Member-only story
Coronavirus Diaries From the C-Suite
What It’s Like to Realize Your Business Might Not Survive This
The clock is now ticking for many companies. For this one, it’s got until Mother’s Day.
Coronavirus Diaries From the C-Suite is a new Marker series where leaders share how the pandemic is impacting their businesses.
For Christina Stembel, the founder and CEO of Farmgirl Flowers, a 10-year-old bootstrapped company that offers rustic floral bouquets, the clock is ticking. On March 16, in the scramble to contain the spread of coronavirus, San Francisco gave nonessential businesses just 12 hours’ notice they’d need to shut down. That included Farmgirl’s warehouse in the city’s Patrol Hill neighborhood. Besides the logistical nightmare of a lightning-fast shutdown that forced her to toss $150,000 worth of fresh flowers and furlough 95% of her 197 employees, Stembel — whose company was, pre-Covid-19, on track to hit $50 million in revenue this year — is furiously trying to get her business back up and running somewhere close to capacity by Mothers Day, the floral industry’s Super Bowl. It’s the holiday that keeps the floral industry afloat through the lean summer months when many flower sellers already experience a 30% to 50% drop in monthly revenue. To set up the first of what she hopes will be several pop-up distribution centers outside of San Francisco, Stembel has been commuting every day to a farm in Watsonville, California, that has an exemption as an essential business. She spoke to Marker about trying to keep her business afloat.
A week or two before the virus really hit the U.S. hard I started thinking, wow, what’s this going to mean for us if we follow Italy? What am I going to do to mitigate our risk? But everything happened so quickly there wasn’t enough time to come up with pivot plans. I heard through friends that the city might shut down the afternoon before it happened, and then when it did, things got really real. We’re very vulnerable to things like this because we make things in-house. Almost all of the CEOs I’m friends with and am in networking groups with can just pivot to a work-from-home model, but you can’t do that when you make things with your hands.
