Evighedsbuket and Your Local Flower

How a 4-day workweek made me able to create two new startups

About a year ago I and my colleague launched a side-project called Evighedsbuket (Eternal Bouquet). Not because we know anything about flowers, but because we wanted to know all aspects of running an e-commerce business. And we are firm believers in learn-by-doing. So we built our own business.

We are lucky enough to be employed at a company experimenting with a 4-day workweek. That made us able to focus at least one day on the side project.

We launched the webshop www.evighedsbuket.dk in only 2 days and we made our first sales within a couple of weeks. What do we sell? Dried flowers. Yes, dried flowers. We chose that because we saw a growing trend among Danes wanting to decorate their homes with dried flowers. And it was good for us to sell because we could stock it. Dried flowers don’t need water or sunlight.

It all started with one hypothesis and one outcome:

• We believe we can sell dried flowers online.
• We will measure it by having one customer ordering a bouquet.
• That customer must not be a friend nor family member.

It took us two weeks to get out the first customer. But since then we’ve had over 1000 orders.

This is what an Eternal Bouquet looks like. And yes, we started out by binding them ourselves.

We started slow, but growth has been steady for us since we started out.

One of the learnings we had, was how great an impact packaging has on the customer experience. We had a problem with people complaining about their bouquets even though nothing was wrong with them. The result was that we had to refund A LOT of customers. We had a hypothesis that the packaging was the main issue, so we changed it.

Our first packing. It did get the job done. However, the experience of receiving flower in a brown cardboard box was not good.

The new packaging was a much better unboxing experience

The change in packing resulted in a reduction of 85% in customer complaints. Which reduced our refund costs by 79%.

The next step

We’ve been running Evighedsbuket for close to a year now and we’ve learned a lot along the way. One of the major learnings we had was how broken the online flower trade is. Here’s why:

The online market for flowers (in Denmark) is dominated by Interflora and Euroflorist. All of which take huge fees for florists to sell through them. For example, Interflora takes DKK 25.000 in start-up costs and DKK 25.000 deposit. That is followed by a monthly subscription of DKK 1.000, as well as 30% transaction fee of the sale on a bouquet. And it also takes almost 2 months to get started.

We thought we could do better and offer florist a better experience by giving them a cheaper alternative. A webshop solution where they could display their own bouquets for a fraction of the price. We call it Your Local Flower:

www.yourlocalflower.dk

To test out our value proposition and prove our hypothesis, we’ve built a platform where local florists can get their own webshop free of charge for a payment fee of 10% of the revenue they have on the webshop. And we built it in 2 days, because why spend 3 months of development and resources when you can use existing technologies to launch quickly and validate your hypothesis?

Our model is based on selection and variety (longtail). Interflora has 16 different bouquets to choose from. They decide solely on how the bouquets should look. The florist doesn’t have a say.

So we turn it upside down. Give the florist a choice of what bouquets they want to put up for sale. We let the florists decide for themselves, which creates a much greater variety and selection. The thesis is that greater selection and geographical spread will drive more customers into our business than Interflora. Simply because ‘selection is king’. Thus, creating a positive feedback loop. More selection -> more customers -> more money to be made -> more florists -> even greater selection.

Interflora is somewhat similar to Just-Eat only having one menu card with a fixed number of dishes that Just-Eat decide. Now all the restaurants have to make that specific offer. So, you’re a Thai restaurant? That’s too bad now you have to make Italian.

The flower market in Denmark is close to DKK 1.7 per year. This is only accounting for physical sales in flower shops. If we count online we are in excess of DKK 3 billion per year. So the market is big. Besides, flowers are also a good item to sell as there are anniversaries all year round. Typically, however, the winter months are dull. Interflora has sales of DKK 40 million. on Mother’s Day alone.

So far, it has not been difficult to get florists on the platform, because:

1. Many florists aren’t fond of Interflora,
2. It is free to get started and you only pay when you start having revenue
3. It solves a major challenge for them — online sales.

Many florists are not technically strong. So we have a value proposition they appreciate: We take care of online marketing, webshop setup, SEO, payment etc. They just get an order and then they tie it up and make sure the customer gets it. All webshops are on a subdomain under our platform, so we get crazy good backlinking and SEO optimization when the florists share their link with customers, on Facebook, or anywhere else.

Of course, all of this is just a major hypothesis, but as long as florists are signing up. We are going on onwards and upwards.

Results

Evighedsbuket:

• 60% MoM growth in sales
• 15.000+ unique visitors every month

Your Local Flower:

• Conversion rate of 85% of approached Florists
• 10 florists signed up in one week.
• Covering 7 locations in Copenhagen

Roles

Everything.