On a foggy day last March, as Covid-19 began its vicious spread across the United States, Christina Stembel found herself in a precarious position. Nearly 10 years after starting Farmgirl Flowers from her San Francisco apartment and growing it into a large-scale, national business against all odds, she was told to shut down operations by 11:59pm that night. With hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of flowers on their way to her facility and 197 employees hard at work, Stembel had 12 hours to figure out a way to close everything and still keep her company afloat.
But as hundreds of her competitors had to create all new business models or halt operations entirely, the Farmgirl Flowers founder already had a Plan B. Although the once-regional floral delivery service launched sourcing its stems exclusively from local farmers, she realized that this was not a sustainable approach once expanding to nationwide delivery. “I really drank the Kool-Aid in the beginning and heard so many people say how their agriculture business had suffered at the hands of the free-trade agreement with South America, so I really went all in on the local flowers,” Stembel explains. “But working in the agricultural space in North America as a female founder was extremely challenging because of gender, and there are many farms that to this day would not sell to me but sold to many of our male-owned competitors.” After exhausting all domestic options, she knew that she needed to start sourcing her flowers internationally and in January 2017, Farmgirl began working with farms in South America and informed customers of the change.