Latest / The Growth Class with Phil Masiello / Floral Ecommerce Innovation: Building a Farm-Direct Flower Empire with Liza Roeser

Transcript

Floral Ecommerce Innovation: Building a Farm-Direct Flower Empire with Liza Roeser · The Growth Class with Phil Masiello

• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: Hey everybody and welcome back to the growth class.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: Today we're talking about disrupting traditional massive industries through sheer grit operational systems and flawless execution.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: If you think your business faces a tough supply chain or high-stakes inventory, imagine managing a product that is highly perishable, internationally sourced, and expected to arrive in perfect condition for the most high-stakes day of a consumer's life, their wedding day.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: My guest today didn't just build a business in that space.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: She completely revolutionized it.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: Liza Roser is the founder and CEO of 50flowers.com.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: Her journey began with a chance assignment in Ecuador with the Peace Corps, where she got in front row seat to the global flower export industry and recognizing a massive gap between the farms growing the product and the end consumers paying a massive markup.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: So she bootstrapped a brand using just$2,400 of her Peace Corps savings.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: And today, 50 Flowers is an eight-figure e-commerce empire that ships farm-direct flowers to thousands of events every single week.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: She pioneered the DIY floral movement, digitized and antiquated industry, and proved that even the most creative passions can be scaled through world-class business processes.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: So, Liza, welcome and thank you for taking the time to come on.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: I truly appreciate having you here.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_02: Well, Phil, I've enjoyed all of our conversation so far.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_02: And I can't wait to talk.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_02: Let's talk.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_02: Let's talk flowers.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_02: Let's talk about how the crazy business of perishable flowers.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that is a that is a heck of a heck of a supply chain because your product's dying as it goes through that supply chain.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: So why don't you bring us back?
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: Explain that whole thing.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: I touched on it, the Peace Corps piece, but let's go back to how you started, why you started, what you did.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, well, I I was a Peace Corps volunteer.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_02: And like a lot of us entrepreneurs out there, I just had this sick feeling of don't go back, stay here.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_02: There's something more to do.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_02: And I found a job in Flowers.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_02: I learned the business inside and out and ended up putting in my very first business, which is a B2B.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_02: And I like to call her the ugly stepchild because there's not enough time to focus on her.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_02: She's a good, she's a good business, and we're about to blow her up, but she's been the ugly stepchild for a long while.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_02: And then in 2000, I discovered the internet and put in 50 flowers, built 50 flowers from scratch.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I brought down a I was living in Ecuador at the time, and I brought down a coder from Michigan and a designer from California.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_02: I put them in a room, and we literally had like these, you you know how it is.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_02: Your front end and back end.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_02: They don't like each other.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_02: They really didn't like each other back then.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_02: And built the very first consumer direct online um store to buy flowers.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_02: And very soon found the niche into the do-it-yourself wedding, and the rest is history.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it was an interesting time.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we I I think I told you we built one of the first meal sites back in 2000.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, back then, there was no Magento, there was no WordPress, there was no, you know, Shopify.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: You had to code the whole thing.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I think our first site cost like$115,000.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: And you then you're only dealing with one screen.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: And it but you're 100% right.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: You had to have the person who was coding it who didn't know what it's supposed to look like, and then you had to have somebody who knew how it should look.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: And we didn't have what we knew today about you know conversion rate optimization and things like that.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: It was just sort of poke and hope.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_02: In fact, I love to, and if you don't know about Wayback Machine, yeah, Doc, you can go look at the like the versions of your website.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_01: I know.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_02: And every once in a while when I get frustrated, I just go back and I look at the very first version.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_02: You know, remember Old Navy had those sites that things like popped up, and we were able to get, and it was a big deal.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_02: We got these two roses to pop up, and it was this, you know, it wasn't like this slide, it was this pop-up, it went like this, and then it came down like this and stopped.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, those were the days.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it was interesting.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: The the best part though, I thought was, you know, you we um there wasn't very sophisticated payment systems like there are today.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so we used to cat you used to capture the information, but we actually had to go to a terminal on the at the in the office and you put the information in to charge the customer.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: So it was uh it was wild.