When you think of ‘disrupters’ in San Francisco, an image of a teched-out male in a hoodie likely comes to mind.
Christina Stembel turns that assumption 180 degrees.
She is the Founder and CEO of Farmgirl Flowers, a direct-to-consumer e-commerce flower company. Stembel proves that persistence, gumption, and an eye for design is key to her small business success.
Stembel was raised in Indiana on a corn and soybean farm and despite not going to college, she’s running a multi-million-dollar company in one of the most expensive cities in the world, San Francisco. Farmgirl Flowers is generating over $15 million in revenue, and growing. Stembel’s hope is to scale and become a $1 billion company.
That’s nothing short of impressive for an entirely bootstrapped company that she started from her dining room in 2010. “I wasn’t going to be able to raise capital out-the-gate. I didn’t have the pedigree,” Stembel explains. “So, I needed it to be a business I could bootstrap with my own savings account, which was $49,000. Turns out, that’s not a lot of money when starting a business!”
Besides being bootstrapped, Stembel says, Farmgirl Flowers ticked a few other boxes she had in mind for entering her first business. “I wanted a business that could grow really big, so I did not want the maximum market share I could acquire to be one-million dollars,” explains Stembel. “The flower industry is a $35 billion industry, the e-commerce space alone is $3 billion, and there were four players who made up three-quarters of that space, which meant that there was plenty of room to take market-share from those players.”
Stembel also embraced a “less-is-more” philosophy to not only better serve consumers, but to also have a positive environmental imprint. She looked to the In-and-Out Burgers and Shake Shack business models where they only offer a few items, but do them very well. Stembel says that meant instead of having hundreds of lackluster flower-arrangement options, her company would only offer consumers a few beautiful options to choose from on her site.
“The consumer doesn’t need to spend an hour sorting through a hundred different options to find the least ugly one,” Stembel explains. “And then when they send it to the recipient, it doesn’t look anything like what was supposed to look like online. What you see is what you get with Farmgirl Flowers.”
To ensure each arrangement is made up to snuff, the company makes every bouquet in-house in its San Francisco warehouse. All of this, in turn, according to Stembel, enables Farmgirl Flowers to reduce its waste by 40 percent.