I now use Bloomthat for everything (YC and personal). The arrangements are always charming. It's also so easy (and immediate) that I find myself sending flowers to friends and colleagues much more often -- just for little reasons/thankyou's.
Thanks for using BloomThat! The impact of sending flowers in the moment just to say thanks is really powerful. It's great to see people use the service for things other than the twice annual obligatory flower sends.
I don't know how Bloomthat works, but I'm a little suspicious of anything that offers pre-arranged bouquets without any consideration to which flowers are in season. San Franciscans who like flowers might like http://farmgirlflowers.com/ : locally farmed flowers with beautiful arrangements and home delivery.
(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!)
Hi evmar, we really appreciate your feedback. We rotate our arranged bouquets seasonally and we're big proponents of supporting local flower growers and local brick and mortar florists.
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!
That's great to read. The last time I looked into purchasing flowers outside of SF I was sad to discover that most local florists are themselves effectively just resellers of gross FTD flowers, so it seems like a service like yours can go far. I wish you luck.
So the big differentiator here is delivery in under 90 minutes?
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.
Thanks for your comment. Your experience in the space is insightful.
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.
After seeing the episode of The Lookout[1] about online flower services which contract out to local florists I decided to use the local florists directly. The gist of it was that the local flower shops will tend to give a more skimpy arrangement for online orders since they have to give a cut to the website.
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.
Jeff, thanks a lot for sharing this episode. We haven't watched it yet but we'll take a look tonight when we get a chance.
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.
I completely disagree with you. Local florists are to Target, as BloomThat is to Google Shopping Express. All the benefits of shopping online with delivery in less than 90 minutes. WAY more convenient than spending an hour driving, browsing, buying, driving.
And as Chad said below, they hold all florist to a high standard "to ensure quality across the board."
This isn't a great analogy as way to explain this (I still have no idea what you're saying). The only company I have direct experience with is Target; I'm unfamiliar with the purchasing experience of local florists or BloomThat, and didn't even know Google Shopping Express was a thing. I'm not really unrepresentative.
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:
Thanks for your comment. You nailed it re: spam. They play a similar game with CPC ads - cornering the real estate with resellers and effectively bidding up the CPC on themselves. Speaking of which, I love the ads for the same companies underneath the horrible consumer ratings in the link you posted!
I like the idea of a non-SEO/CPA, non-crappy flower company. My problem is the only people I need to send flowers to are outside the Bay Area, and generally in second or third tier markets you'll probably never serve directly. I have no idea what I should be doing -- I use Calyx now, which is overpriced and kind of crappy in a lot of ways. I tried the "local florist" in "place where parents live" and that was too much of a hassle, too. Searching for the city name and florist brings me 4 "local florists", only one I vaguely recall (same town I lived when I was 8-14 and not really in the floral market). 2 are "teleflora network", one appears to be a real independent shop, another appears to be wedding focused. I generally don't care about this very much, so I use a known vendor who lets me avoid the worst case but doesn't really provide a good average or best case. I'd normally use Yelp or TripAdvisor or something to check reviews, but each vendor has 0 or 1 reviews -- not exactly SF.
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 like this idea. The flower delivery market has plenty of players, but also plenty of room for disruption.
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?
> 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...
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.
Hi, thanks for the comment! Trust me, we asked ourselves the same question when we first launched our MVP. Do people really need flowers in 90 minutes? The answer has been surprising - YES!
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.
This is great. I've ordered many bouquets and it's always been somewhat stressful. I used to be in a long distance relationship, and so ordering a bouquet online required finding 1) reputable florists that could 2) deliver on time to the 3) region I want. So something like this is more than welcome.
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!
There was a local florist where I used to live that was frustrating (but really, most of them I've used over the years have been).
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?)
Hi Kyro, thanks for the comment! These are great ideas. Expanding our offering to include gifts is a great idea and we'll definitely consider as we continue to grow. Thanks!
Figuring out how to market affordably (and in a defensible way) is really key to this space. A friend works for 1800 Flowers and it sounds like the entire industry competes on marketing, not on product, because the products are indistinguishable.
Great insight. You're absolutely right. For this reason, we take a lot of inspiration from Warby Parker. By building an awesome brand that people want to associate with, you can (hopefully) avoid playing the super expensive demand harvest game.
Maybe I'm missing something but I can't see this being more than a small business. The only reason I can see to choose this over a local flower business is that it delivers in 90 minutes. A very limited number of bouquets is a big downside meaning you can't really deliver to the same person more than a few times. Also, is the 90 minute thing really a big selling point? How often is anyone going to need flowers delivered that quickly? Normally you send for an occasion which you know in advance and if you're sending them to thank someone for something that just happened next day would be fine.
Thanks for your comment. You bring up good points.
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.
Thanks for responding, it's good to hear your side of things. I'm sure you understand the market a lot better than me (I very rarely use flower delivery services).
I literally just ordered flowers from ProFlowers and the whole flower ordering business sucks. I can't stand seeing flowers on a site for $19.99 then on the last page seeing that shipping and handling is another $20 bucks. And seeing an option for a coupon and searching the web for something is also absurd. I'm digging the flat model and speed. I'm not in the SF area, but I'm looking forward to this spreading through the US.
Hey scubasteve - great name - and thanks for the comment. You're absolutely right: pricing tricks and up charges are not cool. The price we display is the price you'll pay (plus a little tax). We're working hard to spread to other cities super fast. Where are you located?
This is interesting, and they appear to be having a valid business plan, but how 'tech' is this startup really? It seems to be about flowers and logistics. Sure, that doesn't matter for the business, but I wonder if these guys would've been on sites like techcrunch and hacker news if YC hadn't taken them on.
Hi, thanks for your comment! What you see online now is the MVP we used to validate demand. We're working on some pretty cool tech too.
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.
"Indeed, while there are your typical use cases like boyfriend-forgets-anniversary"
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.
Not sure if we (guys) like flowers as much as girls. But honestly, I think it'd be a very nice detail.
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.
How you will know when Austin, Kansas City, Seattle, Boston, or Tallahassee are just as startup-hip as San Francisco: When we read that "startup InterestingName with CleverProduct done on a local scale has launched in AnyCityBesidesSFO."
Density. Certainly it's possible to start a courier business in a less-dense city (and not saying there aren't others -- Boston and NYC especially) but you've now made getting off the ground a lot harder. Obviously the culture in SF has made courier start-up pretty popular lately, but without density I bet that we'd be seeing far less of them.
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.
Agreed. Density is a key component here. The good news is that nearly 80% of Americans live in places considered to be urban (50k + population). Are they dense enough for a model like this to work is yet to be seen.
I don't really like the idea of sending someone a dying organism. (Although my girlfriend I believe enjoys receiving such a thing.) But I guess they do real live plants as the article mentioned a succulent.