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_02: I mean and then today we get frustrated because of something so little like the A B test, like A B testing.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_02: Whoever even knew I'm I'm I'm actually quite jealous of people who can get in the industry today, you know, the e-commerce world, and you just plug and play.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_02: But you get a lot of tribal knowledge.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, absolutely.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's it's it's pretty impressive.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: I, you know, we we do a lot of uh consumer product, consumer focused brands, beauty, personal care, food.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, you know, Shopify has become the system that everybody wants to be on.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I can understand it because Shopify has built its own ecosystem, and I think it's done a really good job of building an ecosystem that that can sell, help sell, versus, you know, WooCommerce and and and WordPress, I think, haven't done as good a job, Normagento or any of the other ones that are out there, big commerce.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: But I think Shopify's done a great job.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: And it's amazing how how fast you can spin up a website and how inexpensively you can spin that website up and get going and get moving and start selling.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, I granted, you can always improve it, you can always do things, but uh, it's amazing to me how because I I run into these entrepreneurs that started and they they did the website themselves and it looks okay.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: You know, they just used a um, you know, a uh uh what do you call it, a theme.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: But it, you know, it works and and they start selling.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: And then once they start making money, then they want to improve it.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's it is incredible how fast it is comparatively to just five years ago.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_02: You know, five years ago, I had my proprietary front-end end ERP system.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_02: And in 2000, we decided to switch over to Shopify.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_02: And meeting with the the crew that we hired to to bring us on, they had helped develop Shopify and then brand stoff and of course now selling services.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_02: They looked at what we had already built and was mesmerized.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_02: Because every all of those plug and plays that you can do now, we were doing then.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_02: You know, like all of the, you know, the the ship stations, you know, that you can ship, we API directly in.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_02: We've been doing that.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_02: Texting.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, 50 followers has been texting to the consumer for 12 years.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, it's you know, I was thinking when you were talking about that, Phil?
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_02: Do you remember getting a merchant account?
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_02: Remember how hard it was?
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_02: And now you just have Google Pay, or you have all these pay Venmo and all of this.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_02: It's like, it is so easy.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: You used to have to fill out the application, but you had to do it for Amex, you had to do it for for uh Visa, for MasterCard.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: And then, you know, if you had a problem, they'd send you something and you had to get more information and you're like, oh my God.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, today on Shopify, you use Shopify payments, you can add PayPal, you can add, you know, Venmo, Apple Pay.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: You have a million different payment methods.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_02: It's easy.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_02: There is no excuse now.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: No, there is no excuse.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's become uh you know, it's become great.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: And then obviously, you know, having uh uh mobile first sites and and all that.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we didn't have to worry about that in the beginning because all you had was a desktop computer.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: You just worried about these stupid massive desktops that people used.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: It was fun.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: So I mean, how do you so so so we think about it, you know, you you started this business back when you were in Ecuador and you started moving flowers, but you really scaled it.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: And and that doesn't just happen.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, there had to be some sort of forethought to that.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_02: Well, first off, I want to say scaling it, because we're in our next phase of scaling and we're very focused and driven.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_02: And that's what I believe the success of building a bigger business or just building a business is understanding the way Jim Collins says it with his hedgehog is what do you do best better than anybody else?
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_02: And focus on that.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_02: And the moment that you deviate, you know, during COVID, flowers for events.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_02: Guess what?
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, there were no events.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_02: So it was okay, how are we gonna keep the lights on?
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_02: I call it hashtag keep the lights on.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_02: And we created a subscription business and re-marketed to all of our, you know, our existing client base and did a completely separate brand, completely separate Shopify store.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_02: And it was a disaster.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_02: You know, yeah.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_02: Because we do flowers for events, and that whole market, you know, that whole it's it's it's a completely different business model.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, COVID, I would imagine COVID had to disrupt your supply chain tremendously as well, even the front front end, but the back end.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um not that much.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_02: Really?
