Tulips To Table? These MBAs Try To Disrupt FTD

‘I FELT LIKE I’D BEEN BEAT UP’

Serendipitously, Tabis had recently had a frustrating experience. He tried to order flowers online for a family member. “I was disgusted by the entire experience,” says Tabis. “For something that’s supposed to be a kind and happy gift-giving moment, at the end of buying these flowers, I felt like I’d been beat up.”

Tabis saw one of those $19.99 flower ads on Google that seem to always pop up around Valentine’s Day. He clicked on it and started the process, but when he got to the checkout, the price ended up being more than $70. “I was like, how could this be legal? To tell me the price is this but when I get to checkout they add in all these fees,” says Tabis, noting he went through “all the big brands” and they were all the same.

“I ended up just giving in and saying fine, I’ll pay $74 for something that was supposed to be $19.99,” continues Tabis. “And when they arrived, it wasn’t even what I ordered and they were dead two days later for my family member.”

Tabis realized the consumer side of floral delivery was just as broken as the sourcing side. And so he pitched Montúfar an idea. “I said, ‘you keep working your job, I’ll quit mine and work on this full-time and be your boss,” Tabis says laughing. “Which ended up being a conversation we had, but he eventually agreed to that. And so off we went.”

PROBLEM ONE? NO RICH FRIENDS OR FAMILY

Off they went, indeed. The first problem? They didn’t have any rich friends or family members. “Our friends and family are not multi-millionaires,” Tabis says bluntly. “Lots of people come up with these friends and family rounds with like $1 million and I’m like, ‘who are your friends and family? That’s pretty amazing. Mine are not those same people.'”

Tabis convinced his apparently less-practical mother to invest $1,000 in his floral delivery dream. He got another $2,000 from his sister. Montúfar and Tabis each pitched in $4,000 and a couple of his “Bain buddies” chipped in $1,000 each for a total of $13,000 to start. They hired a part-time engineer and an intern from UCLA to do the coding. “Ten weeks later, we launched what was probably one of the worst websites in the history of time,” laughs Tabis. “But it allowed someone to order flowers straight from the Volcano (the original farm) and it worked. We hacked it together as much as you could hack something together.”

REINVENTING AN INDUSTRY

And now more than three years later, they’re going head-to-head with those companies that lead to such frustration for Tabis. “At the end of the day, we’re competing with companies with a lot more people, a lot more data and a lot more knowledge,” concedes Tabis. And even the traditional giants like 1-800-Flowers.com and FTD.com have eco-friendly options. But they have yet to cut out all the middle-men. And startups like Bouqs are stepping in to claim vulnerable parts of the market.

San Francisco-based BloomThat came to the market in 2013 and has raised more than $7.6 million. Washington D.C.-based UrbanStems, launched in 2014, is another venture claiming only to source from eco-friendly South American farms.

Still, having an actual farm manager on the ground in Ecuador continues to be a point of advantage for Bouqs, which is now producing 1.5 billion stems a year from their network of farms. “My co-founder has thought, how do I make this better for my farm and then how do we extend it to other farms,” says Tabis, noting they now have “hundreds of thousands” of customers in each state.

“Let’s make this a no-brainer for the customer where they get fresher flowers for cheaper and better customer service,” continues Tabis. “But let’s also make this a no-brainer for the farm where they make more money, the processing is really easy and we provide all the packing materials so they don’t have to worry about buying extra inventory.”

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