Christina Stembel, founder and CEO of Farmgirl Flowers, shares her strategy for dressing when she needs to feel strong.
The following written content by Marina Liao
Our favorite entrepreneurs are disruptors in their industry, whether they happen to serendipitously fall into it or actively seek out that opportunity to make a change. Farmgirl Flowers founder Christina Stembel is the latter, quitting her full-time job at Stanford University to launch a flower delivery business that was bootstrapped by her own $49,000 in savings.
“I was intentional about starting a business. I wanted to check some boxes and I came up with 4,000 ideas before Farmgirl Flowers. I didn’t want to take someone’s idea and tweak it. I wanted to innovate,” she says.
Stembel says she was dissatisfied with the floral offerings out there and struggled to find the type of arrangements she envisioned in her head. Additionally, back in 2010 when she was brainstorming, the whole flower delivery process was archaic and simply not that special. Then Farmgirl Flowers entered the picture, with its perfectly-designed-for-Instagram arrangements of in-season peonies, tulips, roses, anemones, and more, setting Stembel on a journey she still finds fulfillment and joy in 10 years later.
The journey itself has had its ups and downs. For Stembel, who grew up on a farm in rural Indiana and never attended college, everything about the flower industry was self-taught via books and videos, from learning the names of the varieties to understanding techniques like processing the flowers. “I was like, What do you mean? Then I watched YouTube videos and was like, Oh, it just means stripping the foliage off,” she explains.
Stembel says she initially had no budget for marketing. Instead, she would place floral bouquets in coffee shops around San Francisco with a small set of marketing cards. “I would make sure the flowers were in different neighborhoods and that they were displayed on the actual bar where people pick up their coffee,” she says. “[After a few weeks] I’d count how many cards were taken. If it was 40 or 50 cards taken, I would put another arrangement out. The bouquets [took] $20 [to make].”
The flowers were all arranged by Stembel in her apartment until her landlord caught on to her business. She eventually moved her operations to a stall in the San Francisco flower market. Attention to detail—Stembel’s burlap wrap around the floral bouquets became her signature—plus the coffee shop guerrilla marketing worked. Fans started to spread the word about Farmgirl Flowers to their family and friends. Read more from Marie Claire.
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