Consumers in U.S. collectively spend $18 billion a year on flowers. The companies had to figure out how to scale all of it and make the business large and bigger in scope. Flowers are not only for special events rather consumers prefer buying fresh produce regularly and send flowers to Japan, US, Australia or any other country in the world. For this, companies have come up with subscription commerce where fresh flowers from local dealers are delivered on doorsteps. Companies had to spend around 9 months figuring out the first version of the online flower company. The companies must organize payments among multiple partners out of whom many have only dealt with cash and paper based transactions. The tech push enables the companies to get fresh and competitively priced flowers from its network of 140 farms.
If the flowers get delivered directly from farmers to consumers the farmers would not get the short end of the stick and the consumers will also not get a sense of being ripped off on pricing. Digital platforms tying up with local farmers offer more transparency about supply and pricing, there is promotion of sustainability, usage of technology to reduce friction and bringing more efficiency to the entire process.
Despite all the e-commerce platforms, $100 billion global flower industry is not a tach savvy space in retail as the produce comes from farms and in general agriculture lags the technical power of digitalised ordering, payment & delivery. The consumers also are used to dealing with local brick and mortar florist. Digitalising flower businesses stand out compared to the ones which aren’t. Customers are becoming consciously aware of sustainability and it matters to them where the produce is coming from. Eventually this will be the main factor and the world is headed towards it thus the digitalised platform will benefit more and is the future for the industry.
