1-800 Flowers Reflection

This case study is about 1-800 Flowers.com which is an ingenious floral company and has been trying to maintain its mark in the
floral industry market. The brand acquisition of the company and major sale has been through the online segment and the
supply chain is comprised of a vast network of local floral companies for its shipment and delivery. They eventually collaborated
with BloomNet which is a networking service and thus tried to enter in the non-floral segment of the market which consists of
the gourmet cookies and gift SKUs. In this reflection, I have tried to summarize the strategies which could have been adopted
by 1-800 flowers to maintain their name and be an aggressive player in the flower industry.

When I researched about the problem statement, I realized that one of the most imperative factors which can be addressed
here is the originality of 1-800 flowers as a brand. Despite of the fact that they have collaborated with BloomNet and have many
breeders, these local growers themselves could sell these flowers to the target customer thus hampering the brand as well as
its sole purpose business regimen and making it impossible for them to have a control over its vendors. Secondly, there is a
heavy competition in this segment which has been arising lately and they are use the same techniques of online delivery at
much lower rates making it difficult for them to cater the market with their uniqueness. Moreover, the focus of the organization
on the non-floral segment by providing the delivery on the same day is not there and thus has to be considered.

When it comes to the overall revenue, it can be observed that the maximum revenue comes from floral business of 53% and
11% from BloomNet and 36% from non-floral business. It can be easily observed that apart from the floral businesses the
company should address the non-floral business and make it securable easily across the states. When the economic downturn
arrived, the company tried to find alternate ways to reduce their costs and used the “good, better and best” approach to make
them think differently from the competition. Moreover, they optimized their supply chain to a great extent by adopting the
vertical and virtual integration in the supply chain process. They collaborated with the local florists and cut down fixed costs
making it easy to increase the scalability of the business and even making the local growers a part of the company by organizing
various talent acquisition and training programs.

In order to maintain the originality of the brand, 1-800 flowers can eliminate all the competition from the local breeders by
buying them all. This is turn will help the organization to move forward as a single entity. The time and capital required to move
forward with this option is large, but it is one good option to have control over the market. Moreover, if they invest more capital
with BloomNet and expand this network they will collaborate with high quality breeders making them to have better purchases
of high-quality flowers. This will not only increase the quality of the flowers but also will provide them the ability to assemble,
ship and deliver the products on the same day as well as reduce inventory costs. When they are planning to collaborate with
the local vendors and trying to gain their full business, they can put these vendors on a legal contract which will restrict them
to sell their own flowers to the local customers maintaining the uniqueness of 1800 flowers. For non-floral business they can
set a certain amount of quantity with local breeders so that when the customers place an order online for flowers and wants to
add some cookies with it, they can provide gift packages at lower cost making it feasible for them to buy and even maintain the
minimum inventory possible. Furthermore, they should optimize their delivery service so that the customer has the flexibility
to order from any location and at any time of the day, it will provide a wider scope and reach to the target audience.

In my recommendation, it would be feasible if 1-800 started collaborating more with BloomNet and have more control over the
virtual part of the supply chain. This in turn will help them in having more networking and control over the local growers and
help them achieve a wide variety and quality of floral demands from its customers. This will not only make the procurement
and sourcing cycle easy but also help them to expand with the BloomNet. They should even reduce the number of SKUs for their
non floral items to reduce inventory and increase their exposure and sales by providing them in a gift box approach along with
flowers. Depending upon the festivals and seasons they can design theme-based flowers and gifts and during the final
transaction the customers must have an option of adding additional gifts from the non-floral section thus increasing the
popularity and scalability of these items. Moreover, the customer should be offered discounts when they are buying the gift
boxes which will increase the attractiveness factor in them. The most unique thing they should adopt is delivery services. They
should adopt a way of providing the delivery on the same day in boxes and thus giving an opportunity to its customers to track
the order starting from placing the order till the time he receives it. In this way the company will also maintain its integrity by
not disclosing the customers address to the local growers. They can even reduce the costs of the personal orders so that they
can get a repeated orders from the same customers. This will increase the volume of orders also. Focusing more on virtual
integration by collaborating with BloomNet will increase the overall profitability and revenue of the business.