The Superbowl of Flowers - Part II

This year’s article about the business of retail flowers is about all the preparation.? As I learn more and more about what goes into that arrangement arriving at your home, I’m blown away by how much work it is.? Like a team preparing for the Super Bowl or a submarine at sea, most of that work is hidden beneath the surface.

Setting the stage

At its core, In Bloom Flowers is an asset light manufacturing company. We take raw materials (flowers, vases, etc.) and assemble them by hand into a finished product using a bill of materials. Planning for Valentine’s starts in September – we decide how many arrangements we’ll offer at what price points, create a bill of materials (we call them recipes) for each arrangement, and then forecast the unit sales. This process allows us to calculate the total number of stems by variety (17,000 red roses, 1,500 white hydrangeas, etc) that we’ll need to purchase for the holiday. For 2024, we purchased about 96,000 individual stems of flowers for about $85,000 to be sold between 2/10 – 2/14.

"Plans are useless, planning is invaluable" - Military saying

Flowers are delicate and perishable. Sometimes we can’t use the flowers we receive because they arrived bad. We also order directly from farms all over the world – language and communication barriers are real and can sometimes lead to shipping errors (case in point - about 1,000 stems we ordered for 2024 Valentine’s weren’t shipped or arrived late).

When the correct flowers don’t arrive from a farm during a holiday, it is often impossible to find a last-minute substitute. If we don’t receive 800 pink hydrangeas that were supposed to go into 400 flower arrangements, on the fly we must figure out what to do with the flowers that did arrive for those 400 arrangements.? Fortunately, the In Bloom team has the infrastructure, confidence and competence to be flexible and adaptable to things not going to plan:

• In <30 minutes the team at In Bloom can design a new arrangement from scratch, create a bill of materials and instructions to support the design and assembly process, price it, shoot beautiful pictures and a 360 degree spin for the website, post it with copy, and start accepting orders.?
• This go to market time makes these supply chain issues into non issues. Plan like an optimist, prepare like a pessimist. ?

Team

What facilitates everything we do is the team. In Bloom is blessed to have a team of tenured, talented and committed managers and stuff. The ideas I get to write about came from various staff members and the In Bloom Flowers was excited to try them. The ideas below contributed to YTD 2024 revenue being 33% higher than in 2022, our first year of ownership.

• Don Irving The Operations Director staffed up early for Valentine's Day to let the temporary folks get in the groove and mesh with the full timers so that on game day, it's smooth
• Jennifer Lane The Customer Service Manager preparing sales scripts, ticketing systems, and training the team on how to handle common customer situations.
• Dennis McCarrell - The warehouse manager handling a tire blow out by swapping vehicles and coordinating with the customer service team to contact customers whose arrangements might arrive later than expected .?
• Lauren Hemesath managing store inventories and processes to making sure customers get a friendly and efficient experience.?
• Kenda Killion the Production Manager minimizing wasted design time by organizing flowers into “Recipe Carts” that contain the exact number of stems by variety necessary to produce a specific quantity of a specific arrangement.

• Megan Ohail Brand Manager – stepping into the critical role of routing arrangements into delivery trips– making sure her routes are dense (not spread out over a large geography which wastes driver time) and factoring in Nick’s growth initiatives to use a remote store as a one day distribution center.
• An observant team member seeing a delivery going to a VIP/celebrity and alerting Nick, who could then act on the opportunity of serving a customer with a wide network.
• Mark Lein and the Flyline Search Marketing ? team running a world class advertising campaign to draw customers to our website
• @Monte Butts at @Bill Doran allowing us to organize flowers before delivery to our four locations in his large cooler – this keeps our flowers cold ensuring they last as long as possible for our customers.

Trade offs - "run out or have too many?"

-????????? Something I like to ask Nick is “Would you rather run out of flowers or have extra?” (Anyone who knows Nick can guess his answer.)? It comes up while planning inventory for the holiday season.? If you run out, you’ve missed revenue, missed a chance to wow a customer, and maybe upset a long term customer by not being able to serve them.? Running out also puts you behind for the days after the holiday when people still come to buy arrangements for birthdays, anniversaries, sympathy, etc.? On the other hand, order too much, the flowers expire and you dispose of them at a loss.

-????????? Buying early vs buying late.? We (Nick) did the math.? It costs about double per stem to order locally versus placing the orders a few months ahead.? Any operations expert out there ( Gad Allon )know the equation for how much we should order early/at risk based on this?

