About Lily's Florist - Australia

Our Story: No Boardrooms, Just a Dinner Table

For the last 15 years this about us page has been generic, kind of corporate, that said a whole lot, but nothing at all. It lacked depth, it didn't show 'our story', how we evolved, our trials and tribulations and how we ended up here. 

We decided it was time for a change because on reflection, it's kind of a cool yarn and it goes a long way to backing up the claim on our website "we're Australian owned and operated' and, we think, puts a face to Lily's Florist. We're not a multinational business, we have no marketing team, no boardroom, no team of solicitors, like some of our competitors, we are literally a Mum and Dad run business with two kids who are 14 and 18, and most of our business decisions are made at the dinner table, or on the many trips to netball or school. So with that, we thought we would lay it all on the table, the very long version, about how we ended up going from working in regular jobs in Sydney, to an Australia-wide delivery network of over 800 florists.

Our Story in Brief

For those in a hurry, here's the very short version of our 18 year journey:

• It started with a sea change. In 2006, we left our 9-5 jobs in Sydney, bought a tiny flower shop in Kingscliff NSW against our accountant's advice, with a baby on the way and zero experience.
• We discovered our future by accident. An old Yellow Pages ad led to so many flower requests that we pivoted, creating a unique partnership model to help local florists across Australia.
• We survived on grit (and a baby bottle craze). An unlikely boom in our organic baby product business funded the early growth of our flower network, allowing us to go "all-in" on our real passion.
• Today, we're still a family business. That network has grown from one brave florist in Murwillumbah to a family of over 800. We're still proudly Australian, still run by a Mum and Dad, and still dedicated to connecting people through the simple joy of flowers.

Now, if you've got a cup of tea or a long black coffee, here's the full story...

From Sydney's Rat Race to a Rickety Bridge

We were both (Siobhan and Andrew) working 9-5 jobs in Sydney in events and marketing, we were expecting a baby, living in Drummoyne in an apartment. In July 2006, stricken with morning sickness, in the dead of winter, despite our age, we thought there has to be more than life to this and we felt like needed a sea change. But what do and where...

We had saved some money from working since leaving University, and now having an interest in organic products, baby products and gifting, we had the idea to follow that dream and either buy and existing business if we could afford it, or start a new one. But, yet again, the 'where' was the burning mystery.

We sat down and narrowed our list down from over 30 locations to just 5, with the only premise that it be warm, well warmer that Sydney anyway, and be regional or even country or beach town, as we wanted desperately to get away from the 'rat race'. Our final 5 was Byron Bay, Ballina, Kingscliff (that we had never been to, only heard about), Bangalow or somewhere on the Gold Coast QLD.

With flights booked, we spent a week travelling those locations and getting the vibe. Byron Bay was awesome back then, but way out of our budget to start or buy a business, Bangalow felt a little isolated but we did and still do loved it, the Gold Coast was too hectic, Ballina was it, that is until we drove across the old rickety, one lane, timber bridge coming from the south into Kingscliff. It was one of those perfect days, if you know Cudgen Creek, it was 1PM, the tide was high, it was as close to something in Fiji or any Pacific Island as we had ever seen, it was simply beautiful, but was beauty alone enough?

That night we stayed at Mantra at Salt in Kingscliff and planned the next day. The thought was to get an early breakfast on Marine Parade, have a peruse of the shops, then head back to Ballina to fly back to Sydney. After breakfast at Choux Box, we were walking down the main street when we walk past a florist and gift shop, walking past it and not thinking too much, we did a double take and saw a small sign in the window, 'For Sale'. Food for thought.

Buying a Flower Shop with Zero Experience

After much deliberation on returning to Sydney, we decided that Kingscliff was it, and over the next few months, we found a rental Casuarina, started packing, said our goodbyes, and headed North. Now settled into our new rental, we noticed that the florist was still for sale, but we were also in negotiations on a lease for a shop down the road. We worked out it would be actually cheaper buying Kingscliff Florist and it's lease, all the stock, flowers, fittings, and gifts, than the lease of the vacant shop.

