w/ Talia Boone, Postal Petals
The great lockdown of 2020 seems like a lifetime ago. At that time, a lot of took on hobbies. Some of us baked. I made a lot of homemade pizza.
Today's guest also picked up a pandemic hobby, and then, unlike my homemade pizza, she turned it from a passion to a business.
Talia Boone, founder of Postal Petals, a store that sells “do it yourself” flower arrangements shares her journey from sports marketing to entrepreneurship, and we'll find out just how tough - but not impossible - it is to break into some industries.
TALIA'S BIO: Postal Petals Founder & CEO, Talia R. Boone, enters the floral industry after a groundbreaking career in sports, entertainment and social impact. She brings with her over 15 years of experience in brand strategy, communications, marketing, public relations, promotions, sales and strategic partnerships.
In addition to Postal Petals, she is the Managing Director of INTER:SECT, a tactical solutions agency that serves as a catalyst for pioneering ideas, collaboration and creative opportunities that exist at the intersection of sports & entertainment, business, technology, consciousness, culture and the arts.
Talia’s passion to help drive efforts to achieve long-standing, systematic social justice spills over into anything she does and that includes Postal Petals, where messages encouraging consumers to register to vote and highlighting the frequent injustices against underrepresented communities can be found throughout the brand’s site and its social media platforms.
A native of a Los Angeles suburb, Talia is a graduate of San Diego State University where she earned a degree in communications with an emphasis in public relations. Talia is an advocate of civic engagement and collective social change as well as a lover of facts, experiences, art, culture and of course flowers.
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
Kurt Elster: Ah, the great lockdown of 2020. It seems like a lifetime ago, right? And at that time a lot of us took on new hobbies or rediscovered past interests. A lot of people baked. I know I baked. I made a lot of homemade pizza. That was my thing. But today’s guest also picked up a pandemic hobby, and then, unlike my homemade pizza, she turned it from a passion to a business, like a really cool, interesting business. Today’s guest is Talia Boone, founder of Postal Petals, a store that sells DIY, do it yourself flower arrangements. But it wasn’t easy, so we’ll hear about her journey from sports marketing to entrepreneurship, and we’ll find out just how tough, but not impossible, it is to break into some industry.
Talia, thank you for joining us.
Talia Boone: Thank you so much for having me, Kurt. Really, really excited to be here. Excited for this conversation.
Kurt Elster: Oh, absolutely. So, let’s start at the top, start easy. What the heck is Postal Petals?
Talia Boone: So, Postal Petals, the way that I like to describe Postal Petals is as a multi-touchpoint self-care and wellness company that uses fresh cut flowers and DIY flower arranging as a tool for mindfulness and self-care. So, at our core, what we do is we partner with domestic flower farms to ship bundles of fresh cut flowers to our customers all across the country. We ship within the continental U.S. for our customers to create their own DIY flower arranging. I like to say we’re not a design house. We’re not a floristry. We don’t ship pre-designed arrangements. What we do is we curate the bundles of flowers that go in the box based on what we think will look good together, but then we leave it 100% up to our customer, the end user, to decide how to break those bundles apart and create an arrangement of their own that they can be proud of. And through the process of arranging them, really help them to evolve their traditional experience with flowers from this ready to use product that is typically delivered to them by a professional florist, maybe they put it on the table and enjoy it for a few days, then it dies and they throw it out, instead of really focusing on it as that ready to use product, really encouraging them to experience the process of arranging them, and in doing that allowing that creativity to help to relieve stress, anxiety, and to become really an interactive part of their self-care routine.
Kurt Elster: I love it. I just… My personality is fiddly. I like to fiddle. And that just lends itself to a lot of interesting projects, hobbies, crafts, and my business, eCommerce optimization, it’s fiddling. And so, when you have a physical thing, and you’re the one who arranged it, maybe like you… This is assembly. I have assembled my arrangement. Now I feel I have ownership of it. I may have bought it, but it wasn’t mine until I set it up the way I want, and so I just… I love products, and arrangements, and presentations like this.
And so, if I were to place an order with you today, I’d get a box. In the box is bundles of various flowers?
Talia Boone: Yeah, so in the box is exactly that, so first of all I love that term assembly. Assembly required. I actually wrote it down, like I’m still in that, like I’m gonna integrate that in there, that our flowers are absolutely assembly required. But yeah, so when you order our box, and our boxes come in three different sizes. Our Beanie box is our smallest size box, named after my forever dog daughter, Beanie, and that comes with usually about six to eight bundles of flowers. Our second size is our medium size box called our Midis, and that comes with about anywhere from nine to eleven bundles of flowers. And then our Biggie box, which is our largest size box, comes with anywhere from 12 to 15 bundles of flowers. And when we say bundles, we mean you will get like a bundle of dahlias, a bundle of sunflowers, a bundle of eucalyptus, but they’re all one bundle of each of those flowers boxed in a very large shipping box.