-????????? Time allocation is the biggest trade off in small business.? The trade offs produce a visceral feeling.? The team has invested a tremendous amount of time, brainpower and energy into developing a Material Resource Planning (MRP) type system.? We know which stems and how many go into which arrangement and how many of those arrangements were sold.? The team uses this to help plan.? It’s not a crystal ball but it helps reduce the ordering error and helps with the nerves (more to come).?

-????????? Making this type of time and energy investment in a small business is hard in a way I can’t effectively communicate.? Any of the things that seem obvious like ‘just look at your historical buying and use that to forecast’ simply don’t exist – they don’t exist for a reason and it’s never because the person didn’t have the idea.? It’s a trade off between doing this or calling on your customers, doing this or finding a new payroll provider, doing this or spending time with the team.

- ?? Another shout out is due to the team at In Bloom.? The team does such a fantastic job of taking initiative and dealing with issues at the lowest level possible which often allows Nick to stay out of the day to day fire fighting so he can spend the time needed to build out infrastructure necessary to make the business better and to scale.

It's a lot of little things

-????????? We break up DFW into 14 zones.? Each zone covers 5-20 zip codes.? Occasionally a zip code comes through that isn’t pre assigned to a zone.? Looking at this big map makes it very easy for anyone to make the judgment for which zone makes most sense for that arrangement.

-????????? Drivers are sent out with replacements.? Each vehicle receives a kit of extra stems, gifts, water, etc.? That way if an arrangement has an issue, the driver isn’t faced with “Do I deliver something that isn’t perfect but is still pretty good?” or “Do I have to come all the way back to a store or to the HQ and possibly miss a delivery time window?” (We get to schools by 3 PM and businesses by 5 PM).? They can just make that replacement on their own in the field.

"Success = Quality + Service" - In Bloom

-????????? Valentine’s Day was Wednesday.? The All Hands call to celebrate a successful holiday was at 10 AM on Friday and the “Hot Wash” Lessons Learned meeting was Friday at 2 PM.

-????????? Qualification cards – You can take the submariner out of a submarine, but not the submarine out of the submariner.? Qualification cards (and lessons learned sessions) are a foundational part of the nuclear Navy.? In Bloom implemented a training item checklist (qualification card) for new hires in the store.? Said differently: learn these X things, to have this title and this pay.? Learn these Y thing to have this new title and this new pay rate.? It gives structure and predictability for the new hire.? They know what good looks like.? This also turns it into a process which can be modified and refined, rather than a hope.

It takes nerve

-????????? Imagine planning for your big annual party.? You’ve been planning since the last one ended, you have the venue booked, theme planned, invites sent out, signature cocktail planned, glasses purchased, ingredients ready, non refundable deposits to catering and the DJ, and your outfit is planned.? Now imagine that and 5 days out from the event you’ve received 20% of your RSVPs.? As of 2/9/24, 20% of the orders for the entire holiday period had been placed and yet everything is in motion assuming 100% of people will come.? Everything has to be purchased well ahead of time.? It is beyond nerve wracking to be so exposed ahead of the demand.

-????????? The holiday is stereotypically about men buying presents.? Men allegedly wait until the last minute.? This creates the operational challenge of taking, preparing, and delivering thousands of last minute orders but is also a business opportunity. Over 1,000 orders during this year’s holiday were taken, processed, and delivered within 24 hours.

Culture matters

-????????? I continue to be blown away by the culture of the team.? From top to bottom, people care.? They care so much.? Everyone wants to deliver exceptional flowers.? Everyone wants to get better.? Everyone wants to succeed and everyone wants to help each other.? This whole article is about how hard it is and yet people have fun.

-????????? Our mantra is to treat every arrangement like it is the only arrangement. While we may sell 3,500 arrangements over a 3 day period, to each customer the only one that matters is the one they receive. The team does an incredible job of internalizing this reality – each arrangement we craft and deliver may be the only arrangement a recipient receives ever. So we need to make each one perfect.

-????????? Everyone believes we will win.? There is this organizational confidence.? It’s as if we all know how to play. We know the game. We’ve practiced for the last 365 days.? Now we just execute.?

-????????? As a fun view behind the curtain, there is a bulletin board with copies of notable card inscriptions.? If your note is telling someone they have a nice butt (using a different word), you are making your florist chuckle.

Do the next right thing

The standards only get higher.? Each year builds on the last.? What feels new in 2024 becomes part of ‘how we do things at In Bloom Flowers’ in 2025.? The bold new things we try in 2025 become the obvious way in 2026.? I couldn’t be more excited to see how the In Bloom story plays out and couldn’t be more proud to call Nick my best friend and partner.