It’s time for a local flower movement, CEO says
Artisan bouquets look earthy, sentimental
Steven Dyme doesn’t know, or understand, why sending a dozen roses is a staple of the flower delivery business.
“I don’t like them,” said the CEO of Flowers for Dreams.
The 27-year-old University of Wisconsin-Madison alumnus thinks his company is growing a craft flower movement similar to the trend in local beer and coffee. His company, based in Chicago, sells artisan bouquets of mixed flowers.
“Let’s go back to the times before when you went back to your garden and grabbed flowers,” he said. “I think there’s something sentimental about that.”
Flowers for Dreams’ mixed floral bouquets wrapped in burlap are meant to look earthy and organic as if they were just picked from a farm field. The flowers are sourced from farms in Wisconsin, Illinois and Michigan as seasonally available. A brown luggage tag tied around the stems labels the bouquet as coming from Flowers for Dreams.
The product, and its Instagram-worthy presentation, has caught on since the company’s founding in 2012.
Flowers for Dreams is expanding to the north, marking a permanent stake in the Milwaukee market with its first store outside Chicago.
The Walker’s Point shop at 134 W. Pittsburgh Ave. will open in June.
Flowers for Dreams started delivering to Milwaukee last year.
The company delivered more than 41,000 bouquets in 2017.
The firm, which started an Instagram account before it had email, has more than 48,000 followers on the platform and continually makes lists of brands to follow. It has about 35 full-time employees, a few of whom work from Milwaukee.
Flowers for Dreams offers a rotating selection of four bouquets that start at $35. Prices vary with size and vase options.
The company started doing weddings at the end of 2014. Special events now comprise about half of the firm’s revenues, Dyme said.
Dyme and his co-founder, Joe Dickstein, in no way intended to start a flower company. They began by selling flowers outside high school graduation ceremonies in suburban Chicago for extra cash while working unpaid summer internships during college.
The boys ordered thousands of dollars of flowers on credit to peddle to parents before commencement. They
forged relationships with schools, setting up flower sales as fundraisers and donating school supplies to students in need.
“It became a great hustle,” Dyme said.
After a few summers, Dyme and Dickstein became “the flower guys.” Friends and family often asked for advice about where to order flowers.
Dyme said he didn’t like any of the options he would recommend. The online companies felt trapped in the past with uninspired bouquets. Local florists were too expensive. But flowers come out of the ground, Dyme thought, and we should enjoy them more often.
Their new company would have an accessible price point and be socially conscious — Flowers for Dreams donates 25 percent of profits to local charities. Most of all, Dyme said, he wanted to deliver bouquets that came with an experience.
“Who brags about their 1-800-Flowers bouquet? Right? There are no (flower) brands that elicit pride or loyalty, and that was a huge opportunity. It’s more about aesthetic and experience,” he said.
While it’s a traditional business, the market keeps growing. Retail sales for flowers exceeded $30 billion in 2016 (the most recent year available), according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis Personal Consumption Expenditures.
After graduating from college, Dyme and Dickstein started delivering the bouquets on bicycles in downtown Chicago with wooden crates strapped to their handlebars with bungee cords.
“If we had done that math, we wouldn’t have started,” Dyme said.