How To Make A Million (Or More!)

What these success stories have in common is passion and persistence and a vision for what their wealth can achieve.

- Sandra Block, Eileen Ambrose And Patricia Mertz Esswein

Christina Stembel didn’t just bend the traditional business model for flower companies; she snipped it in half. // Stembel grew up on a farm in Bremen, Ind. (population 4,500), so it’s tempting to say that she founded Farmgirl Flowers to get back to her roots. But the real inspiration for her business came while she was working as an event planner near San Francisco in the mid 2000s. Tasked with cutting expenses, Stembel, now 41, looked for ways to reduce the costs of floral arrangements, which she thought were overpriced and underwhelming. She started ordering directly from local growers, which led her down a rabbit hole of research into the business of flowers. She concluded that the e-commerce side of the industry was ripe for disruption because a lot of people— particularly young people—weren’t satisfied with the floral arrangements available online.

“Younger consumers were purchasing far less often than previous generations, for the same reason I hated sending my mom flowers—they didn’t like what was out there,” she says. “You spend an hour sorting through options on websites to find the least ugly option, which shouldn’t be the thing you say about flowers.”

Stembel’s idea: Instead of adopting the model of the big flower companies’ websites, which offer everything from red roses to Asiatic lilies, she would sell only one arrangement that changes daily, based on what’s in season. Stembel launched Farmgirl Flowers in 2010 with $49,000 in savings. In 2015, the company started taking orders outside the Bay Area, relying primarily on social media and word of mouth to drive traffic to its website (FarmgirlFlowers.com).