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.
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 <a href="http://farmgirlflowers.com/" rel="nofollow">http://farmgirlflowers.com/</a> : locally farmed flowers with beautiful arrangements and home delivery.<p>(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!)
So the big differentiator here is delivery in under 90 minutes?<p>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.<p>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.<p>Are you opening locations in each locale wish to serve? That's capital intensive and leads to procurement issues.<p>If you gain traction, I hope you're ready for what Valentines/Mother's day bring.
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.<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/video/full-bloom-online-flower-purchases-19695280" rel="nofollow">http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/video/full-bloom-online-flow...</a>
[2] <a href="http://www.starbrightnyc.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.starbrightnyc.com/</a>
This is a space ripe for disruption.<p>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:<p><a href="http://www.resellerratings.com/store/ProFlowers" rel="nofollow">http://www.resellerratings.com/store/ProFlowers</a><p>New startup formula:<p>1. Find "(Expertsexchange|ProFlowers) of X"<p>2. Build "(StackOverflow|Uber|Yelp) of X", don't sell your entire customer base down the river<p>3. Profit
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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?
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.<p>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.<p>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!
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.<p><a href="http://i.imgur.com/GUZRdUE.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/GUZRdUE.png</a>
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.
Nice idea but holy crap don't do this:<p>> One intrepid friend of mine suggested: “Find two people you think clearly should be banging and send them each flowers addressed from the other.”
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.
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 <i>tech</i>crunch and <i>hacker</i> news if YC hadn't taken them on.
"Indeed, while there are your typical use cases like boyfriend-forgets-anniversary"<p>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.<p>I've never given a SO flowers, such a practise seems pretty silly. It's like paying for caring.
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."
If people are curious about the price, they seem to start at 14 tulips for $35.00 or a succulent plant for $25.00.<p>I guess given my income and life priorities, I can't afford that much money for a one-time gift; but more power to those of you that can :)
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.