How This Successful Floral Startup is Building a Better Bouquet

Christina Stembel launched Farmgirl Flowers in 2010 from her dining room with $49,000 of her own savings. Before hitting the two year mark, she was down to $411. Fast forward to today, though, and you’ll find it’s a different story for the 37-year-old Indiana native. She’s running a nationwide bouquet delivery service with millions of dollars in revenue, 46 employees, and 5,500 square feet in the San Francisco Flower Mart. Here, the entrepreneur tells us what it takes to create a successful startup (hint: countless 21-hour work days), and some surprisingly tough lessons she’s learned in the beautiful—but hardly easy—world of flowers.

Yahoo Style: Why did you decide to start Farmgirl Flowers?

Christina Stembel: In 2010, when I was overseeing one of the event departments at Stanford, I started to investigate why the flowers we were using cost so much. What I found was a wide-open industry with very little innovation. The most recent change happened when ProFlowers came onto the scene in the mid-nineties and they actually made the industry so much worse by changing their sourcing and supply chain from American grown to South American grown flowers. Those were always the companies I had to use when I would send my mom flowers in Indiana because there weren’t any local florists in her tiny farm town. I would spend a hundred dollars and hours going through a ton of options on their website and the arrangement ended up looking like something you could pick up at the grocery store for a few bucks. For me, that didn’t make any sense. I decided to come up with a better model.

That sounds like a big undertaking! What obstacles did you have to overcome?

There were three main problems I had to tackle. Importing costs about a half to a third less than local flowers because there’s a free trade agreement with Colombia which cuts taxes and tariffs. Also, flowers can be grown much cheaper because of the low labor costs. It’s unfortunately an industry run the same way as textiles, coffee, and technology. Second, the aesthetic was horrible. In order to get a beautiful arrangement you’d have to find a designer florist in that city, which would work if you’re in New York or L.A., but hardly anywhere else. The third problem was waste. People think because this is literally a green industry it’ll actually be green. That’s not the case at all. About forty percent of flowers that are grown are never sold and end up getting composted. When you go into a florist shop, the vendor doesn’t know what flowers you’re going to order. If you buy tulips, he will have to subsidize the lilies that will end up getting thrown out. All that choice leads to a lot of waste, which leads to the increased prices.

What’s unique about your business model?

I tackled each problem and committed to coming up with a solution for it. From the start, I was dedicated to using only American-grown flowers. In order not to have to charge $400 per bouquet and get away from all the waste, I decided to do one daily arrangement. We don’t give anybody a choice. We pick for them, and that also covers my third problem, which is the aesthetic. I can give my clients a designer-quality arrangement for the generic e-commerce price. The first two years were hard because we were re-educating consumers on how to purchase flowers differently. We want people to trust us so we don’t pull the wool over anybody’s eyes. Every picture we take is an actual arrangement that went out. We don’t bring in professional photographers. Younger consumers want to feel something when they’re buying.

Is there anything that you found especially surprising about the flower world?

One hundred percent of all the other flower startups that have been founded are owned by men. Which is funny because seventy-eight percent of people who buy flowers are women for other women. When I talk to men in the industry they say, “Oh, it’s just a recipe, anyone can make an arrangement.” And that why I think the other startups won’t be successful for long. This is not paint by numbers.

What advice would you give someone who wants to start a business?

I would tell them two things. One: Don’t feel like you’re unsuccessful if you’re unfunded. Don’t think of that as the marker of success—figure out instead exactly what your mission is. Patagonia is a great example. Funding is just debt. It’s not free money. Two: Persevere through the hard times. The first two years of starting Farmgirl were the hardest years of my life. Nobody really tells you how hard it is. You’ll work twenty-one hours a day for years at a time, but the key is just to push through. Get through two years and you’ll start to feel better when people recognize your product.

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