We hired a local accountant and got some advice, incidentally they are still our accounts after 19 years. Their advice was simple. Don't buy it! Thinking we knew more than our accountant, we write with a chuckle, we decided to back ourselves and go all in on the florist and gift shop. We bought the Kingscliff Florist and Gift Shop and everything it in mid-2006, and moved in November 2006, just in time for Christmas Holidays.

But now what? That was the question. Zero retail experience, flowers experience, a shop that looked like it did in 1979, how to get more flowers, who will make them for us, how to we renovate, how do we hook up Eftpos and how do we make money, what's with this cash register, where do we get our proposed new line of gifts, food, skincare and baby products from and speaking of a babies, we were due to have a baby in 7 months time. We kind of had this excited, optimistic, yet sinking feeling all in one but we wholeheartedly believed in what we were about to do, or at least we thought we did, at that time, but more on that later.

The first task was to shut the shop, cover up the front windows and begin the transition from daggy old florist gift shop to organic gift, food and baby product store that happened to sell a few flowers which we got delivered from a 'work from home' florist we found it town, who ended up delivering them to us every morning.

We then went to Brisbane and met with suppliers of all the products we needed in store and worked out deals with them, we found the business name we ended up going with (Down to Earth Organics) but of course we retained the florist shop name too, found a designer who did all our artwork and signage, went to various commercial furniture stores and ordered all the fixtures and fittings we would need, bought fridges and lastly bought the URL downtoearthorganics with a view to making an online store down the track for the shop. With zero, or even less than zero, knowledge of anything ecommerce or websites. We opened the doors in November 2006 to much fanfare in town. The shop had everything we had imagined, including the gifts of that we bought in the sale. It was fun, and something different and we were excited.

The Problem & The Pivot: A Quiet Shop and a Phone That Wouldn't Stop Ringing

The "Ghost Town" Reality Check

After a bumper Christmas period, we approached a web designer to build us a website so we could try selling all our products online, the build took about 4 months taking into June 2007 when we started uploading websites onto a website, for the first time ever. June was a rather sobering time for us as, after a great start, June in Kingscliff in 2007 was like a ghost town, I mean like at 3PM on a Wednesdays afternoon in June, you could walk out the door and not see one person walking from one end of the street to the other, with the accountants words still buzzing in our heads to 'not buy'!

The Accidental Catalyst: A Yellow Pages Ad

One thing was puzzling though for the both of us. That dang phone kept ringing. At first, we were kind of scornful and annoyed to be honest of the 20+ calls a day for flowers as we didn't deliver flowers, we just relied on walk-ins. But why was it ringing? After some digging we found that the previous owner had taken out an old school Yellow Pages Advertisement, yeah I know right, the book, that heavy, actually 2 books depending on where you came from. It's hard to believe even now.

The reason we resented the phone calls so much was that most of the calls were for flower deliveries outside our area, random areas like Taree or Coffs Harbour, even out of state cities and places like Canberra or Townsville. Back then, a large amount of flower were sent that way, little did we know, they called it 'wire flowers'. You call your local florist, you asked them to organise flowers, you ring the florist in that location, and do the deal with them. Thanks Yellow Pages! 

The "Penny Dropped" Moment

It's weird right, adversity. Adversity can break a lot of people but if embraced, it can inspire, especially if you believe in the adage 'destruction, growth, and joy', we were definitely in the destruction phase but sincerely believing in what was ahead, embraced the destruction. With that in mind, on that frosty, quiet June day, with less than $25 in sales, for the entire day, after our 25th call for flowers outside our area for that day, we looked at each other and thought to ourselves, in desperation, there's got to be more we can do with these calls. More on that later.

Our First Steps into Ecommerce

With the shiny new website fully loaded with products we actually started to officially sell products online, at that point we had no idea how people were finding us, but it was exciting and new and ended up propping up the shop significantly over the 3 years that followed. But more than anything else, it allowed us to 'cut our teeth' in the new world of ecommerce in 2007, learn about SEO (search engine optimisation) and internet marketing, how to write content and how to make money online, which was a whole new world for us.