I always say to people, “Be prepared, because our boxes are over three feet long,” because these are long stem flowers that we make sure to leave room for the stems to be as long as they are naturally. As long as they fit within our box, that’s why our boxes are so large. They’re almost 40 inches long. And that’s intentional, because that needs to be part of the creative process, is you deciding the shape of your design. Not just where the flowers go, but how dramatic you want it to be, how tall you want it to be. You know, some people love a really tall, lean arrangement, where they have a very kind of like deep but skinny cylinder that they can just stick very, very tall stems into, and so we want to allow for people to be able to do that, so we give them the stems as long as they grow, and then just leave it to you to cut them up.
But yeah, they come in that box, and then in our box it’s got some quick care tips around how to immediately get your flowers unpacked from the boxes, give them a quick trim, put them in water, because it’s important for people to remember that the flowers are traveling overnight, right? And so, they are off of water for anywhere from 18 to 24 hours typically. We usually will ship our flowers to arrive overnight. Always to arrive overnight. There’s hiccups here and there with our deliveries where it will maybe be instead of the next day, it’ll get there the day after, but typically our flowers are so fresh that they last just fine. But we always tell people put them in water right away, give them a few hours to… just like how you would with a houseguest that’s traveled a long distance. Give them a glass of water, allow them to rehydrate, relax, recover, and then once they get their sorts about themselves and have a chance to get used to their new environment, they’re perked up and they’re ready to go. Then we invite people to start designing through some instructions on our box, and then they can go onto our website for more.
Kurt Elster: I love the way… The analogy used to describe that. Please tell me that is somewhere on the box, a pack-in, an email, the website.
Talia Boone: Yes. Yes, it is. Because it’s one of those things where because people, we absolutely do that, and the reason being is because a lot of what we’re doing is, as I mentioned before, truly evolving the way that people are used to engaging with flowers. And so, typically when people get flowers, they are either in water or literally just coming out of water, so people don’t really understand that experience of flowers needing to be put inside of water to bring them back, right? They don’t really understand that process.
And so, the way that I explain it is to say, “Well, any weary traveler, the first thing they’re gonna want when they come to your home, which is the first thing you do when anyone comes in your home, is you offer them a drink. You offer them something to drink, you offer them a refreshment because they’ve traveled to you, and they are likely parched, or they need some sort of sustenance to kind of bring them into the space that they’re in.” And so, we just encourage people to think of their flowers in the exact same way, and so be patient with them, be gentle with them, give them something that will make them comfortable, and then once they’re comfortable and brought back to themselves, they’re gonna be good houseguests.
Kurt Elster: Selling flowers online and shipping them direct to consumer, that’s not unusual or new. But your format 100% is. I don’t know that anyone else was doing this. How did you get started with it two years ago?
Talia Boone: Yeah. Well, Kurt, I’m glad you asked that, because that’s actually exactly how I ended up starting the company, is because that did not exist in the way that I was looking for it. So, my journey with flowers actually started several years ago. A good friend of mine introduced me to flower arranging really just as a friend activity. She’s like, “Oh, you want to go?” Because we would just do… It’s one of those friends that we always do really fun, just new things. Always doing something new. And we would just randomly say, “Hey, you want to go horseback riding? Oh, you want to go learn how to play backgammon?” Always just figuring out something different to do.
And so, she had started flower arranging and she was like, “Hey, I think you’ll actually like this. Let’s try that as an activity.” So, we did it and I fell in love with it. I really, really liked it. And not only did I like it, I started to find that it was very relaxing. It was something I think about the creativity, something about kind of the mindfulness of mindlessness, if that makes sense. Just this kind of arranging the flowers stem by stem, I just… I was drawn to that.
And the work that I was doing even before I started the flower company was really intense, right? So, my background, which I’m sure we’ll get into, is in sports, and I was running and still do run what I call a tactical solutions agency that operates right at the intersection of sports and entertainment, corporate and consumer brands, and social impact. And whenever you’re doing work in any kind of impact space where you’re dealing with any degree of human and civil rights issues, it can be incredibly stressful. And so, I started to really utilize the flowers as a way for me to relieve that energy, relieve that stress, and it just became a natural hobby for me, and then fast forward to the pandemic, here in L.A. we’d gone on lockdown I think maybe the second or third week I think of March. It initially was just meant to be just two weeks in the house and then it’ll be gone, and we’ll be fine. Well, by the middle of April once it started to become really clear that this was not gonna be just a quick two weeks or four weeks in the house, I started to get really a lot of anxiety and started to really be nervous just about what this meant for life, what this meant for the future of myself, my business, my family, all of these things.
