Cash management and business operations remain a pain point for small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in creative, events-based verticals like the floral and catering arena. While revenues can be strong, margins remain thin, often thanks to supply chain disruptions and supplier management issues.
It’s also a market that Curate Founder and CEO Ryan O’Neil said has been under-served by the B2B technology arena. As a result, he told PYMNTS in an interview, those unused David Austin garden roses can quickly become Abraham Lincoln roses, costing florists $5 per stem. “That’s the impetus behind our platform,” he said. “You have disposable or consumable goods that expire, so how do we simplify this process to make sure that you aren’t having that bucket of leftover flowers?”
Pruning the excess platforms
A lack of industry-targeted FinTech solutions for the floral industry currently has businesses attempting to cobble together a variety of platforms to run their businesses, as O’Neil said he experienced firsthand.
“We had information and documentation in 17 different places,” he said. “We had to have 12 different tabs up. We had Google forms, an invoicing software, and a payment processing software. We had this Franken-sheet made out of Excel to try to manage and calculate some numbers for us.”
Considering the nuanced pain points of the floral industry, such manual and unintegrated workflows were problematic. Flower species availability ebbs and flows with seasonality, supply chains often stemming from farmers across borders in markets like Ecuador and Colombia face backlogs, and products can wilt and die in transit if not delivered on time.
Agility and efficiency are critical to successful operations, yet without integrated workflows, florists are often forced to order from wholesalers last-minute, facing high product markups, said O’Neil. What’s more, to mitigate against the risk of not having enough viable product, or because they lack visibility into accurate inventory projections, florists can often order too much of a flower, only to have that product wasted at the end of an event—and have margins cut even thinner as a result.
This is where Curate has stepped in to streamline a variety of workflows, from payment processing to supplier management, in a holistic portal designed for florists and caterers. Driving efficiency means a florist can have several months’—as opposed to a few weeks’—worth of visibility into future orders to prepare.
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