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_02: Believe it or not.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, we did a, you know, along with that, I'm this is when I truly put on my visionary hat and said, We are gonna focus on keeping the lights on because we've built this brand and we had served a whole bunch of clients before.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_02: And they believed and they loved our flowers.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_02: And flowers bring joy.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_02: And they got they get delivered to your doorstep.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_02: You know, there is you don't have to go pick them up, you know, FedEx.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_02: And we worked with FedEx, lowered actually our costs, and we moved a lot of flowers throughout COVID.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_02: We did a hashtag save the growers campaign because all my growers were throwing away the roses.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_02: You know, you can't just let a farm not you know, you you've got to continue to cut the flowers and harvest harvest your crop.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_02: If not, right they you know, it just died a lot of habit.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: I know.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: I have flower I have uh rose plants in the front and you have to you have to work 'em.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_02: You have to work 'em.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um, yeah, it's it's it's rough.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: I mean Yeah, COVID was a whole different world for a whole different world.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_02: But what it taught me though is exactly that.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_02: It is we sell flowers for events and we are amazing at it.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, going back to you can throw up a website and you can sell flowers, but when you buy from a brand that is reliable and trusted and has done it and been there and been through all of it.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_02: I love to call it my planes, trains, and automobiles, volcanoes, hurricanes, tornadoes, and ice storms.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_02: We've been through all of it.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, it's interesting because when I, you know, I coach a lot of entrepreneurs and I always tell them you you it's it's really difficult to get through to people because they think, okay, well, I'm in the shaving business, so I sell to everybody.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: And you keep saying, you don't sell to everybody.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: You have to find who you're selling to.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you can't say that, well, everybody shaves.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: I said, look, I was in the shaving business.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: I built a shaving brand, a really big one, and but we didn't sell to everybody because I'm not gonna be able to convert a guy that's 50 years old or older who's been using a three-blade razor forever into a five-blade.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not gonna be able to do it.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm not gonna be able to convert a guy who's under 25 because he doesn't care about shaving yet.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: So I got that 25 to 40 year old, that's who I'm selling to, and I'm selling to, and I'm not just selling the razor, I'm selling a shave.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: I'm selling a complete shave, I'm selling a system.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: And I was, I was, um, I do my uh TV show on on Tuesday nights, and I had a guy on last night, and we were talking about business, and he said, you know, I try and get across to people that you're not selling a product, you're selling a system, right?
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: That's really what you're building, right?
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: Your yours is is is flowers, but your system is really built on, you know, delivering flowers for events.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: That's what you're good at.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_02: And the more that you can hone in on that and really understand not only your client, but build your brand hand in hand with your client.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_02: Because branding is everything.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, absolutely.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's another thing I try and get across to everybody, you know, to people that I coach.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I always talk about building a brand and they go, well, you know, I'm building a SaaS product.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: I go, it doesn't matter.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: You're building a brand, whether it's a SaaS product, I don't care what you're doing.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: I don't care if you're an individual, I don't care if you're a solopreneur, you're building a brand, and you have to treat it like a brand because a brand is how you communicate.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it's not, you know, everybody thinks about a brand as like a box on a shelf.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: And no, it's how you communicate with your end user.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_02: Mm-hmm.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_02: And it's, I mean, every way that you communicate.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_02: You know, one thing I love to think about when I first started, mind you, there were no PPC, you didn't have any, there was none of that.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_02: So you know what I did?
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_02: And sometimes I'm like, I don't think I should be telling this story, but I am.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_02: You know what?
