated with ProFlowers at that one-time-use address. I called customer support to ask how to be removed from the list and got put on hold and hung up on. Not an uncommon experience:
http://www.resellerratings.com/store/ProFlowers
New startup formula:
1. Find "(Expertsexchange|ProFlowers) of X"
2. Build "(StackOverflow|Uber|Yelp) of X", don't sell your entire customer base down the river
3. Profit
For me, a local florist matters less to me (because I can just go to the Flower Mart, if I really want flowers, or really go anywhere and visually inspect them; the flowers at Whole Foods aren't amazing but they're fine sometimes) than one which is flowers-at-a-distance.
I can't think of a time when I've needed flowers in the next 90 minutes, but if you want flowers even in the next week, you tend to get gouged by e.g. 1800 Flowers, so it's nice to see a new offering there.
If/when they try to spread to a new city, I wonder if the community will welcome them, or the establish ed competition will work against them?
Exactly. I can't think of a time when I've needed flowers in 90 minutes, but I can think of a half a dozen times when I've wanted them same day, and at least a dozen or more when I've wanted them next day without paying a gigantic surcharge.
On multiple occasions we've delivered flowers to people in places and at times we never would have imagined. In June we delivered flowers to a person studying for the bar exam in a coffee shop. On Mother's Day we delivered several bouquets right to the brunch table.
It's very rewarding for us to see people use the service in ways never thought possible.
I would suggest that Bloomthat also expand their offerings. Don't limit yourselves to flowers and bouquets. Gift delivery goes way beyond that -- chocolates, stuffed animals, etc.
I can see a new market emerging from a service like this. A market of people who engage in daily on-demand gift delivery. Someone did something nice to you this morning? Send them some flowers after lunch. Wife text you about her bad day at work? Have flowers at her desk in under an hour. Normally this wouldn't happen considering all the research and logistics involved, but this could spur an entire back-and-forth gift-giving frenzy!
My wife was not well, I was out of town, and I called to have flowers delivered. I asked for an extra, and got it, but had to talk to the owner, and it was like twisting their arm to get this done.
I asked for a small box of chocolates and a DVD to be included (I asked for a specific DVD). I offered to pay extra - the DVD was $19 - and I didn't care on the size of chocolates - just something. I kept getting "but we don't do that". I begged and pleaded. Got the owner. "But we don't do that". I said - "look, charge me an extra $50, just please go buy that DVD and include it with the flowers". They finally did, I think I got charged $35 extra for the DVD and chocolates, and it made her day.
This was well before streaming home video stuff, and my wife had hurt her foot - not able to drive anywhere for a bit.
I was shocked at how hard it was to get a local florist to even consider adding in real extra value-add gifts. Throwing in a "romantic/comedy DVD of the season" option and tacking on an extra $25 or so seemed like "found money" imo. Yes, I'm not a florist by trade, but I've seen that there's a lot more that could be done.
Throwing in a movie and some candy and microwave popcorn along with the flowers seems tantalizingly easy to do. Heck - why didn't video stores deliver back in the day? (maybe some did?)
Thanks for your comment!
Most of our users are sending flowers in creative ways outside of the obligatory flower send occasions. For this reason and others, we see the total addressable market to be quite large. In fact, we've reached substantial small biz levels of revenue in a matter of months.
Delivery in 90 minutes is what allows people to send flowers in creative ways. But hey, we're happy to concede 90 minute delivery isn't a game changer these days - it's a requirement.
Our users tell us the power flowers arriving moments after leaving a meeting or closing a deal is quite real.
> One intrepid friend of mine suggested: “Find two people you think clearly should be banging and send them each flowers addressed from the other.”
In fact, technology is what allows this to be possible today. Our API routes orders by zip code to guarantee quick and efficient delivery. Our vendor dashboard displays orders in real time to our floral and delivery partners. We'll also be releasing a mobile app soon that I hope you're able to checkout and provide feedback.
What about girlfriends sending flowers to boyfriends? I'll bet that majority of purchases to a significant other are made by a male, which is not really gender equal.
I've never given a SO flowers, such a practise seems pretty silly. It's like paying for caring.
I don't see it as paying for caring, the times I've giving flowers to SO is when the way flowers look makes me think of them. Yeah technically you're paying for a good... But I'd steal it too.
Density allows these P2P start-ups to succeed with a lot less hassle, and from there they can grow the capital they need to expand.
I guess given my income and life priorities, I can't afford that much money for a one-time gift; but more power to those of you that can :)
