All About FAB 🙌 (Flowers Across Brisbane)
Beginnings
Our Flowers Across â„¢ journey started one evening when Nadina arrived home after another dreary day as an accounts manager and declared 'I want to open a florist!'.
We never discussed whether it was a good idea or not. For us, it just seemed like the natural thing to do. It felt like the next step in our journey after doing everything together since we met all the way back in high school.
It also didn't matter that Nadina hadn't formally been a florist up until that point, she was just passionate about all things flowers and plants, and sharing the positive colourful vibes that flowers bring to people's everyday lives.
Bricks & Mortar
We bought an established but struggling shop in Hawthorn, Melbourne in 2004 and proceeded to have a crash course in all things floristry, leaving our home and moving into the space upstairs above the shop in order to do everything we could to make it work. The banks wouldn't give us a loan so we had to seek out someone to back us. Fortunately for us, a family friend came to the table and helped us gain the funding.
It wasn't without it's trials though, and in order to survive, we were open 7 days a week, getting up at 3am to go to the flower markets, opening the shop at 7am and closing the doors at 7pm.
We actually came very close to not making it work, having to sell our home to get through. We even had a day where we made $1.76 for the entire 12 hour day of being open when someone walked straight past all of our gorgeously laid out, colourful and enticing flowers in order to buy a solitary gift card!
Luckily, our customers loved Nadina's creativity and we started to grow.
Moving Online
When we bought the shop it didn't have a website, and we saw that as an opportunity to reach more people. We then proceeded to create a basic website and through much trial and (much, much more) error, orders started to trickle in.
The results were encouraging, but our shop website was clunky, expensive to maintain and not as user friendly as the websites we know and love today.
Out of frustration and a desire to do better for our customers, as well as still not having the funds available to have someone build a site for us, Rob did the next best thing and learnt to code.
We strongly felt that a website should be super easy to use and we wanted to make sure everyone in Melbourne could have easy flower delivery. Most websites out there at the time were anything but easy to purchase from, thus, the original website Flowers Across Melbourne was born.
Growing Pains
After growing revenues at the shop to 4x where we started, online was becoming a more important method of selling our incredible blooms. It was then that Nadina decided that it was time to shift our business to 100% online. We ran the numbers and on paper it seemed like we should be able to make it work, as long as we kept costs low, so in true entrepreneurial bootstrapping fashion, we sold the shop, moved out, rented a house and started working from home.
This worked fine whilst it was just the two of us, but our orders were growing fast and we soon found ourselves with multiple florists working out of our living room, delivery drivers coming up and down our driveway all day long and flower market dropoffs happening at 1am in the morning 🤪. Luckily our neighbours were amazingly patient, and it probably helped that we hired one of them.
We were finally established enough to move into a proper workspace and we now had a dedicated team of fantastic florists and customer experience superstars.
Expansion
With Melbourne now fully established and fast becoming one of Melbourne's most loved online florists, the next step was naturally a Sydney expansion.
We wanted to bring the same great customer experience vibe and easy ordering to Sydneysiders, so in 2015 we established Flowers Across Sydney and started the process all over again from a small space in Alexandria.
It was surprising to us how different the Sydney market was to Melbourne and how hard it was to get established, we thought we would copy/paste our Melbourne operations and be good to go, we were wrong!!😅 However, with the right team of people, and a steadily growing customer base, we made things work (phew!).
Now (2022), it's Brisbane's turn to experience the outcome of our years of trials and testing, to experience the very best that we can offer in online flower delivery. We honestly cannot wait to deliver market fresh flowers and plants to your friends and loved ones throughout Brisbane.
Giving Back & Sustainability Innovation
With Flowers Acrossâ„¢ we wanted to be a part of the individual communities we serve and are a part of.
We're a company that is built on giving, that's why we created Givr and Givr for Charity. Each week we ask people to send in a story about someone they know (or someone they don't) - someone who has helped or inspired them or someone who is always selfless, always thinking of others, or maybe someone who is struggling at the moment. We pick a story and send that awesome person some flowers to help spread acts of kindness.
Another initiative we are extremely proud of is our monthly Charity Givr program which has been running since 2015. Each month we select a charity that stands out to us for their incredible selfless work. We work to promote their name and their mission for the entire month. At the end of the month we donate 10% of the sales of one of our best selling fresh flower bouquets, and donate the earnings to the charity. We are thankful to be able to give back.
However our biggest and most exciting innovation will come with the launch of our Brisbane branch. FAB is our flagship for our first Zero Waste warehouse. We wanted to ensure we're doing the right thing by the planet wherever we can, after all, our product is literally grown in the earth, and we've been making some great progress already, both with our packaging and in the way we work, so we'll be sharing our progress along the way.
Connecting People
At the end of the day, we exist with the intention to help people connect in meaningful ways, so we'd like to invite you to try our service and see for yourself. Check out our range and delight someone today!