Now armed with more confidence, we had our own 'purple cow' moment, or ah ha moment with flowers. There were many of them in that first quiet period in the shop. One of them was, how do we turn the calls coming into the shop still into flower sales. About 20% of the calls were for flowers within our area so out first port of call was figure out how to get those delivered as we rarely had more than 5-7 bunches in store at any given time. That was simple, ask the lady who was making the flowers for our walk-ins to simply make more flowers, so we would call her up, give her the order, one of us would then deliver the flowers ourselves which was challenging with a newborn baby, but we got it done, and it worked out really well. So we pushed that side a lot harder for orders in our immediate area, basically from Pottsville to Tweed Heads and Banora Point. 

Flowers Became a Thing

Given the emerging success of the new website for the shop we thought to ourselves, what if we had a website for Kingscliff Flower Shop, as we still owned the business name, perhaps we can get more orders. Back then, Google was vastly different, you could launch a website and, providing you had decent content and a very basic understanding for search engine marketing, it could rank #1 very quickly. So we built a website, as you can see below, for the shop kingscliffflorist (.com.au), just a single splash page, and well, it ranked almost within a week. You might of guessed, we got way more calls for flowers to the local and surrounding areas. It was unreal to be honest but one of the largest challenges was talking to people about flowers with no knowledge of flowers, but we found a way and ground it out and learnt fast, as we went.

While flowers were starting to bloom, pun intended, the online store for the shop was starting to get some momentum and pop, but the shop itself was struggling. The battles were real, sometimes painful, and always stressful. Some days we would sell two bunches of flowers, someone would order 3 loaves of expensive bread and not show up to get them so we would lose $20, the bills stated adding up. That said, we were emboldened and optimistic about the emergence of selling flowers and organic products through our two websites so perhaps with wasn't as grim as we had thought.

Our Accidental Heroes: A Brave Florist and a Baby Bottle Craze

Hero #1: Finding Our First Partner

2009 was a defining year in one of the biggest pivots we have ever done and given our battles it was change our lives forever. Looking to keep the shop side of the business afloat we dug really hard into thinking of how we could get delivered the other 10 plus calls for flowers a day we were getting to areas outside the Tweed. We had kept a tally of the areas for about 6 months and whilst the requests were quite random, we decided to focus our attention on getting flower orders done, for calls, for Taree, Byron Bay, Murwillumbah (still in the Tweed), Cairns, Townsville, Coffs Harbour, and Port Macquarie as these seemed to be the most common.

Another 2009 moment was talk of BPA in baby products like toys and baby bottles, but more on that in a in a little while.

One blisteringly hot summers day in early 2009, we packed our daughter Asha into the baby seat in the car, and did the drive to Bray Park (just west of Murwillumbah) with my goal of speaking with the owner of The Flower Shed, and to try and convince her to help us with our flower orders. we arrived, sweating from the heat and nervous anticipation, baby in hand. We had rehearsed ad nauseum what we were going to say over and over in the 25 minute drive our west. we had doubts though, what would she say, was this even a thing, would she laugh me out the door, what are we doing here, it's too hot, we are in over my head, we are not florists - yeah it was real.

Our idea was to ask the owner if she was be interested in helping us with our flower orders. Then, to build a website for her, that we owned, and she would get all the orders that came from it. We were not going to charge her any fees, we only asked that she put a few more flowers into the bouquet to cover our commission for sending her the flower order, a commission that we were up front with her about. In 2009, nobody was approaching the flower industry with this concept, it was completely unique, hopefully she would be on board and get it.

We entered. There is nothing quite as disarming for someone as a baby, crawling and almost walking at that point, being super cute. We recall with a chuckle, it wasn't 30 seconds after putting her on the ground of the shop, them boom! Asha had pulled herself upright using one of stands in the shop and had pulled a trinket off one of the higher shelves, leaving it smashed all over the floor. Well that was an icebreaker if ever I had seen one!

Apologetic faces in tow we approached the owner, offered to pay for the broken gift which she refused, and then, oh and by the way...After all the angst and doubting ourselves, her simple answer was 'yes, I would love to be a part of this'. She got it, she was thrilled, we were thrilled, the next step to our eventual pivot had begun but not without another major unbelievable curveball.

No long after that, we approached the florists in the other areas on our shortlist, and all had the same response, which was yes, that would be amazing. So we now had, at least on paper, 7 partner florists ready to take our orders.

Hero #2: The Unlikely Financial Lifeline

Whilst things were starting to look up and we thought we had a solid business plan to pursue with more delivery locations and partner florist, we still had bills to pay in the shop, rent, a relatively new baby, and we had to somehow now pay to build new websites for our first partners but at least now our internet marketing skills had improved hugely in 2 years, which would be a blessing going forward.

And then it happened. After having a catch up with an old school friend, his wife had mentioned that baby forums all over the the U.S were talking about BPA in baby products, including toys and baby bottles, and that the chatter was just starting to creep into Australian forums. It was all over the news there and was a really big deal. Parents were in a panic and the panic was bound to head Downunder. 

That afternoon after our lunch meeting, both sitting in the quiet shop, a shared spark fired up, we looked at each other and said out loud, "BPA free baby products"! We had a shop that sold flowers and baby products, we had an existing website that we could add them to, we had a great network of suppliers now, and we also had the internet marketing skills now to get something like this off the ground. Later that day, we registered baby-bottles (.com.au), partnered with Ashop Commerce, and started building. The the idea was to build a standalone website with just the new baby products, and add the new range to our existing website, and stock the new products in the shop. We contacted all our suppliers and sourced all the BPA free baby products we could find, barely anyone knew what they were, and at that point, knew nothing of the dramas going on abroad which was perfect for us given the impending storm. Could this be our ticket to help fund more flower websites? Time would tell.

Around 4 weeks later, we had a shiny new website, as you can see below.

To say the shift was dramatic would be an understatement. The sentiment of what was happening in the U.S belted into Australian forums quicker that we thought, but just add we'd hoped. That little website above, well it ranked number one for just about every google search possible to do with baby bottles, bpa free baby products, within weeks, just as the internet exploded for all those Google searches and then...OMG.

As quick as we could pack 20 packages, we had sold 50 more, then more, and more, on top of people coming into the store and buying them, and now a website for flowers to Kingscliff, and Murwillumbah, there was a palpable shift happening. We were the only supplier in Australia at that point that sold these products so it was immense and intense on a scale that we had only dreamt of. The relative scale is hard to put into words, especially when we were featured on the Today Show, Today Tonight and many news outlets, and but with no room in the shop now for more stock, we literally filled our 2 story villa in Casuarina to the ceiling, in the spare bedroom, and entire living area, such was the crazy demand, and to the shock of our local post office owner. Wheeling in a Woolworths trolley into a post office, multiple times a day, in early 2009 wasn't a thing.

This random idea of selling BPA free baby products, spawned from a innocuous observation from a friend, completely transformed our lives and our business. Although we didn't quite know it yet, it set us off on the path to flowers and where we are today.

When "Famine to Feast" Became Too Much

Flush with confidence now, a real and steady income for the first time since 2007, and armed with the ecommerce skills needed, with the help of Ashop Commerce, we built the flower websites for the remaining towns on our initial list - Byron Bay, Taree, Cairns, Coffs Harbour, Townsville, and Port Macquarie. This time though, they were full ecommerce websites, not landing pages, so people could order flowers online which was very rare in the flower game in 2008/2009. The upside for the florists was, we were building these sites for so that there was zero risk them, no financial outlay, no need for marketing or building their own websites, all they needed to do was to add more flowers to each bouquet to cover our transparent and agreed commission. Then, our pledge was to give every order that came from each sites to the partner florist in that town! Sounds simple enough, and it was.

Not even 4 weeks after launching each new website, they were all ranking #1 in Google. Our flower orders, with just a few websites, went crazy. Not 5 times more flower orders, but way more than that. We completely underestimated how many flower orders would come from those websites so, the florists were extremely happy, on top of running and managing a shop and all the stock in it, flowers in store and local delivers, the craziness of all the new baby products, 10 more websites and delivery locations on the horizon, the cracks were begging to show. We were stretched and being pulled to breaking point.

After 10 hours in the shop, driving around locally for flower deliveries, going home at 6PM, then packing until midnight, something had to give. Maybe it was the horrible noise of the packing tape at 11PM, fearful of waking up the baby, the constant tiredness, the 18 hour days, or the 15 trips to the post office a day, something had to give, the famine to feast was starting to take a toll and supports the old adage, 'be careful what you wish for'.

The Pivot to go Online & Sell the Shop

The First Step: Selling the Shop

Exhausted, and doing some soul-searching one late Saturday afternoon, we decided to back ourselves and try to sell the shop side of the business, while retaining all the websites, including the website for the shop and go fully online with flowers, baby products, gifts, skincare etc. By some form of miracle, in just 4 weeks after putting it up for sale, we sold the shop. The relief was immense and it was a financial stress and time commitment we no longer had, which was incredibly liberating, it also removed the 'blinkers' and allowed us to really focus on what we were starting to get pretty good at, and that was ecommerce.

We set up a home office in the spare bedroom. We kept the shop phone number, which was on all the sites. One of us would sit downstairs taking the phone orders for all the delivery locations, answer enquires about all the other products, pack orders. While the other would manually put all the credit card charges into the old school Eftpos machine. We would then convert all the online orders and phone orders to Word documents and fax them, yes I said fax, to all the new partner florists we had set up websites for. That was how we did it, it seems so ancient by today's standards haha.

The Final Fork in the Road

The thing about a tangible product is, you need to order it, stock it, hope you sell it, you need wrap it, send it and so on. This requires a lot of time, energy and logistics, and back then, it was hard, doing all this at home with literally no room to move, while still trying to be parents of a small child. A new tipping point was fast approaching. 

Whilst we had sold the shop, the night after night of packing bags at 11PM to send the next day, having a villa literally to the ceiling on both levels began to take its toll. We were grateful for what had happened but at what cost to us all.

This led us to another fork in the road. If we sold the product based side of the business, could we survive on just flowers. A digital product of sorts, dealing with florists, and phone calls was way easier and less stressful than managing a 1000 product website and all the machinations surrounding that. The question was though, how could be get into more locations, would be get more orders if we did, how could we possibly manage more websites or could we. We decided to expand that idea and build a few more websites and finding partner florists in their prospective towns to test the waters. We expanded the earlier list to Canberra, Darwin, Ballina, Bendigo, Ballina, Toowoomba, Wollongong, Nowra, Wagga Wagga, Launceston, Albury, Orange, Mildura, Gladstone, Mackay, Kempsey, and Geelong. Each florist we spoke to in each town replied with similar excitement as our very first in Murwillumbah and that was an emphatic "YES".

Over the next few months we built all those websites for our new partner florists and the orders started rolling it, like a lot, it was actually kind of scary, in a good way. We had proven the model and it was working wonderfully. 

Lily's Florist is Born

The "Teething Problems" of Success

Having so many sites was a a great idea, at least in principle. Managing so many sites, with unique content, products, contacts, hosting and so on, was another completely different beast. Not only that, we as a business or brand or lack thereof, had no identity in flowers, which posed the question, how could we overcome this?

The Biggest "Ah-ha" Moment of All

This would be another, if not the largest, 'ah ha' moment for us in 2009 - we said 2009 was a huge year! The idea? Build our own brand, our own website, our own products, but targeting a much larger area than the initial 20 cities or so.

We had spent years building and ranking categories on our organic and baby bottle website. Before anyone else in our industry, or anyone anywhere for that matter, our idea was to create a category style page, with products and unique content, for even major city, town on the East Coast of Australia, but on one national website, rather than 100's of websites which was impossible to manage. With that idea the concept of Lily's Florist was born.

It would be easy to skim over the next three years, but we've come this far, so we may as well go all the way and we feel that the story of Lily's Florist has just begun.

Professionalising in Pottsville

During 2009, by all the planets aligning, and by some miracle, we managed to get finance to build a home, we decided on Pottsville as that was all we could afford, plus it was still in the area, it had a fantastic junior school, and it was still close to the beach. More than anything else though, it had space, and way more of it, and we finally something that we could call 'ours' from a personal point of view after so much grind.

Our plan was to build a home office where we could store all our products, and work from. I mean fully kitted out. The double garage would do. By kitted out, I mean downlights, air-conditioning, carpet, proper desks and workstations for the two of us, a VOIP phone system for all our calls, a kitchenette, coffee machine, printer, I mean everything. It was bright and shiny and we loved it and moved into this house and office in 2010, finally a place for all our baby products too.

* A photo of one side of our home office, of Lily's Florist in Pottsville in 2010

Not long after we started building out Lily's Florist with landing pages, which meant a lot of calls to new potential partners, but now the approach was different, rather than a website, we would build a page for them, whilst still giving that new ore existing partner florist all the orders generated by that page. The thing is though, were doing all this on top of, trying to manage 2 other product based websites, going to the post office which felt like 100 times a day, answering loads more of inbound calls for flowers, still packing Australia Post bags at 11PM, but at least now the horrible sound of packing tape wasn't waking Asha at night :). Working 7 days a week, sometimes 18 hours a day was just not sustainable, it was unhealthy even, and we had done it for years now. Breathe. It's time for another change.

Finding Our "Street Cred"

With the flower side of the business growing quickly, we really felt like this was our future, there was something about it. Not only that, we got wind that all the major supermarkets and department stores were beginning to start stocking the products we sold. So, with that, we backed ourselves again, we were all in with flowers, and decided to sell both Down To Earth Organic and Our Baby Bottles business, bundled together. And we did, just a few months later to a family in Ballina. We used most of the proceeds to invest in Lily's Florist to build a more powerful software program for us to grow into. Now, it was all about flowers.

With the transition into flowers only, we both had time to focus on the one thing, rather than a million things pulling us in every direction. Firstly, we needed someone who could help us answer the phones. Our idea was to try and hire a florist, who was looking for a career change, someone who could talk the talk as much with the potential and existing partner florists, as with customers. We did, actually, we found two florists, one Anna, and the other Will. We believed that having florists as employees would give us some 'street cred' with florists, especially ones who were not yet in our network. It worked a treat, just as we planned, both Anna and Will were instrumental in bringing new florists on board and helping to build out the Lily's Florist network of florists. Over that next 3 years our network would grow from around 20 florists to over 150 partners that gave us a reach from Darwin all the way down the East Coast of Australia to regional WA and Perth.

Valentine's Day We'll Never Forget

We will never forget the office in our home in Pottsville on Valentine's Day week in 2011. Two desks, had become 6 permanent, and 2 temporary desks in the middle, for those we had planted 2 friends who had little idea what we did, other than, yeah we send a few flowers around the place. We were literally about to have our second baby, so we were 8.5 months pregnant (with Ivy), and the phones exploded, furiously, relentlessly, from 630AM thee week of, until the very last minute until we had to shut the sites down. We fondly recall the look of disbelief our friends gave us, bedraggled, spent, exhausted, when one aptly said, Jody her name is, "OMG, what have you created...?".

Our Story Today

By 2013, we had created, from scratch, by accident, with no knowledge of flowers or ecommerce, without any outside investment from banks or investors, gathering a huge amount of bumps and bruises along the way, a Mum & Dad with a baby & later tow in tow, an Australia Wide delivery network of over 150 florists spanning all major cities, most regional cities, and major towns. We had built a team of expert staff, we literally trained ourselves, a cutting edge software program that helped us manage all those florists, over 1000 landing pages and over 250 products, a loyal customer base.

The 12 years since has been just as exciting, we have gained more bumps and bruises for sure. That network of 150 florists has grown into the family of over 800 we have today, but our core mission has never changed. It’s the small moments over the years that remind us of this. I’ll always remember, about 12 years ago, when our wonderful partner florist in Toowoomba, who we still work with today, sent us a surprise gift just to say thank you for the partnership, and birthday hampers to us both yearly. I also remember visiting or Taree partner florist, Pauline and Tina numerous times over the last 15 years. They were eternally grateful for all the business we sent them, "you have changed our lives...", "we're so grateful...". It was that moment, and so many others like it, that proved we were building more not just a business.

We're still that Mum and Dad team, making decisions at the dinner table, dedicated to connecting people across Australia through the simple act of giving flowers. In fact, these very words were written by the both of us, it took us a month to write. 

Thank you for being a part of our story.

Siobhan & Andrew