Australia’s $1.4 billion dollar flower industry has a new player in Melbourne: Flowerfox. A first-of-its-kind marketplace in Australia, Flowerfox aims to support local and bring creative flair and profits back to florists.
We chat with their Founder, Leah Pooley.
Tell us about Flowerfox.
Flowerfox is a curated marketplace for flowers, connecting style conscious customers directly with boutique local florists selling unique, bespoke products online.
We hand-select our florists to ensure we only work with the ones who share our passion for personalised customer service and beautiful, contemporary design. They each get their own storefront where they have full creative freedom over what they sell and for how much.
Flowerfox is a hyperlocal model where you just type in the suburb you want to send flowers to and we show you all of the products by local florists that deliver to that area for $10. This allows us to keep the delivery cost low and straightforward for customers, as well as support the florist in that local area.
We have a huge focus on service excellence, with customer and florist happiness at the heart of everything we do. We’ve partnered with our florists every step of the way to ensure we’re building something that really solves their problems. For customers, we recognise how important these moments are and we’ll go above and beyond to make sure that moment is as magic as possible.
What inspired you to start Flowerfox?
I’m a country girl from WA who grew up on a property with acres of sprawling gardens, so I have always loved being surrounded by flowers. Living away from my family, I buy flowers online a lot and was constantly being let down by the lack of contemporary options, the hefty price tag and the fact that what arrived was rarely like the picture.
I noticed florists closing down and couldn’t understand why they weren’t embracing technology to evolve their business. I started speaking with florists and flower buyers to truly understand the problem and found that customers want to buy bespoke flowers from local florists but many florists don’t have the time or resources to have their own online store so people can’t access their products. The ones that do can be hard to find as they can’t afford to compete with large online only retailers who dominate Google with unethical practices and huge marketing budgets. Many of these sites pose as local florists and then get the florists to fulfil the orders in the background for a fraction of the price. Florists don’t enjoy working this way as they’re copying someone else’s dated design rather than using their own creative flair. We wanted to cut out the middle man and provide a platform that connected florists directly to their customers.
Tell us about your career and background.
I’ve been in the marketing world for 13 years working for award winning digital and creative agencies on iconic global brands both in the UK and Australia. I specialise in all things marketing, branding, digital strategy, product management and operations. I’m passionate about solving problems through innovation and love any initiative that uses technology for social good.
Describe a typical work day for you.
As a solo founder, my typical work day involves….doing everything. I could be writing content for our blog, testing a new feature on our site, posting to our Instagram account, doing a product shoot with florists, be knee deep in forecasting spreadsheets or one of a million other things that seem to be on my never ending to do list. It’s all pretty fun stuff though I must admit. Except for the spreadsheets.
What advice do you have for those wanting to start a business?
Just do it! The best thing I ever did in my life was quit my job and launch myself into entrepreneurial life. Yes, there are risks, and financially it can be a challenge but you will learn so much about yourself and what you want out of life.
The lessons are worth every stress and every cent that comes with starting your own business and the good thing about it is, you can’t fail! Because even if you fail it isn’t a failure. It’s only a learning and that will help you to grow.
What’s next for you, and Flowerfox?
We’re ramping things up in Melbourne and have started speaking with florists in other states getting ready to scale Australia wide. Next stop for us is Sydney! I’m also looking for a tech cofounder to join the team to help take our product to the next level. It’s exciting times ahead and I can’t wait for every minute of it.
Flowerfox is delivering handcrafted blooms around inner Melbourne, direct from local florists and made with love: www.flowerfox.com.au
