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Valentine’s Day is meant to be a time for flowers, chocolate, romantic dinners, and posting smartass memes and comments online to make fun of people who like all those things.
For flower delivery startup A Better Florist, it was a day of mad scrambling to meet overwhelming demand – and failing.
Yesterday, on February 14, the Singapore-based startup’s Facebook page was inundated with comments from angry customers. People’s orders were late or never delivered. Some of the orders that did make it into the hands of customers were subpar – flowers were wilting, cards were hastily scribbled, balloons were missing.
To make matters worse, people were trying to get through to customer service, only to have their calls and emails go unanswered. It stoked a fire of Facebook rage that was blazing for most of the day yesterday and into this morning.
It’s something of a cruel irony for co-founder and CEO Steve Feiner, who started the company in 2015 with a vision of providing a better service than traditional flower sellers after a horrible experience he had ordering flowers for his then-girlfriend’s birthday.
“We let countless customers down. We simply did not do our jobs,” a dejected Steve tells Tech in Asia.
Swamped
It was around noon on Valentine’s Day that Steve and his team knew things were not going to work out well. Order volume for the day was 20 times what the startup usually faces, so much so that it had to shut down orders two days before.
This amounted to just under 2,000 orders, which would have been almost 3,500 if not for the shutdown. “I suppose this type of demand comes rarely but it’s 20 times your usual day,” Steve says. “These really are manageable problems and we just didn’t manage them.”
Steve tries to identify the main areas that broke down in the process. One was failure to anticipate bottlenecks. “We had 70 couriers showing up, with 900 orders to do in that first time slot,” Steve says. Trying to service them all created congestion. The next time slots suffered.
Order volume for the day was so large that A Better Florist had to shut down orders two days before.
The bottlenecks affected several orders, which did reach customers’ hands in less than ideal condition. “Quality control is another main issue. The amount of time it takes to check a bouquet is about a minute – you don’t have 2,000 minutes,” Steve laments. “These are things we can catch when we do 600 orders but not thousands.”
Finally, decision-making on the spot to tackle each crisis as it came along was flawed. The team was sleepless, having worked for 116 hours last week to get ready. “I don’t think all of us were making the best real-time decisions.”
For example, to try and satisfy as many orders as possible, Steve decided to funnel all available resources to delivery. This meant no time for customer service and communication. He thinks this allowed the company to get another 100 to 200 orders out. On the flipside, customers who weren’t receiving their orders had no idea what was going on.
It didn’t help that a Facebook thread where customers complained was deleted yesterday. The startup put up an apology post that did little to abate the angry comments. Meanwhile, someone went as far as to create a troll “A Better Florist Customer Care” page, which hasn’t seen much traction so far.
This isn’t A Better Florist’s first Valentine’s Day, but it is the first time the startup faced so many problems. “Last year was challenging, but we were able to do it,” Steve says. Since then, its business has grown 10x year-on-year so Valentine’s Day followed suit with that growth.”
Rude awakening
Steve doesn’t mince words when reflecting on the past 24 hours. “We got into this business to make people happy and we did the exact opposite,” he says. “Despite our best planning, our hard work, working through the night, fundamentally we didn’t execute.”
The hardest lesson the startup learned was how under-resourced it was to meet this kind of demand. Just the previous day, it was putting out calls online for friends to come help with deliveries.
Customer Xing Chew went as far as to visit the startup’s office to cancel his order. “I told them they obviously did something right in terms of marketing and branding but the execution was really, really terrible – I’m not sure if this is something they can recover from,” he tells Tech in Asia.
“What is worse than a no-show is zero communication – I received no emails, did not see updates on Facebook, called but the phone was disconnected. That aggravated an already bad situation,” he adds.
Victor Lin tells Tech in Asia he ordered flowers for his wife as early as February 2, motivated by good online reviews of A Better Florist. The order never arrived and Victor couldn’t get a response to either his calls or emails. Now he’s one of many customers waiting to hear from A Better Florist about his experience.
Daniel Tay, formerly a writer with Tech in Asia, ordered flowers for his girlfriend on February 8. But in an email exchange, the company wasn’t very forthcoming on the timing of the delivery beyond the 9am to 1pm window. “The replies were curt, bordering on rude, informing me that they won’t be able to give a specific time. Which was fair enough, I suppose,” he says.
The hardest lesson the startup learned was how under-resourced it was to meet this kind of demand.
The delivery missed its window – and its recipient. The flowers were found on the ground outside the front door. Daniel hasn’t heard from the company so far either, despite several calls and emails.
Jessica Koh also received her bouquet of flowers, but not the way her boyfriend hoped, she tells Tech in Asia. Instead of reaching her place between 4 and 5pm to surprise her for what was their first Valentine’s, the flowers arrived just before 10pm in a sorry state, without the card and balloons included in the purchase. The courier did take the time to explain the startup ran out of flowers for her bouquet and had to bump delivery. The couple also hasn’t heard back from the startup so far. “It’s a Valentine’s Day to remember in a different way,” she muses.
A Better Florist’s blog now includes an official apology from Steve. “We are a group of 20-somethings that thought we could make an impact in the world and brighten people’s lives along the way,” the post says. “We started this business because we were the folks that had companies treat us poorly, and the sad, ironic twist is now we did just that to so many others.”
The post includes a form for customers who want to ask for refunds.
Today Steve plans to contact his customers one by one to offer personal apologies. “I’m going to spend the entire day calling, communicating with people, saying I fucked up,” he says. “This is on me, not my team who gave everything they had.”
“I watched two grown men cry last night because of disappointment,” he says of his staff. “I’m a founder, I’m gonna be obsessed with my business but for others to have that passion is something I’m grateful for.”
There’s nothing else to do now but for A Better Florist to pick up the pieces and try to put them together again. “These lessons are brutal, ass-kicking motherfucking lessons,” Steve says. “It’s a mess to clean up but we will clean it up.”
(Update, 6:30pm SGT: The story has been updated with quotes from customers and information about A Better Florist’s official apology on its blog.)
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