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_02: I had stickers and I went and I traveled a lot because I visited my clients and I visited, you know, I was out and about.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_02: I would take stickers into the bathroom of airports.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_02: Because I was in the airports all the time.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_02: So I put a sticker on the bathroom stalls all throughout the United States, just because we deliver to all, you know, 50 states.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_02: Even Hawaii.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_02: Listen, don't suggest people do that because it it is a little bit.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's is as long as you don't stick it on the mirrors so much, but you know, maybe you do, I don't know.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: But when there's a woman named Sally Hogshead, I don't know if you ever heard of her, but in my opinion, she's brilliant.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: She's written a couple of books.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and her whole point is, you know, be different, be different, be different.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: And we had one business that we were uh that we were sort of struggling with, and we got, you know, we we we had a an off site with her, and she said, you know, you're um you're focused on selling a great shave.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: And you wanna be you want to be the guys who sell the burn-free guarantee.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: She said, why don't you do this?
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_00: Why don't you go and get coasters made and just give them to the bars?
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: Because that's where the guys are, she said, and coasters cost nothing, and bars need them, they don't want to pay for them.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: And if you just took cases and cases of coasters with, you know, your brand on it, the burn-free guarantee, and your website, I guarantee you it'll work.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: And we did it.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: We did it all over the place.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: We got we actually uh hooked up with a uh liquor distributor and uh one of the largest, and we gave him to them, and and it was a it was a great boom.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: The thing that did it for us, though, is uh I I offered there was this baseball player, Brian Wilson, who played for the San Francisco Giants, and he had this, this is going back now uh uh 12 years ago or so, 14 years ago, and he had this epic beard and Major League Baseball hated it.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and they, you know, and and he was defiant.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: He hurt his arm, had Tommy John surgery, they traded him to the Dodgers.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: It was the first time he was going to pitch in a year.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I I sent a message to his people and I said, I'll pay him a million dollars to shave with my system.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I got back that we'll talk to Brian about it.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I gave that to the PR firm.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: That just exploded because people were outraged that we would pay a guy who was making so much money a million dollars to shave.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: And then they were s there were other people that were sending in body parts that I'll shave this for 10 grand, shave this for 20 grand.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean, but I we had no intention of paying the guy.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: It was a stunt, right?
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: We knew he wasn't gonna shave his beard off.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: It was just a stunt.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: But we got so much press out of it.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: We were uh we were being interviewed on all the sports channels, everybody thought we were nuts, but it led to a significant number of sales.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_02: So it's brilliant, and that's finding those brilliant moments, you know, and that's what takes your brand, you know.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_02: Miss Universe was in Ecuador, and I knew that I needed to get trust behind my brand.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_02: So of course, what did I do?
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_02: I did, I was the official flower sponsor for Miss Universe.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_01: Great.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_02: Which they didn't have one ever before.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_02: And you know what?
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_02: She carried my flowers.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_02: We were everywhere.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_02: The VIP, you know, got to meet all the all the names and get pictures with my flowers to build the credibility.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_02: Sure.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_02: That's that's what we do.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_02: You know, if Miss Universe can carry my flowers down the winning walk, a bride knows that we can do that as well.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_02: Mm-hmm.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: So you were you so how long were you in Ecuador for that you were running the business from there and then you moved you moved to the States with it?
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_02: States, yes.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_02: I in total I was in Ecuador for about 12 years.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_02: And running the business specifically, probably about eight, eight years.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_02: Um P score, then working for and you know, I worked and and this is another key that I think I didn't know what I was doing at the time.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_02: That's always it's interesting, you just do things, right?
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_02: The door opens and you run through it.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_02: If you're a visionary like myself, a terrible blazer like myself, but I worked for farms both in Ecuador and Colombia, and I opened up offices, you know, all over the world for them.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_02: I did a lot of marketing.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_02: I really learned a lot of the back end of the business before I started my own.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's important to understand that whole supply chain.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: I I it was amazing to me that uh, you know, I'm ordering flowers online and they're actually getting shipped directly from, you know, whether it's Colombia or Ecuador or wherever, and uh into the United States that rapidly.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I was amazed when I found that out.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't realize it.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, a lot of people are mesmerized.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_00: And and it happens so fast.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_02: It's complicated.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, the interesting part about it is, you know, Phil, when I got into this industry, this did not exist.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_02: In fact, I remember sitting with a bunch of vice presidents from FedEx, because they're all vice presidents.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_01: Right, right.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_02: A conference table, and this was probably 1997.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_02: And we're in Quito, and they're talking, and you know, some of the growers, Ecuadorian growers that were in the room, they were like, Yeah, yeah, yeah, we can help you get land planes.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_02: And I took a step back and I was like, I'm just gonna call it a spade a spade, because I don't believe in manana.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_02: You know, there is no way that you're gonna be able to land planes without pain under the table in Ecuador.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_02: So if you're if you're willing to grease some hands, you know, some palms, then that'll work.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_02: And if not, I got I got work to do.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_02: And they all kind of looked at me like, who is this woman?