And I’m expressing these things to my therapist and she’s hearing me really kind of struggle with anxiety in this way and she just said, “You know, Talia, I have not heard you talk about arranging flowers in a while. Why don’t you try that and see if that helps you to kind of relieve some of this anxiety that you’re feeling, and help you to kind of reset so that emotionally you can start to kind of think about some really healthier ways to begin to process what’s happening?” And so, I was like, “Oh, that’s a great idea.” And then I immediately was like, “Oh, I’ll head down to the L.A. flower market, because that’s where I would typically go once I started getting into arranging. I would just go down to the flower market, mill around, just grab whatever I thought would look good barely ever knowing the names of any of the flowers. I would just pick off of colors, and textures, and all those things that I would think would look good together.
But the problem was that the L.A. flower market was closed because of the lockdowns. And so, I just thought, “Oh, I’m sure everybody’s shipping everything right now. I’m positive I’ll be able to find someone that could ship me flowers to my house that I can arrange.” And so, I started looking and could not find anything. You found people who’d send you arrangements, but that’s not what I wanted. I didn’t want flowers for the sake of flowers. I wanted flowers for the experience of arranging them. And so, I ended up finding online this wholesale flower distributor that shipped very large volumes of flowers to his clients all around the world, retail clients around the world for like weddings, events, that kind of thing, and so I called him really just with the audacity to see if I could convince him to reduce his minimums enough for him to just send me a small box of flowers for me to arrange at home.
And so, he right away told me no, but he was patient enough to explain to me why, and so two-and-a-half hours later, we were still on the phone kind of talking about the floral industry, and all of these different things, and by the end of that conversation I recognized two things. I recognized one, that what I was looking for did not exist in the marketplace in the way that I was looking for it, and then two, that there was an opportunity for me to enter the floral industry because as I mentioned before that he would ship a lot to retailers who would do weddings, and events, and those kind of things. None of those things were happening because of the lockdown, right? And even big flower farms, particularly domestic flower farms that even had big deals with grocery stores and things, people were stockpiling toilet paper at the time. They were not thinking about flowers in any way, shape, or form.
And so, a lot of the domestic flower farms were suffering greatly and looking for new ways to bring their product to market. And so, with all of those facts in mind immediately on that call, by the time I got off the call, the kind of rough idea for what is now Postal Petals came to me, and I asked him right in that moment like, “Hey, do you think something like this could work?” And he thought about it for a second and he just said, “You know, if you’d have asked me this four months ago I would have said probably not, but now thinking about the current state of the floral industry, it probably could work.”
Kurt Elster: There’s several interesting things there. So, the pandemic, you were suffering with a lot of anxiety with it early on. And I can relate. I distinctly remember I’d wake up in the morning and then moments later I’d remember, “Oh, shit. This again.” And then the anxiety would return, and you’d have that brief moment when you first wake up before you remembered it. And so, you went back to this hobby you enjoyed that was like a practice of… I love that phrase, mindless mindfulness I think was what you described it as?
Talia Boone: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: It really focuses your attention without being like terribly taxing. You know, we’re not doing algebra here. You had to solve a pain or problem for yourself, and that’s often how these businesses start, so you’re trying to pursue this hobby that you love, and you can’t get the local flowers the way you want them, and so you’re like, “All right, I’m gonna fix this.” And you went and found someone who clearly you were able to engage with them, because they spent enough time on the phone with you and you were able from there… That was where that business idea was born. You needed someone in the industry to go, “Yeah, I think that could work.” So, what’s the beta there? Is it just to… What are you trying to validate with it?
Talia Boone: Well, really it’s proofing the concept, right? And the one thing that I didn’t say that I should have is that when we launched beta in July, we had nearly 20 farm partners signed up to ship for us. And so, what that looks like is-
Kurt Elster: Oh, wow.
Talia Boone: And so, when you’re thinking about in beta, really that is… It’s testing all sorts of things. Is there a market for this? Do people want to arrange flowers or is this only something that I like to do? One of the learnings, with beta it’s all about testing the functionality of your website, testing the marketplace to see if there’s interest for it, but also testing models of the business, right? So, does the price point work? One of the very first learnings within I’d say the first 36 hours, initially the shipping for the boxes was free. It was initially free. And within 36 hours after people started buying I was like, “Oh yeah, it can’t be free,” because as I started to realize how incredibly expensive it is to ship flowers I realized that there’s no way that the company could sustain without charging for shipping.
