Quitting Cushy Jobs, Gurugram Couple Starts ‘Flower Subscriptions’ That Earns Rs 7 Lakhs/Month
Started by Pooja and Amit Tripathi in 2016, Gurugram startup 'Bring My Flowers' offers a weekly flower subscription that's already clocking a revenue of Rs 7 lakhs/month.
We bring you so many stories of couples who choose to quit their corporate jobs and come out of their comfort zone to pursue a passion or a dream they once nurtured. One question I have always asked myself is — what’s that one moment that leads one to take life-changing decisions?
It was in 2016 when Pooja (40) and Amit Tripathi (42), a couple from Gurugram, decided to quit their respective jobs at multinational companies to start a weekly flower subscription service which is aptly called Bring My Flowers (BMF). Other than being armed with a passion for flowers, the duo had no experience of being entrepreneurs. Through their inspiring journey, they have grown from having 21 customers in their first month to more than 4,000 active subscriptions today.
Speaking to The Better India, Pooja says, “Having fresh flowers at home was something that I have always loved. Every Friday, after work, I would stop on my way home and pick up various kinds of flowers and set them around the house. It brightened up our weekend.” BMF was born out of a conversation that the couple had with each other and Amit says, “After putting in long hours at work, we were burning out and we still wanted something more out of our lives. We knew we wanted to do something but honestly the idea never struck us until it did.”
With Amit’s sales experience and Pooja’s marketing bent of mind, the couple stumbled upon flowers while thinking of ideas. Amit says, “Since we both liked the idea of getting flowers home every week, we thought there might be many others in the city who would love it too, so why not offer it as a service?” With the convenience of being able to choose the flowers you want, have it delivered to your doorstep on the day chosen by you, for a cost substantially lesser than what one would get on high-street flower boutiques – BMF was launched in April 2016.
Early morning duty calls
While it seems like the couple decided one fine evening that they wanted to start this business, Amit says they did a lot of due diligence before making that decision. “We would wake up at 3.00 a.m. to visit the flower mandi (market), where we would study the kind of flowers that came each season, what factors impacted the price of flowers, what season was best for them. We would often buy different kinds of flowers just to experiment and this went on for about a year,” says Amit. Pooja adds here that there was a time when her living room would be filled with different flowers every second day. “I was not complaining!” she says.
The meticulous notes that Pooja made for each flower, she says, come in handy even today. Giving me an example of the kind of notes she would make, she says, “I would write things like — Green coloured carnations do not last long. Most of them are broken when you open the bunch.” In hindsight, the couple feels that everything that they did early on in their entrepreneurial journey helped them build the brand. “All those really early morning trips to the mandi were completely worth it,” adds Amit.
No garden of roses
The company was built with an initial investment of about 10 lakhs, most of which went into setting up the infrastructure that would be required to bring flowers in such large quantities, store them, and work with them. “We were sure of launching the subscription model, that was our big idea,” says Amit. Initially, the couple did not even have a karigar (master) to make the bouquets even since it was only a subscription model that they were working on, and it was only a few months later that they streamlined the process.
As neither Amit nor Pooja came from business backgrounds, they mention how there were several goof ups in the early days of the business.
“We would be given a set of instructions for a particular type of flower order and while the intention was always to key it into the system immediately, sometimes that would not happen and we ended up not following the instructions to the T,” says Amit. It took the couple a month to settle down and put different processes in place.
But for Aanchal Sudhakar, a customer who signed up with the BMF subscription model way back in 2016, says, “I’ve been long associated with the BMF team and the experience is nothing short of awesome. As a subscription customer, all my flower requirements are fulfilled by BMF from occasional bouquets to Diwali décor flowers or any other pooja requirements. What I’m most pleased with are the quality of flowers provided week-on-week. The flowers have always been appropriately priced and in the very rare case of any issues, they have replaced flowers — No questions asked. Totally recommended and worth every penny.”
The brand is now clocking in a month-on-month revenue of about Rs 7 lakhs currently and Amit says that the brand has 19 employees working with them.
Subscription plans begin at Rs 650/month which will get you a bouquet of eight roses, carnations and more. They go up to Rs 3250/ month which will get you flower arrangements of the exotic type such as Heliconia or Spring Daisies. Their flower delivery services have been bringing joy to more than 4000 customers in Delhi/NCR.
With a subscription plan of Rs 650/month, which is called ‘delight’ customers can choose between various flowers like rose, asiatic lilly, orchids, birds of paradise, guldawari, and tubrose. One can get upto 8 stems of flowers each week with this plan and with the ‘enchantment’ plan costing Rs 3250 customers can get upto 60 stems of flowers (depending on the type of flowers they opt for).
If you are a resident of Delhi/NCR and want to check out the subscription models at BMF, click here.
(Edited by Yoshita Rao)
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