Focus On/Smalll Bu usines s Business arrangements to a Dropbox folder. The three also traveled around the U.S. visiting florists and flower markets to pitch their idea. Within six months, they’d signed up 500 vendors. ors. Santa (Calif.) company The Sa ant n a Monica M (Cali now ha has a staff of 30 full-time employees em and an has raised $5.5 $5 5 million in venture capital b from Andreessen Horowitz and A Capital. (Bloomberg LP, Estimated size of which owns wh ut flower we w wer e err the U.S. cut Bloomberg Bl kett market Businessweek, B Bu is i an investor in Andreessen H Horowitz.) it ) Daneshgar says revenue is growing at a rate of 15 percent to 20 percent per month. Charlotte D’Costa Taylor, who owns Floral Heights in Brooklyn, N.Y., says she won’t renew her five-year contract with Teleflora when it expires because she’s happier with BloomNation. She pays 27 percent of each order to the wire service, plus anywhere from $250 to $300 a year in fees for promotions such as posters and seasonal vases. Teleflora doesn’t share customer contact information with the florists who fill its orders, so D’Costa Taylor can’t market to the people who have actually bought her arrangements. When she gets a wire service order, she can’t be creative; she has to stick to the company’s design template. She points to a Father’s Day bouquet displayed ed on Teleflora’s website: Carnationss and alstroemeria stick up from a
$8
Daneshgar, Weisstein, and Shoraka set out to create “an Etsy for flowers”
vase resembling a red convertible. It sells for $55. “This is so not us,” she says. D’Costa Taylor joined BloomNation three years ago after one of her employees saw its fan page on Facebook. She says she now gets more orders through BloomNation than the wire service and is able to set her own prices, which was one of BloomNation’s biggest selling points when it was recruiting florists. Wire services usually set the prices for bouquets, with most arrangements on Teleflora going for $40 to $60, an amount D’Costa Taylor says doesn’t usually cover the total cost of the product. BloomNation’s bouquets start at about $60 and go for as much as $180. To help counter the sticker shock, the startup counsels its members to offer a few smaller, less expensive bouquets that will keep online customers browsing. Along with marketing advice, the service gives florists access to data that may help them win more orders. ers. “We can tell them that yellow w tulips are trending in Southern rn California,” Shoraka says. Since joining BloomNation, both Le Du and D’Costa Taylor say their online sales are up 10 percent every year and that they see more repeat customers. “What they’re doing is bringing transparency to a very big, opaque market,” says Ronny Conway of A Capital. After focusing on developing their network netwo of florists in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and other major An cities, Shoraka, Daneshgar, and c Weisstein are looking to break W
into the wedding and events planning market and trying to expand the company’s network of florists into other U.S. cities. Shoraka also has visions that BloomNation could one day become a global enterprise: “The way we’ve built it, the platform is very scalable.” —Jennifer Chaussee The bottom line Startup BloomNation charges florists less than half of what floral delivery giants do to process orders.
Finance
Insurance for the Agent-Averse PolicyGenius caters to millennials who prefer to shop online “Like, why is this guy asking me all this stuff?”
an online insurance broPolic PolicyGenius, kerage, is chasing the kind of customer kerag rather fill out a detailed who would w profile on a website than open up p to a total stranger. A 2014 Gallup poll p found that millennials, born between 1980 and 2000, are more than betw twice as likely as other generations to buy their policies online as through an agent. Insurers “still expect folks to deal with a face-to-face agent, and that’s just not how most people, particularly younger people, do things,” says Jennifer Fitzgerald, who co-founded PolicyGenius with Francois de Lame. “It can feel very intrusive, like, why is this guy asking me all this stuff?” Based in Brooklyn, N.Y., PolicyGenius sells life and disability insurance, along with policies that cover renters’ possessions and pets. The site has logged 300,000-plus users since its inception in July 2014, according to Fitzgerald, who adds that more than half of customers are millennials. Visitors to the company’s website select what type of coverage they want and how much, and are then asked to answer standard questions about their finances and health. Within a few minutes of submitting the application, the site returns quotes from some of the 26 different insurers that offer policies through PolicyGenius, including AIG, ING, MetLife, and Prudential Financial. Users can model different levels of coverage and cost by sliding a rule back and forth. Once a
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