And even now, we don’t charge really what it costs us to ship, but at least we use the shipping costs to try to at least offset some of those fees. But in beta that’s really what it was. Learning what worked and didn’t work. We learned that people had to pay for shipping. We learned that initially the thought was that we would decide what boxes they get, and it would be a surprise for people all the time, but then I started feeling this anxiety around picking which box people get, and so that’s when we said, “Okay, we’re not doing that anymore. Now we’re gonna give people every…” I think at that time we were giving them 10 or 12 selections to choose from. We’ve narrowed that down to six just because we don’t want so many SKUs, because we’ve realized we can streamline a lot of our backend admin, and even people’s understanding of what we do, by giving them less options.
You know, it’s always… I always say the less options I have, the more decisive I am able to be. And so, these are the learnings that we’ve gotten over time. And then also too, just very direct feedback during that beta phase. Asking friends and family, like, “Hey, what do you think? When the flowers came, how were they packaged? Did your flowers last? Did you enjoy the process? What could have made it easier?” All of those things.
And so, it really was a proper beta timeframe, and then when we came up, and that six-week period, initially I was planning beta to just be three or four weeks, but we needed more time to build out certain aspects. And even now, we’re constantly tweaking and evolving the offering, the language, all of these different things, because we’re learning from our customers. We’re learning about how to use… how our product can be used based on the way our customers are using. So, we kind of integrated merch in there because we made some cute little sweatshirts for ourselves and people were like, “Oh my God, those are so cute. How can we get those?” And I was like, “Actually, perfect. We’ll just add that onto the site too.” And it just made it really easy. So, again, we just kind of listened to the way our customers are using the product and taking a lot of their insights in and just adjusting accordingly.
Kurt Elster: Is the merch, is it print on demand?
Talia Boone: Yep. We work with Printful, so it’s print on demand. There’s some stuff that we’re gonna actually… We’re actually right now getting printed for the new year, for the holiday, that our print on demand partner doesn’t have. But we’re gonna… We trust that demand is enough for it there that we don’t mind kind of warehousing some of that product and then being able to push it out ourselves over the holiday.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I love those print on demand services where it’s like, “Oh, just in time manufacturing.” The product doesn’t have to exist until someone orders it, and then they handle it, and it is like especially early on, it really simplifies the process. And the number of things you can get made in this-
Talia Boone: So many things.
Kurt Elster: … method now. Wow. You could even do… I’m not wearing it now, but they’ll embroider shirts for you now, which is pretty cool.
Talia Boone: Yep. They absolutely will. And then what’s great about it, and I don’t know if you’ve ever kind of priced around other options for warehousing merch, but unless you get into the thousands as it relates to units, their pricing is actually pretty comparable with the print on demand versus larger, kind of buying them in larger bulk, and so it's one of those things where unless it’s something specialty that they don’t offer and we want to sell, I honestly could envision us continuing to do print on demand for quite some time because we are successful doing it and there’s no requirement to hold inventory, and we’re not having resources tied up. And that’s really the beautiful thing about the model across the board, is that it allows us the flexibility to ship as people want them versus kind of warehousing product.
Kurt Elster: It sounded like you got a lot of customer feedback, and I’m always banging the drum on this show, and just with clients in general, that hey, one of the most valuable things you could do is talk to your customers. Phone.app. That’s the one that’s gonna make the most money. What were some of the things that surprised you when you… Because you weren’t sure, like yeah, this worked for you. You thought this was cool. But until it’s out there and you’re selling it, who knows if anyone else is gonna care or have the same reaction? What were some of the things that surprised you when you talked to customers?
Talia Boone: Some of the things that surprised me was some of the ways they were using them, like I had… I started noticing we were getting people who were normally buying Biggie boxes throughout the year, when it came time for holidays, end of school year, beginning of school year, they started buying Biggie boxes, and so when we started asking questions about kind of we noticed there’s a change in your buying behavior, talk to us about what you’re doing, they said, “Oh. Well, we’re actually using these with the kids. We’re making hand ties for the teachers as teacher gifts.”
And so, it started to become where we started seeing people use our products in ways that we not necessarily didn’t intend, but didn’t expect, and then we’re able to actually end up marketing against that because now we’re like, “Oh, these can be neighbor gifts for the holidays. They could be teacher gifts. They could be that kind of thing.” People starting to do birthday parties, like, “Oh, can we do a workshop with you?” And then we want to have a birthday party for friends, or we just… Our friends just want to get together. Because remember, we started it during the pandemic when everyone was still doing Zoom happy hours, and Zoom things, looking for Zoom gatherings for their friends, and so that’s how we started doing the virtual flower arranging workshops, was that those were our customers saying, “Hey, we want you to ship all of the boxes to our friends and then we’re gonna get on Zoom. Are you able to come on and show us how to do it?”
