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1-800-Flowers CEO on getting ready for Valentine’s Day 2022

People are expected to spend $23.9 billion on the holiday this year, with 37% of consumers planning to purchase flowers.
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1-800-Flowers

3 min read

Retail news that keeps industry pros in the know

Retail Brew delivers the latest retail industry news and insights surrounding marketing, DTC, and e-commerce to keep leaders and decision-makers up to date.

For 1-800-Flowers, Valentine’s Day is a chance to flex.

People are expected to spend $23.9 billion on the holiday this year, with 37% of consumers planning to purchase flowers.

  • 1-800-Flowers will get a nice piece of that: Valentine’s Day accounts for roughly 9% of its consolidated annual revenue, the company told us. (It owns several other brands, including Harry & David and The Popcorn Factory.) Total net revenues reached $2.12 billion in its most recent fiscal year.

So, to make sure that everything comes up roses, preparation typically starts a year in advance, and CEO Chris McCann said that’s how the company stays ahead—even during a pandemic.

“We start to work with our growers early on in the cycle so that they know what our marketing plans will be,” McCann told Retail Brew. “We know what their growing capacities will be, what plants they’re doing, what colors we’re looking at.”

But that’s not to say there aren’t challenges.

Roughly 70% of the company’s supply is sourced from South America, specifically Colombia and Ecuador. And labor shortages there have increased the cost of transporting products to the US, McCann explained.

  • 1-800-Flowers budgeted for ocean freight to be 3x the price of what it was last year, he said. It actually came in at 5x.

Inflation, too, has “forced us to look at pricing on a very diligent basis,” McCann said. “It’s done in a very strategic, targeted manner to make sure that we’re still giving good value to the consumer and, at the same time, offering the consumer a breadth of products and a breadth of price points.” (Flower arrangements range from under $30 to upwards of $100.)

Grow with us

But McCann brings the company’s strategy back to its growers and relationships. Communication is important, he explained, which is why the company has “dozens” of “florist-relations consultants,” who make sure product and labor supply are in line with forecasted demand.

  • 1-800-Flowers has a network of 5,000 florists that provide design and same-day delivery capabilities ahead of distribution to its 125,000+ retail locations.

“We do our forecasting down to the zip-code level, so that we can tell any given shop, ‘This is what we expect—how many of arrangement A, how many of arrangement B’…during the Valentine’s Day period in each of the zip codes we cover,” McCann said.

Field day: 1-800-Flowers also relies on the 10,000+ seasonal workers it hired during the winter holidays, asking some to stay on or move from another brand or team, depending on demand.

  • For example, 150–200 seasonal employees were moved from the customer care team to the flowers team this Valentine’s Day.

“As much as we can do that, it works well for the employee. And it works well for us, the employer,” McCann said.—KM

Retail news that keeps industry pros in the know

Retail Brew delivers the latest retail industry news and insights surrounding marketing, DTC, and e-commerce to keep leaders and decision-makers up to date.