with bouquets featuring elevated, specialty flowers, specialty ribbons and even more refined packaging to mitigate having fewer orders but reinforcing a profitable average order value. Unlike other companies, Farmgirl is led by the founder herself. This year’s bouquets are inspired by color palettes Stembel has found on fashion runways and trending on TikTok, like neon.In the past, Farmgirl always would scale up for Valentine’s Day.
Farmgirl Flowers started with a problem. Stembel never could get fabulous flowers delivered to her mom in her hometown in rural Indiana. She would scroll through endless options only to wind up with a bouquet of kelly green button mums. “I wanted fewer, better Stembel grew up in a town with just two stoplights, attending church several times a week. She took a big risk leaving home at age 18, just after graduating high school, to move to New York City.
had ever crossed my mind until I moved to the west coast in the middle of the first dot com bubble,” Stembel says. “I joke that the same way everyone in Los Angeles carries their headshots in their back pocket, everyone in SF totes around their business plan. I was inspired by how many women were striking out as entrepreneurs. It was there, in San Francisco on the cusp of the new millennium and in the hotbed of startup culture, that I decided I wanted to one day have my own company.
As with so many other businesses, the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020 rocked Farmgirl Flowers’ world. “We completely overhauled our business model and have fundamentally changed as a company,” says Stembel. “We’re stronger now because of it all but it was the longest, hardest road that I have had to travel as a CEO. I’m grateful we’re still here.”
Stembel offers this advice to young people looking to align their career with their life purpose. “The self-preservation thing that compels some teenagers to conform, to dress like their classmates, to act like their classmates, to fit in – I just didn’t have it. My advice is to be unapologetically the best version of yourself whenever you can. Often it felt like I was swimming upstream.