And then we were like, “Bingo. We need to be doing workshops in this way.” So, it’s that kind of stuff where you just kind of watch the way that they’re using it. When you see changes in behavior, just reach out and just say, “Hey, thank you for being a loyal customer. We noticed that you do blah, blah, blah, and right now you’re doing XYZ. Can you talk us through what this change is representing and how we can help you to kind of better utilize the flowers in whatever way that you’re currently using them?” And they’ve actually… Staying tapped into our customers is really what has helped us to really thoughtfully grow and expand, right?
Even our work in the B2B space, that came from customer outreach. We had actually a really popular late night show reach out to us about doing flower arranging as part of their corporate wellness activity, and that right away just put off all these lightbulbs around how our flowers can use… Some of which we’re still working on, so I can’t share it totally, but it really… It helped me understand the ways in which we may be able to utilize our flowers in a corporate setting.
And so, that’s how we started doing corporate team building activities, corporate health and wellness activities. We went and got all of our minority business certifications, so we’re a certified minority-owned business, certified woman-owned business, certified woman-owned small business, so that we could really start to, as we work with our corporate clients, really start to tap into and really maximize their opportunity for spends with us because so many of them have designated dollars that they’ve committed to spending with women-owned business, minority-owned businesses, small-owned businesses, and so us having those certifications are gonna be essential to helping the business grow. But we would not have so carefully and thoughtfully considered B2B were it not for our clients reaching out. People who had used our products as consumers and said, “Hey, I think this would be really cool if we utilized this product as a team activity to kind of bring us all together virtually.” And so, yeah, it’s been very, very helpful staying in contact with our customers in that way.
Kurt Elster: Being in touch with these customers really led you to adding an entire successful sales channel to this business.
Talia Boone: 100%. 100%. 100%.
Kurt Elster: I’m also glad you brought up the business certifications, like woman-owned business, because I’ve had clients say, “Hey, we’re gonna get this certification. We’re gonna put it on the site. We think we should. It feels right. But what’s the value of that? Do you know?” And I say I don’t, actually. It feels right. I think we should do it. But I really don’t know what the big advantage there is. And you really spelled it out for us.
Talia Boone: Yeah. It has been a tremendous value for us for a couple of reasons. One, as I explained, yes, you can do corporate partnerships and get corporate clients without them, but when you have those certifications, those spends multiply because they can directly count the dollars that they’re spending with you against their corporate mandates to spend with business owners in specific categories, so that’s one. But two, and I always say with anything you get out of it what you put into it, right?
And so, I’m one of those people that stays incredibly engaged, and when you stay engaged, there’s been so many corporate partners, corporate clients that I met only because I have the certifications, right? Because it’s not just… If you just get the certification and then never engage with the certifying entity again, you have completely missed a significant opportunity, because part of the benefit, I would even say the more significant benefit in having your business certifications is the community that is built there, right? Because many of these certifying agencies, they have national conferences. They have regular programming where they’re bringing in different corporates, so you’re able to constantly pitch your product and service. There’s so many things like that. There’s so much business that I’ve gotten, so much business that I’m currently kind of gardening, if you will, like planting seeds and tending the soil, and really working on growing these relationships, that by this time next year we’re gonna have a really solid, steady growth of corporate clients, and that’s directly relating to the certifications that we’ve gotten and our level of engagement with each of those certifying entities.
Kurt Elster: And you’ve got… It sounds like, are we starting to hear some of your sports marketing background, that skill set come through in this business? Because you were working with NFL players. You were a big deal. Are a big deal?
Talia Boone: I did well there. I did well there. So, I started in PR. I was doing sports PR for first the then San Diego Chargers, and then the Washington team, then Redskins, now Commanders moved me to the Washington area to work with them. And so, I worked with the teams for a few years and then ended up working for individual players. I worked with players on their foundations, and nonprofit endeavors, and then started kind of working with them on business strategy, and business management, and I always say any good publicist, unless you just love the art of PR, and pitching, and that kind of thing, what I usually find with publicists is that as they evolve they will almost always turn into some sort of brand strategist. And the reason being is because people don’t realize it that publicists are not just… Some are, but for the most part I am not the kind of publicist that is just pitching all the time. I’m also looking strategically at how I can position the client with partnerships in certain rooms, with certain opportunities that are gonna help to raise their profile, right?