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_00: That's funny.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_00: That's great.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but it's it's gotta be a complicated business because r truly your inventory is is is is dying as it's moving, right?
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_00: I mean flowers are highly perishable.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I like to I like to think of the word fading instead of dying.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_02: Just because dying has m of a stronger emotion.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_02: Part of a flower, uh the beauty of a flower is that it fades.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_02: And yeah, absolutely.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_02: We can call it whatever we want to, but that is what is happening.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_02: The moment that we cut that flower, it's unlimited time.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_02: And we have ways, you know, it's all scientifically proven and We've done so much studies go into flowers and the food and the cooling and you know the the boxing and the paper that you use to help keep it as fresh as possible for as long as possible.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_00: So are you holding huge inventories in the States or no?
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_02: No.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_02: All of our stuff comes farm direct.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_02: You were buying from a farmer when you buy from Fifty Flowers.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_02: And we have about 350 farmers.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, we were talking earlier.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_02: I broke bread with one of them here in Fort Lauderdale at my house last night.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_02: In fact, I loved it.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_02: I had this international table.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_02: It was at, you know, Italy, Colombia, Ecuador, and it's just it's fun.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_00: I love that.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think that's great.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's amazing when you can uh, you know, sort of put that whole supply chain piece together uh and make it work so that the customer winds up with, you know, this great product that ships directly that they get the longevity out of it.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: Because I'm I'm used to I grew up s sort of in the food retail side of it, and we sold flowers in stores.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_00: And you went to the flower guy, you know, who's got a warehouse full of flowers over in, you know, wherever outside DC.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I I just thought that's how online flour people were, you know, getting flowers.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_00: And it like I said, it was uh mind-blowing to me when I saw that they were shipping direct from the farms because that to me was just uh I I thought that that was just fantastic.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_02: You know, that's my friend Yarden that you went to visit outside of DC in Silver Springs, right?
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_02: That's a traditional wholesale house, which is that's where I became a disruptor.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_02: You know, it goes, it used to go from the farm to the importer to the wholesaler to the florist, the consumer.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_02: And we cut all that out.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_02: We go from the farm directly to the consumer.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, that's amazing.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_00: You don't realize how how many steps there were in uh you know in the past.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_00: So it was pretty, pretty interesting.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_00: And do you uh you probably wouldn't have gotten there if you weren't in uh watching it in Ecuador and seeing how it it worked, would you?
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_00: Like if you just came to the States and said, I'm gonna sell flowers online, uh you probably if you didn't go to Ecuador ever, you probably wouldn't have understood how the flowers were grown and moved.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_02: In 2000, no.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_02: But today, it's it's it's feasible.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron Powell Yeah.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_00: Today I think people are much more in tune, you know, much more in tune with like food supply and and perishable supply chain and moving that faster.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_00: Because like I said, we we built we had built one of the first meal sites online back in in 2000.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, the site cost a tremendous amount to build, but but more importantly, just moving the food.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_00: It was, you know, we we tried to look at what, you know, uh Harry and David were doing and and what uh Omaha Stakes was doing.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_00: But, you know, when it came down to it, like FedEx, UPS, they didn't know how to handle it.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_00: They weren't doing the things that they're doing today.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_00: The supply chain wasn't built up.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_00: So it was a struggle.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_00: And the funny part for us was that we had these stores and we were trying to expand the store footprint.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_00: And the stores had great top line sales, great bottom line sales, uh, great bottom line profit.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_00: And we had this website, and we were looking for investment dollars, and we had all these investors coming through, and all they ever wanted to talk about was this website.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, website does a million dollars, loses$118,000 a year.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm like, uh, I said, I uh I'm ready to shut it down.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_00: And they're like, no, no, that's like the greatest thing.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, oh yeah, man, glad you think so.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, it was a it was a struggle, but then we wound up the you know, the the key was to we exited to a supermarket chain who then turned the website into their home shopping business, which was smart, right?
