The Client

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A large-scale U.S. floral grower and distributor with estimated average annual revenue of approximately $150 million and more than 600 employees during peak season. The company served major mass-market retailers while also operating and fulfilling multiple e-commerce floral brands.

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The Challenge

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The company's owned e-commerce business had been operating for approximately six years but continued to underperform the third-party e-commerce brands the company fulfilled for.

​Management was considering shutting the division down.

​The problem wasn't a single underperforming marketing channel. Growth was being constrained across the business-from product assortment and channel strategy to pricing, inventory, customer expectations, and fulfillment.

​A cross-functional examination of the business revealed opportunities to improve both revenue growth and profitability.

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The Strategy

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Eliminating channel cannibalizaton

 

​Essentially the same products were being offered through both Shopify and Amazon- at lower prices on Amazon. Customers therefore had little incentive to purchase through the company's direct channel.

​Differentiating the channels allowed Shopify to focus on higher-margin, premium and luxury bouquets while Amazon focused on simpler, higher-volume offerings.

​The strategy created clearer reasons to purchase through each channel while supporting stronger margins on the direct-to-consumer Shopify assortment.

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Expanding the product strategy

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An assortment of approximately 10-15 bouquets provided limited variety compared with established online floral competitors.

​Expanding the assortment to approximately 30-40 offerings created greater consumer choice and strengthened the brand's competitive position

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Removing constraints on Amazon growth

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Amazon inventory had typically been maintained at only about 25-50 units per bouquet, artificially limiting available sales volume.

​Increasing availability into the thousands- and, for some products, tens of thousands- of units per bouquet removed a significant constraint on marketplace growth.

​Fulfillment speed presented another opportunity. Rather than treating Amazon's three-to-four day fulfillment allowance as the operating target, fulfilling orders immediately was followed by improved marketplace performance and substantially greater sales volume being directed to the business.

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Repositioning the brand

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The company's digital presence reflected its origins as a flower farm rather than the lifestyle aspirations of the consumer purchasing the product.

Repositioning the e-commerce business as a consumer lifestyle brand created a stronger identity for direct-to-consumer market and better aligned the brand with its target customer.

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Increasing demand generation

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Social media activity had been limited to once or twice per week, with similarly limited promotional communication.

Increasing social activity to three posts per day and promotional email campaigns to approximately three per week created consistent customer-facing marketing cadence rather than relying on occasional promotion.

 

Protecting margin by improving the customer journey

 

High levels of refunds and replacement bouquets were eroding profitability.

Tracing the problem upstream revealed a mismatch between customer expectations and the realities of overnight flower delivery.

Restructuring the website's customer Q&A and expectation-setting content gave customers a clearer understanding of what to expect when flowers arrived and how the product would develop after delivery.

Refunds and replacement requests subsequently fell to nearly zero, eliminating a significant source of avoidable margin leakage.

 

Addressing fulfillment constraints instead of suppressing demand

 

As sales accelerated, fulfillment capacity became a constraint and deactivating products was proposed as a way to reduce volume.

But reducing proven demand would have solved the wrong problem.

Separating production according to product complexity offered a more growth-oriented solution: simpler, high-volume Amazon bouquets could move through machine production while premium and luxury arrangements remained hand-produced.

This allowed increased demand to be addressed as a capacity problem rather than a sales problem.

 

Improving warehouse workflow

 

The fulfillment process also contained unnecessary labor and movement, with employees repeatedly traveling between warehouse coolers to retrieve flowers during bouquet assembly.

Staging each day's required product in advance in the cooler nearest the wrapping area reduced unnecessary movement and created a more efficient production workflow.

 

The Results

 

• The cross-functional turnaround produced measurable commercial results:

• 2074% sales growth

• Previous full-year profit generated within the first quarter.

• #6 to consistently #1 among the company's e-commerce brands

• Multiple #1 company-wide weekly sales rankings, outperforming major mass-market accounts during those periods

• Approximately 2-3x expansion in product assortment

• Substantially improved Shopify product margins

• Refunds and replacement requests reduced to nearly zero

• The e-commerce operation went from being considered for shutdown to becoming the company's consistently highest-performing e-commerce brand

 

Why It Worked

 

The turnaround did not come from solving a single marketing problem.

Growth required understanding how channel strategy, pricing, merchandising, inventory, brand positioning, demand generation, customer experience, production and fulfillment affected one another.

Rather than treating those areas as isolated functions, the business was evaluated as one interconnected growth system.

That cross-functional approach uncovered opportunities that would have been missed by examining marketing, sales or operations in isolation.