And so, as you start to grow, and the publicist kind of is really, to me, I feel like a publicist is more so the quarterback of the team, right? Because they’re the ones who have the full landscape of not just what you’re doing, but they’re also paying attention to what everyone else is doing, and so they’re the ones that can come to you and say, “Oh, I see this is happening over here. Why don’t we look to partner with them? Because they’re gonna get this type of publicity and I think it could be really good for us.” And you know, you start to see this landscape happening.
And so, I always say that publicists oftentimes will transition into a strategist role because what happens is they start bringing different opportunities to the table, but they’re really only eating off of this small publicist plate. But then when you transition into a brand strategist, you’re now able to participate in all of these different things that you grow and bring together. And I really have always enjoyed really just putting those pieces together, which isn’t, I don’t think, too different, too disconnected from why I enjoy flower arranging. Because it really is just kind of putting together this puzzle, and I enjoy puzzles, and strategy for me is just puzzle building.
And so, yeah, I’ve been a strategist for several years, and to your point relating to the certifications, it very much is a strategic move and I’m very thoughtful about the ways in which I move to grow the company. You know, it may seem like I’ve got so many different things going on, and that’s intentional, because you can’t… You know, you can’t grow if you’re singularly focused. You can be singularly focused, but you have to be thinking about all the different ways that that one singular focus is going to be elevated. And there’s a lot of ways to skin a cat. And so, I’m just picking out all these different ways to drive subscriptions for the flower boxes, and that looks like corporate clients. It looks like floral art installations. It looks like interactive areas where people… live events. We do community wellness events. All of these things that we know are helping one, to build community, and then ultimately to start to drive subscriptions.
Kurt Elster: Well, I love that your worldview is these are all puzzles to solve, whether that’s like business strategy, or a flower arrangement, and then the larger goal of hey, if we can familiarize with that strategy, then you’ve got your long-term and your short-term strategy, and everything just fits into this larger puzzle. It’s just puzzles within puzzles.
Talia Boone: That’s it. That’s all it is.
Kurt Elster: We started to hear… I think we’re starting to hear a little bit of how you were able to get this off the ground, because the hardest part of starting a new brand, especially… This is a somewhat new concept, too, is getting the audience. No one knows who you are, so no one cares yet. They don’t know they should even care. And so, how did you find your tribe? How did you get people to care?
Talia Boone: Well, so first it started again with our beta, just went out to friends and family. Asked them to please share with other people that they knew. And then also very early on I tapped into my background in PR, right? So, I reached out to different contacts I knew at different outlets and said, “Hey, I’m starting this new company.” And I pitched the angle, like I’m a Black woman and starting this company that is disrupting the floral industry. It started during the pandemic. I hit all of these different angles. And you know, we were featured in Forbes, and Black Enterprise, Essence, GQ, Good Housekeeping. We were able to get really great coverage in our early days primarily because I have that PR background and I know how important… Two things I know. One, I know how important awareness is, right? And how important it is for people to see you in the press and to see you in credible outlets. Because whenever you are one, bringing a product that you’re a company, a brand that people don’t recognize, it’s either reviews or it’s media validation that’s gonna make people start to have confidence enough to give you their money to try your product.
The second thing is you need to bring awareness to your brand, and the reality is is that traditional earned media is the least expensive way to do that, right? Like when you’re a new company, you don’t have the resources to do a full-fledged marketing campaign or a full-fledged advertising campaign, but what you can do is maybe… If you’re a publicist, a recovering publicist like I was, or if you have some resources, I would say put it into PR, because you can get a lot, and we track that, because that’s the beautiful thing about the Shopify platform, is that you can track where your customers are coming from, and we can see that so many of our customers are coming from Good Housekeeping, they’re coming from the GQ article. They’re coming from all these different places.
And we can say, we can look at it and see, okay, these are the type of outlets that are drawing, that are really driving business to our site, so then we start to focus on pitching those outlets. And so, that becomes our form of advertising and marketing, because we… Again, we could never pay. I shouldn’t say we could never pay. We are not currently in a position to pay for these six, seven-figure marketing and advertising campaigns, but doing it through PR and through earned media is a really great way to get the word out. And so, we’ve been, again, very strategic about that being a really intentional focus for us. And it’s worked, so essentially quite a bit of our business has grown just by word of mouth.
Kurt Elster: And there is no better source of qualified traffic than word of mouth, because they know your story, because you told it, and to your point, you said, “Hey, this is kind of how I positioned myself to tell that story,” I was on the receiving end of that. I got the pitch. And it lined up with your bullet points. And I get a lot of pitches, and most of them are just… They’re soggy and lame. And I saw yours and it was like two seconds later I was like, “Yeah, that’s a no brainer. Okay, yes please.”
Talia Boone: Oh, wow. Thank you.
Kurt Elster: Just pick a date. Let’s record.
Talia Boone: Thank you. Amazing. Thank you so much. I appreciate that. Because I also too realize that if it’s not interesting, nobody wants it. And I don’t… I’m not crafting interesting. I do think that the brand is interesting. I think we’re doing really cool things. I think yes, we are disrupting the floral industry. I do think that that’s really cool. I think the idea that we’re saying to people like, “Yo, we all like flowers, but you guys are using them wrong.” That’s something that if somebody said that to me, I’d be like, “What? What do you mean I’m using them wrong?” And then having to go through the process of trying to help people understand how they could really maximize their relationship with flowers, right?
It's this idea of using flowers for self-care. That’s mind blowing. And I didn’t even think about flowers in that way until I started engaging with them. And then there’s these fun tidbits about, you know, I’m obsessed. I always read stories about people who have started businesses during the pandemic, right? If you look at, historically speaking, when you see some of the greatest wealth globally that’s been built, it’s been built in times of intense either recession, like economic depression, or times of great uncertainty. Those are the times when great wealth is typically built. And so, those kind of stories really fascinate me. I am an information nerd. I am culturally diverse. I’m socially diverse. I’m informationally diverse. I just love information and insight.
And so, I appreciate you saying that you getting the pitch and immediately you were like, “Yo, this is awesome.” I appreciate that because I like to be interesting, because I’m drawn to interesting, and I think that this company is… I’m obsessed. Fully obsessed with this company.
Kurt Elster: So, you’re in an interesting position, right? You started this at… We were like deep in the pandemic. Summer 2020 is when this really goes live. How has… Have you seen shifts in consumer trends, demand? Self-care really took off in 2020. We’re like, “Look, let’s buy ice cream and sweatpants. That’s what’s hot.” Little different now. What have you noticed?
Talia Boone: So, what I’ve noticed is, and I’m again going back to being thoughtful about trends, right? And being strategic. And really paying attention to the landscape. And so, when I went and started getting my minority business certifications, a lot of the reason that I did that is yes, of course, because the price points are bigger, and it’s a great way to reach an end user, and you can… You’re working with the corporate, but you’re… The safe assumption is if a corporate is paying for an employee to have this experience, that the employee likely makes enough money to be able to utilize the product. So, all of those things are true, but the other thing that I started to realize was that people were still gonna be able to utilize our flowers, utilize them in the way that they had been, but I think there would be a shift so it wouldn’t be as virtual as it was before. Now it’s starting to look at how can we engage with people IRL, in real life?
And so, with our corporate clients, we thought, “Okay, now that outside is starting to open up and they need to start learning, figuring out how to bring people back, nobody wants to go back into the office.” And so, that messaging started to shift around like, “Hey, you know, how can we help you bring your employees back into the office? Let’s set up wellness spaces in your offices where employees can come and have a mini mental escape during the workday and arrange flowers. How can we have a day where even if it’s not we’re leading them through workshops, let’s have fresh cut flowers in whatever that gathering space was in the office before you went away to the pandemic, everybody went away to work from home.” Because now most workforces are anywhere from 50 to 70% new people than who they had when they first went away, and so the corporate culture for in office doesn’t really exist anymore.
And so, it’s looking at how can we utilize our flowers and our services to help people kind of redefine and reintroduce corporate culture to the employees and entice them, at the same time, entice them to come back into the office? And then with our consumer, our direct customer, we are also saying we can continue to use the flowers in the way that we talked about, but let’s also think about how we can build community in person, right? And so, earlier this year we started doing our regular community wellness events, where we’re not stopping and just saying, “Let’s arrange flowers.” We’re saying, “Let’s have a full morning of wellness. Let’s do gentle yoga, some sort of body movement. Let’s tend to our mind and do a guided meditation or a sound bath meditation. And then let’s bring that energy into a really peaceful floral design experience where you can really start your day off and let the flowers be a reminder of this time that you spent in mindfulness.”
And those kind of experiences, while they can be done virtually, they’re done quite better in the real life setting. And so, we’ve just started to pivot. As we see people now beginning to be outside, we’re meeting them. We’re meeting them where they are. So, instead of doing virtual workshops, we’re saying, “Hey, meet us in the garden. Let’s meet us in the botanic garden and let’s do…” You know, we did a big event at the South Coast Botanic Garden a couple of weeks ago, and as a part of that event we had two wellness sessions. Those wellness sessions sold out just like that, because people are excited about self-care. They’re excited about their wellness. And they’re also excited about being able to do those things outside and in relationship with other people.
And so, it doesn’t… The pandemic essentially ending doesn’t change our business model. It’s still meeting people where they are because the good thing about the pandemic is two things. Several things happened, but two things that we focus on is one, that people really did get into the DIY space, and they really got into the space of really wanting to have some sort of a say in what the end product of any product that they’re using looks like, feels like, and how they experience it, and so we are giving them a product that exactly does that. Whether they’re in the pandemic or not, we’re still here and can offer that.
The other thing is that people became very aware of how important it is to pay attention to their mindfulness, pay attention to their emotional and mental health, and really be intentional about practicing self-care. And again, we’re still here providing those services and can meet you exactly where you are. We can still ship you boxes of flowers to your house, but then we can also do real-life events to start to bring people together and introduce them to this concept of flower arranging as a form of mindfulness and self-care in a way that we weren’t necessarily able to touch them before.
So, our work continues. It just looks a little bit different because we’re not having to stay operating in that virtual space. We can now start to get out and touch people, which I’m really excited about.
Kurt Elster: The trends we’re seeing here that survive the pandemic, that like they’re here to stay, they’re not going away, self-care and mindfulness, for sure. We have this idea, like remote’s not going away, but also we have this return to the office and work that has not been thrilling for most folks, right? It’s like how do you do that in an intentional way that doesn’t come across as like, “Well, we got middle managers who just need to be up in your business, so get back in there, buddy.” It doesn’t work. Nobody wants it. And so, if you have a product that can… If you just went to me like, “All right, people gotta go back to work and I sell DIY flower arrangements. How do we market that?” I’d go, “I don’t know.” But you come up with these very clever methods to insert your brand and your product into that discussion and space, and make a profit doing it, and gain new customers doing it. Again, you’re just solving puzzles over here. Playing 4D chess.
And then the other trend, and this one I’ve noticed too. This is one of my favorites, is just that explosion of DIY hobbies, interests, communities around skills, because you had people looking for stuff to do. And so, this can really apply to all kinds of things, but if you’re adjacent to any of those spaces and you can get involved with that community, that’s very beneficial, as well. And even just adding customizable, personalized, or DIY lesser versions of your products could be quite helpful.
Okay. What’s next for Talia and Postal Petals?
Talia Boone: We are continuing to grow our consumer offering. You know, we’re really excited going into the holiday season. We’ve got some really cool surprises, kind of like limited drops that we’re gonna be doing going into holiday season. One of the things that we’ve also been really intentional about at the beginning of this was supporting smaller, small, women-owned, minority-owned businesses, and also local businesses, and so we’re looking for some ways to continue to collaborate with local florists that have national offerings, like national audiences, and be able to help them to get their products to their audiences in cities, who live in cities and would never be able to get access to a fresh arrangement from their favorite florist outside of a collaboration with Postal Petals. So, we’re looking at some really cool collaborations in that way.
Also, some really cool curation collaborations. We’re working with some different visual artists to curate bundles of flowers that kind of fit the aesthetic that their audience are looking for. We’ve got some really cool corporate opportunities that we’re building out. I think the corporate space is gonna be a really, really major, major space for us. We’re also, which I’m really excited about, as we start to get into this floral art, and floral art installations, and using that as a way… Again, this whole thing of us really evolving people’s relationship with flowers and showing them that flowers can be a part of their lifestyle in a way that’s more than just observing, but really interacting with them. Because through our floral art installations, there’s always an interactive engaging piece for those, and so we have some really cool things coming up with some pretty large events where people are going to be able to experience the flowers in a new way, but then also be able to engage directly with them.
So, I think what’s next for us is, especially now that outside is open, is a really intentional drive towards essentially with flowers saying, “Allow me to reintroduce myself.” Because we are truly coming in and really saying to people like, “Hey, you thought you knew, but you have no idea. Come see what these flowers can do.” And so, there’s a lot going on, and we’re really, really excited about it. And so, yeah, just keep watching us. We’re @PostalPetals across all social media platforms, on PostalPetals.com if you want to get a box or just get a subscription for a friend, or two, or three, or four. We do gift subscriptions, as well, but yeah, I’m really excited about what the end of this year and beyond has for us, because there’s a lot of really great things brewing. It’s been a lot of hard work for the last couple of years and feels like we’re getting ready to start seeing a lot of fruit from that labor come to the forefront, so I’m really excited.
Kurt Elster: It does sound incredible, like I am thrilled to have you share that story with me. I love that it’s so focused on DIY. And just the whole thing, it’s wholesome, and positive, right? It feels great. So, I don’t know. I have to go grab one of these boxes.
Talia Boone: Please do.
Kurt Elster: But thank you so much for joining us. Talia Boone. PostalPetals.com. Thank you.
Talia Boone: Thank you so much, Kurt.