BloomThat has launched its flower delivery service nationwide, but it won’t be quite as on-demand as the services it currently offers in San Francisco and New York. Instead of offering delivery within a couple of hours, BloomThat will guarantee next-day delivery, which moves into the territory of 1-800-FLOWERS.
“At that point, it’s a price point and a design piece, as well as a brand that our generation aligns with,” BloomThat co-founder Matthew Schwab told TechCrunch.
To make nationwide delivery possible, BloomThat has teamed up with growers throughout the country to source raw materials and assemble bouquets stateside. At those partner locations, a handful of BloomThat employees will be there to ensure the quality and display.
When companies go national, it’s usually because it wants to target customers in those areas, but not the explicit case in this scenario. BloomThat, Schwab says, is actually targeting its pre-existing customers in San Francisco — where the company is already profitable — and the New York Tri-State area who want to deliver to relatives in different parts of the country.
Unlike many other on-demand companies, BloomThat relies on three key services for its deliveries: FedEx, UPS and Deliv.
“A lot of the work that we did last year in setting up the vendor relationships is going to allow us to scale,” Schwab said.
Before tapping FedEx, UPS and Deliv to handle the actual deliveries, BloomThat managed their own deliveries and owned the logistics from end to end. By changing the logistics around delivery and doing things like implementing delivery fees, BloomThat’s burn rate dropped from $560,000 to $15,000 a month last summer. BloomThat has raised $7.6 million to date, with the most recent round in April 2015.