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_02: Smart.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_02: Very much so.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_02: Sure.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_00: You know, this this um the a lot of these meal sites, they're still um, you know, they're not profitable and and may not ever be profitable because the cost of acquisition versus how you know when you start the one thing I do know about humans is that there are certain things, certain areas that you can't mess around with the cost of, and that's food, right?
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_00: People in this country expect to be to buy good high-quality food, but not spend huge amounts of money on it.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_00: So when you start working with Middle America selling them, you know, these meal kits, and it's it you know blows their budget, you know, it's costing you two, three hundred dollars to acquire a customer, and you know, you don't have that long-term value, it doesn't it doesn't work.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_00: So Yeah.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_02: And it is, it's it's it's really interesting too, because just like with food, it's perishable.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, our our express carriers do not have refrigeration.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_02: And you have to work around that.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's a lot.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_00: So uh any we we we had a good conversation.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_00: We're running a little bit over.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_00: Any uh any last minute uh discussion points, comments you want to make, where can people find you, where can people go and buy from you?
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_02: Sure.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_02: If you're planning an event, come visit our website, fiftyflowers.com.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_02: You can follow us on social.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_02: It's spelled out f-i-f-l-o-w-e-r-s, and we'll help you with all your flower designs and a plan, and also with over 4,000 flower varieties.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_02: 4,000.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I'm just gonna say one peonies.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_02: We brought peonies to the marketplace year-round.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_00: Really?
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_02: We follow, we track them all across the United States, and we're also helping breeders develop different types of flower, like flowers, but in the peony bud form.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_02: We have um I can't say, but we have some coming out that are gonna be incredible.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_02: Incredible.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_00: And they're gonna be exclusive to you.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_02: Mm-hmm.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_02: They are.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_00: That's fantastic.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_00: I I I love the story.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_00: I I love what you built.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's amazing when you think about it how you really recreated that whole supply chain, because I don't think that uh a lot of people would have thought about it the way that you did.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_00: So that's pretty, you know, it's very impressive.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_02: So I congratulate you.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I have a great team too.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_02: I have to say.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_02: Sure.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_02: And great mentors and coaches, and just also, you know what?
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_02: I'm having so much fun still.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_02: Which is after almost I mean, it's been twenty-six years.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_02: Mm-hmm.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm still, it's like every day is a new day.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_02: And there are different challenges, but it's uh it's almost like it's rent and repeat.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_02: You get tougher and you get smarter.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes, you know.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes I don't know if I get smarter sometimes, but you know, I seem to of course you do.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_02: If you take time to reflect on on how you failed, you know, or why it didn't go well, which we do every single order that we get a complaint on, I know about.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_02: And we do.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_02: And that's that's where, you know, it can be just disheartening at times because it was a simple mistake on our behalf or it was a complicated mistake, but also making that up and in ways that you you make it right for the customer.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, absolutely.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_02: And we will not repeat that.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_02: We will not.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_02: We fix it.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_00: That's great.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's fantastic.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I appreciate you taking the time.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_00: I truly do.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_00: And uh we'll have your uh the link to your website in the description.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_00: We'll have your information in there, your background.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um and yeah, if anybody is looking for flowers, just go to fiftyflowers.com and uh and enjoy yourself.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_00: And thank you for taking the time to come on.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I I appreciate it, and we will see you guys next time.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_02: Bye y'all.