Farmgirl Flowers is changing the way people buy flowers in San Francisco (and soon everywhere!), and along with that mission, we're also interacting with our fans and customers in a very different way than most traditional retail flower shops. Because we don't have a storefront, we rely heavily on digital media channels to attract customers to our business. That's why we turned to Facebook and Instagram to introduce and initiate relationships with fans, which luckily, oftentimes turn into future customers. We post our daily arrangements, fun classes, and humanizing team photos on our wall, and interact daily with our fan base. We have been able to build our fan base to over 13K on Facebook and over 26K on Instagram in less than 3 years (http://instagram.com/farmgirlflowers, https://www.facebook.com/FarmgirlFlowers). Our fans are extremely engaged, as we post pictures of our flowers, polls about preferences, and in fact, even hire most of our seasonal help through these digital media channels. We're extremely thankful that we've been able to build a strong following, and that others have taken note. Facebook did a video case study and success story on us last October (https://www.facebook.com/business/news/Farmgirl-Flowers and https://www.facebook.com/business/success/farmgirl-flowers), showing how we've been able to build our fan base and convert them into customers (10% of all web traffic comes from FB, & 20% around peak holidays). And one of the front page images on Instagram's home page is of our flowers (www.instagram.com), which generated about 15K fans in a span of a week, when it launched. It's been extremely rewarding to see the fruits of our labor pay off on smaller screens. This question always seems a bit self serving, but in an effort to answer - we think we deserve to win for two reasons. 1) Because we have an amazing team that works really hard to build our brand and our social media identity as well as our small, bootstrapped, disruptive start-up. We don't have a marketing or PR department, just a few really hard-working, many hat wearing, grunt people that are always willing to do whatever necessary to make our company a success. And, 2) We have the most amazing, engaged fans that continue to help contribute to our company's success.
https://www.facebook.com/business/news/Farmgirl-Flowers, https://www.facebook.com/FarmgirlFlowers http://instagram.com/, https://www.facebook.com/FarmgirlFlowers, http://instagram.com/farmgirlflowers Martha Stewart Article: http://kristenflanagan.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/156_AmericanMade_L0513AMEAFR.pdf Society of American Florists: http://www.multibriefs.com/briefs/saf/FMSept13Feature1.pdf SF Gate http://www.sfgate.com/homeandgarden/article/Eco-friendly-florists-think-locally-3109412.php#photo-2284205 Bizbash http://www.bizbash.com/fresh-faces-of-2013-farmgirl-flowers/new-york/story/27489/ Triple Pundit http://www.triplepundit.com/2011/07/farmgirl-flowers/
