On today’s episode, Kunle interviews John Tabis, a Co-Founder of Bouqs, a 9-figure, sustainable direct-to-consumer business serving the floral vertical.

They are venture-backed with $74M+ raised and are the 7th biggest company to be featured on the TV show, Shark Tank.
Kunle and John discuss Bouqs’ DTC journey from ideation 8 years ago to their current omnichannel retail fluidity model.
They are cut-to-order online flower delivery business with roots in sustainability.

Covered Topics:

On today’s interview Kunle and Moshe discuss,

• Funding an ecommerce business
• Technology being an great enabler to differentiation and scale
• Post pandemic DTC landscape
• Why storytelling should be deeply engrained in all market communications
• Complexity of teams as a company is scaled
• Perishable supply chains

Timestamp:

• 10:00 – John’s career path to Bouqs
• 13:02 – How Bouqs was started – Direct to consumer from the farmer
• 18:16 – Complex supply chain working 140 farms across the world
• 19:00 – Initial seed capital – friends and family round of $13,000 ($4,000 each co-founder and $5,000 from others)
• 21:12 – Limitless opportunities in DTC eCommerce ($75 million raised)
  • No dominating online retailers so far
  • Supply chain disruption matched with segment or value proposition
  • Supply chain hypothesis, 3PL, marketplace, dropship, omnichannel
  • Segment target: young women, older women, pet food, goth
  • No Amazon killers so far in 2020
• 24:30 – Post-pandemic DTC customer experience
• 27:35 – Bouq’s Cayambe volcano ‘origin story’
• 31:30 – How the Bouq’s story has evolved
• 37:30 – Email capture and a referral program are the two fundamental actions every ecommerce start-up should take – Drip campaign that communicates your value-proposition (set it and forget)
• 41:00 – Shark Tank journey and impact on Bouqs, for reach, (from UCLA alumni email update)
• 45:32 – Sold hundreds of thousands of dollars in minutes
  • FAQ on the website
  • 7.5 million reach
• 48:30 – With Series A, $6m funding how did the business change?
  • New HQ
  • 6 -18 Team, with COO, Direct of Marketing
  • Marketing expenses went up by 10X
  • More complexity
  • $24M raised in Series C
• 54:16 Majority non-subscription business
• 56:00 The expectation of the utility of cash from a VC
  • Raise money for a purpose at every funding round
  • Series A – foundational and marketing budget basics (sweepstakes, diy PR, affiliate marketing)
  • Series B – could be full-on marketing due to product market fit
  • Series C – expand supply chain from Ecuador, de-risk existing supply chain.
• 53:00 – How marketing changed with $24M Series C vs $6M Series A
• 1:02:00 – TV commercial
• 1:05:00 – Podcasting and radio
• 1:08:00 – Impact of COVID on DTC
  • Arbitrage opportunity to get free clicks on Facebook
• 1:09:30 – Outdoor billboard advertising experience
• 1:10:55 – Evolution of Bouqs Tech Stack (at 8 yrs old)
  • Perishable product supply chain platform
  • 25 tech team out of 85 staff member
• 1:14:00 – Tech Stack
  • Ecommerce Platform: Workarea (customised)
  • Email Service Provider (EST): Sailthru
  • Subscription engine (in-house)

Takeaways:

• In Facebook advertising, do not limit the amount of signals because without enough data to analyse, it just collides.
• It’s much easier to consume an ad if you have the graphics to support the story rather than subtitles.

Lightning Round:

• Advice to yourself 5 Years ago:
  • Build for tomorrow rather than today
• Are you a morning person? Not a morning person
• Morning routine –
  • struggle to get up,
  • kids wake him up,
  • 1 hour gym workout + email over workout
  • Shower and set out to work
• Two things can’t live without –
  • Ben and Jerrys ice cream (brownie batter core, microwave for 10 secs), 1 pint a week and the beach.
• Best mistake to date:
  • thought they didn’t need to heavily invest in tech – tech is actually a great enablers
• Current book:
  • no book but last book was, “Radical Candor, Kim Scott”

Tweetable Quotes:

“Buying a single local cable spot during the super bowl was actually surprisingly cheap – we spent $10,000 – $15,000”

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