How a Struggling Flower Shop Became a Booming Business

In 2018, Michael Jacobson was fresh out of college when he got an unexpected call. His uncle had been running a local flower shop called French Florist for 40 years, but he was burned out and wanted Jacobson to help him sell it. Jacobson said yes — but the more he learned about the floral industry, the more he realized there was a bigger opportunity there.

The way Jacobson saw it, all local florists suffered from the same three problems. First, most orders came through aggregators like 1-800-FLOWERS, whose commission and fees often took north of 40% of a sale’s revenue. Second, local shops couldn’t buy directly from flower farms, so they had to go through expensive middlemen, which reduced the freshness of the flowers. And third, local shops were working with outdated technology. If Jacobson could solve all of these issues, he figured, he could build a competitive business — so he became the CEO of French Florist, and transformed it into a budding franchise which is on track to have 11 locations by late November. Here, he explains how he did it.

How did you free yourself from that 40% cut to aggregators?

Because we were already paying such a high commission, that gave us a lot of budget to try to acquire clients more directly.

In other words: You were already losing 40% on these orders, so why not spend that money on marketing your own business?

Yes. When someone buys directly from you instead of an aggregator, you get that client’s data — and the second time they purchase from you, you’re not paying that acquisition cost anymore.

What attracted those customers?

We invested into website conversion rate and search engine optimization, plus ads. Your traditional florists might get 10% to 40% of their clients from the internet. We get 95% while still getting the same amount of walk-ins. We also got creative on the client retention side — which is equally as important as client acquisition. We send a handwritten card to every first-time client. We also tried to increase our average order value to help our unit economics. It was not one magic pill that made the business explode.

Next, you had to figure out how to source directly from farmers. They don’t generally sell to local florists, because local florists often aren’t able to order in bulk. So what did you do?

It took a few years, until we were spending millions per year on flowers. Then it became a very virtuous cycle. If we have a better supply chain, we’re gonna have a better product at a lower price and provide a better client experience. Then we’re going to have better client retention, which allows us to increase revenue further, which allows us to invest in our supply chain deeper, or maybe make our technology better.

What was your approach on the technology side?

It was asking: If I could have any tech that existed, what would it be? Technology is in a wonderful space. The question is not whether it’s possible, it’s whether you have the money to do it. We were spending $13,000 a year on ink for printing out orders. But we could buy five or six iPads for $2,000 and develop a small application to digitize that process. We also had the creativity in our team to drum up some really fun ideas. We came up with a way to offer the option to record a video message that comes with the flowers through a QR code on the card.

When you were a local shop, you were frustrated with the aggregators like 1-800-FLOWERS. Now you’re a franchisor, and your franchisees are paying you royalties. As you grow, how do you avoid becoming a version of the thing you fought against?

We question ourselves constantly. Where the aggregators are charging 40%, we charge 6%. And we’re not just aggregating orders. We’re fulfilling them from a local French Florist and have control all the way through. Our goal is to resurrect what people have always known flowers to be — a reminder that life is beautiful — after our industry messed up delivering that experience.