The story behind farm fresh flowers — AMA with Rhea & Yeshoda Karuturi
The challenges in getting fresh flowers direct to your home from farms through RoseBazaar
About RoseBazaar
RoseBazaar is a company to achieve something really simple: to make flowers a way of life for millions of households across India.
How it all started?
The story of Rose Bazaar started a long time ago — both us (we’re sisters if the names didn’t give that away) — grew up on floriculture farms: for as long as we can remember, we grew up hearing about harvest cycles, auction prices, and freight rates.
Our father started his rose farm in 1994, the year Yeshoda was born. He then grew to have farms in India, Ethiopia, and Kenya. Along the way, we saw how the industry changed dramatically — from unorganized, fragmented markets to the setting up of the International Flower Auction Bangalore, the first exports of cut roses from Bangalore, and the awe-inspiring Kenyan farm, which was the world’s largest rose farm.
We both have also worked at Karuturi, our family business — Yeshoda as the Executive Director and Rhea during her quarters off. While working in the cut flower industry, we saw first hand the enormous scalability in the industry, but what was shocking is that while bouquet flowers are big, most Indians don’t actually interact with flowers in that way.
Most Indians interact with traditional flowers — jasmine, marigold, chrysanthemum, bud roses, etc — every single day. They use it in their morning prayer, to decorate their hair, to hang up in their auto, car, offices. Traditional flower usage is a ubiquitous need, just like the daily newspaper or milk.
And yet this enormous sector of the flower market — making up 481,907 acres of production in India — has barely changed in the last 3 decades. The supply chain is still incredibly fragmented, unorganized and the wastage is as high as 40%. That’s around 192,000 acres of land being used to produce flowers that are just thrown away.
Flowers are passed through multiple levels of handling, and by the time they reach the end customer, it’s been 36–48 hours since their harvest, with no cold chain or proper care.
We saw an enormous opportunity here — with our experience in agriculture, we’re able to partner with farms to reduce the turnaround time to 12–24 hours. Innovation in the packaging helps us extend the flower shelf life by 2x to 5x, something unheard of in the current industry.
Now, let's ask some questions to Rhea & Yeshoda about their experiences and challenges while starting up and running Rosebazaar
Q. Can you brief us about whats the concept behind RoseBazaar?
Rose Bazaar serves the everyday need for traditional flowers that millions of Indian households have. As the daily newspaper or milk, this is a necessity without which the day cannot start, and our job is to get beautiful fresh flowers to you so you can start your day with happiness.
Q. Would you like to share how your MVP looked like and did you ever require to pivot?
When we started we ran a lot of experiments.
But our MVP was a simple “Assorted Flowers” box. We had a lot of options for customization like day of delivery, time of delivery, a doorbell option, different sizes, etc.
Over time through talking to customers and learning from them, we figured out what mattered to them and what was extraneous. We used that as the starting point to build from. We continue to run many mini experiments and make changes as we go — that’s our greatest advantage as a startup and I think we try to make the most of that.
Q. Since RoseBazaar isn’t targeting a tech-savvy audience, how do you think users would adopt an online platform like RoseBazaar?
I think that’s a fairly common misunderstanding. A lot of our audience is quite comfortable with ordering their groceries etc online, and that comfort is only growing. Think of who uses WhatsApp the most — that’s technology! The onus lies with us to listen to our customers, understand them, and design our tech to cater to them in the most seamless way possible. The tech that is not intuitive and user friendly to its audience is not good tech in my opinion.
Q. How do you think rose bazaar would compete with local vendors since the cost would be a major factor here and online platforms add to the cost of delivery and other costs?
We provide a product that stays fresh for up to 5 times what is found outside and uses a supply chain that takes 1/3 the time. So we definitely find that customers don’t compare us to alternatives — they see that our freshness, reliability, and quality sets us apart.
We also want to make our product widely accessible and so don’t charge a premium — in fact, all our prices match the market.
Q. Does rose bazaar plans to enter the market of gifting flowers to our loved ones?
We experimented with that early on, and while an interesting market, our strength, and belief lie in the traditional flower space which has so far been so ignored. We found traditional flowers to be a great product to scale and serving a truly everyday need, which was very exciting.
Experimentation is the key !
Q. What challenges did COVID brought to your business and day-to-day operations and how are you managing it?
We are currently fully operational and our supply chains and subscriptions are back up. COVID was definitely an interesting period — we chose to pause operations before the lockdown even happened because we were acutely aware of how a lot of our staff would be the most vulnerable and we felt it was our responsibility to proactively flatten the curve.
But we did the following important things during the lockdown:
- Having a lot of conversations with customers, which helped us grow a lot and was very productive.
- We also used the time to work on our tech stack and other projects which have helped us now accelerate our growth.
Q. What's behind the name RoseBazaar, any particular significance behind the name related to rose since RoseBazaar deals with all kinds of pooja flowers?
Well, the name has quite a bit of history for us personally — it was a name that our father and mother used very early on in their career. When we were discussing names, it seemed apt to draw inspiration from that given how much we’ve learned about the floriculture industry from them and how the idea for Rose Bazaar came about while watching our mom do puja in our house. We felt it captured the concept well because the “Bazaar” captures the variety, vivacity, and joy of these traditional flowers and “Rose” is a colloquial word that is used as a catch-all for all kinds of flowers in Kannada.
Q. How RoseBazaar stands now and what are the future plans for it?
We are currently expanding in Bangalore and expect to expand to other metros later this year.
If you are interested to know more about RoseBazaar, check their website out.
Fresh farm flowers from RoseBazaar are available at the following platforms:
