Christina Stembel’s Farmgirl Flowers seemed like a huge success. The ecommerce flower delivery business was a media darling of the 2010s—and though Stembel never was able to raise any outside capital, its home base in San Francisco made it seem like part of the startup ecosystem. “To the outside world, we were super successful,” she remembers.
In 2019, the company did $34 million in revenue—but only $36,000 in profit. And Stembel only paid herself $60,000 that year. The next year, what seemed at first like an existential crisis quickly became a boom; during the pandemic, people sent flowers to each other and were eager to brighten up their homes. The company reached $60 million in sales in 2020 with 200 U.S. employees and 100 more in South America. But as soon as the world reopened, sales cratered. In 2021, the business suffered a $5-and-a-half million loss—and Stembel took out a $3-and-a-half million personal loan to keep it afloat.
Today, Stembel has overhauled her business model four times, and she’s running a much smaller company. She has 30 employees; bouquets are now assembled externally, rather than fully in-house, as differentiated Farmgirl from competitors for years but kept its costs high. (They’re still designed in-house.) And Stembel has redefined her definition of success.
Farmgirl is back at about $35 million in sales, with 15% net profit expected for the year—and Stembel is no longer building toward an exit. “I realized it was just my ego. It’s not anything else,” she says of originally aiming for a splashy outcome. She didn’t graduate college, and caught the entrepreneurship bug while working in the administrative department at Stanford’s law school. Unable to raise funding, she started the business with $49,000 of her own savings. But aiming for that high-profile exit is “not really vision,” she says. “What we’re doing now takes so much more vision than to take money from someone and pile it into ads.”
She believes that as a woman, she received fewer opportunities to reach that so-called pinnacle. She once got an offer to acquire the business that her banker called the “worst offer he’d ever seen.” “I finally realized that’s just not going to be my story, and it’s not going to be a possibility for me,” she says. Yet if she had raised money from investors, Stembel says she wouldn’t still be in business today. She wouldn’t have had the ability to pivot so many times, to come back from near-death with other people’s money on the line.
Stembel owns 99.86% of the business. She has stepchildren—but she doesn’t plan to turn Farmgirl Flowers into a family business and leave it to the next generation. She doesn’t believe in inherited wealth. Instead, she hopes to reach a point of stability in the next decade where she can step back, begin more profit-sharing with employees, and have the business run without her.
“Women don’t have the same choices men have,” she explains. “So the choice I can make is to make an exit not important any longer.”
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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PARTING WORDS
"It’s more powerful to say no to a lot of stuff than to say yes."
— Actress Rose Byrne says she wishes she'd said no more earlier in her career
