Shop ByWhere Do Our Flowers Come From
A paddock, a market floor at four in the morning, a bench in a shop near the recipient, and then a van. Four stops, and none of them is a warehouse.
Your flowers do not travel to the recipient. They are already near them, and they get bought that week.
Lily's Florist is an online network florist, partnered with over 800 florist shops Australia wide. Australian owned and operated. Sending flowers since 2009 under this name, though really since 2006, when we bought a shop in Kingscliff and found out how little we knew.
The honest answer to the question in the title is that it depends which florist gets your order, because we do not buy the flowers. They do. Every one of those 800 shops has its own growers, its own wholesaler, its own market run. What I can tell you is the shape of the journey, because it is the same shape everywhere, and it is a different shape to the one most flower websites are running.
Paddock To Posy
Our florist partners keep close relationships with growers and suppliers near them, which is how a stem can go paddock to posy and then straight out to the person you are sending to. Four stops. Here they are in order.
A farm, often within a few hours of the shop that will end up using it. Cut, graded and packed cold.
Cut before dawnA wholesale floor, or a direct delivery from the grower. Our florists are there early and they buy what is good that morning, not what a catalogue says.
Very early, most weeksA trained florist in a real shop, near the recipient, builds your order by hand on the day it goes out.
The morning of deliveryLocal staff and local couriers, usually inside a 30km radius of the shop. No postal network, no depot overnight.
Same day, in by 2pmThe flowers never make the trip to the recipient's town. They are already in it. That is the entire difference, and everything else on this page follows from it.
By choosing Lily's Florist your flowers will be prepared by a real florist shop, from someone who has been fully trained in floristry, who employs local staff and couriers. That sentence is the whole product. The rest is admin.
What Is Grown Here, What Is Not
Most of what goes into our arrangements is grown in Australia. Not all of it, and I am not going to pretend otherwise, because anybody who has bought roses in February knows better.
Red roses and tulips are the usual imports. The reason is volume and season. Australian growers cannot cover the country's demand for red roses in the week of Valentine's Day, and tulips want a cold season that most of this country does not reliably have. So some stems come in from overseas growers, and they arrive cold and in a hurry. Everything else, in most cases, was in a paddock here.
If you want the most Australian thing on the site, ask for natives. They are grown here, they hold up in heat far better than an imported rose, and in our florists' experience they keep going long after the soft imported stems have given up.
The Two Ways Flowers Get Sent
There are broadly two models operating in this country and it is worth knowing which one you are buying from, because the websites can look identical.
The other model runs on warehouses in a handful of city centres. Flowers are bought in bulk from overseas growers, made up on a production line against a set recipe, boxed, and then posted. If you are sending to Taree, the box leaves Sydney. It goes into the postal network, it sits somewhere overnight, and it arrives when it arrives. Flowers do not enjoy that.
| Stage | Network florist | Warehouse and post |
|---|---|---|
| Where the flowers sit | In a shop near your recipient | In a depot in a capital city |
| Who makes it | A trained florist, by hand, that morning | A packing line, to a fixed recipe |
| How it travels | A local courier, usually under 30km | Boxed into the postal network |
| Same day | Yes, order by 2pm weekdays | Rarely, whatever the homepage says |
| If it goes wrong | Ring us, we ring the florist, six days a week | Often a form, and no phone number |
On that last row. Some operators take no inbound calls at all and publish no number. We are contactable by phone or email, six days a week, by people who have done this for years. It is the least glamorous line in the table and it is the one that matters at 4pm when something has not turned up.
Kingscliff, NSW
The bit that gets lost in all the model talk is what a florist actually does when they read your order. They look at the occasion, they look at what came in that morning, and they make a judgement. A 90th is not a new baby. A funeral for someone's dad is not an apology to a girlfriend. A production line just follows a recipe, without any creative flare or input, because it cannot do anything else, it has never met you and it is not going to.
Ours read the card message first. Every single one of them, without being told to. It changes what they reach for.
How Lily's Florist Operates
Think of it a bit like Airbnb. We are the gateway between you and the shop, not the shop itself. You order with us, we route it, the florist makes it and delivers it.
We take the orders. We handle the customer service around them: the calls about what to send, the address that was typed wrong, the delivery date somebody wants moved, the follow up when a recipient is not home. That is all us. It leaves the florist free to do the part we cannot do, which is make the thing and get it there.
Neither Siobhan nor I is a florist. Seventeen years in and we are still not florists. What we are good at is the layer around them.
Where We Got The Idea
We bought Kingscliff Florist in far northern NSW in 2006. For a while we delivered locally and that was that. The problem was the phone. People kept ringing wanting flowers sent to places we could not reach, and we kept saying no. Taree. Coffs Harbour. Canberra. Townsville. Six months of saying no to money while sitting in a very quiet shop.
So we started ringing florists in the places we could not reach. Byron Bay, Ballina, Murwillumbah, then over the border to Coolangatta and Tugun. The arrangement was simple: we take the order, you make it, you deliver it. The next time someone rang wanting flowers in Byron, we said yes.
That is the whole idea. Everything since has been the same idea with more phone numbers in it. There is a longer version of the story, including the day we drove to Bray Park with a baby in the car to ask the first florist, on our Lily's Florist location page.
How The Orders Reach A Florist
We run landing pages targeting areas around the country, built either around where a partner florist actually sits or around a delivery zone they can reach. Most partner florists cover about 30 kilometres from their shop door, which is why the pages are shaped the way they are.
People find those pages by searching, mostly Google and Bing, and through Google Ads and Microsoft Ads. Then the mechanical part: the order lands in our partner network database, gets read against the recipient's postcode, and goes out to the florist covering that postcode. No human picks it. The postcode picks it.
Then somebody in a shop you have never heard of, in a town you may never have been to, starts cutting stems for a person you cannot get to today. That is the bit I still like.
Lily's Florist is Australian owned and operated, founded in 2009, and delivers Australia-wide through a network of over 800 partner florist shops. Same day delivery when you order before 2pm weekdays. Phone 1300 360 469, or read our story.
