BloomNation seeks to help florists grow by creating a new marketplace.

• Author: Biton, Adva
• Position: Around Utah

Salt Lake City -- A new California-based startup is trying to disrupt the floral industry by giving local florists a more direct way to reach customers online. The company, BLOOMNATION, claims big wire-companies like 1-800-Flowers aren't a good thing for local florists.

Wire companies--FTD Florists, Teleflora, 1-800-Flowers--put up stock images of bouquets on their website, gathering orders and sending them off to local florists. They act as a middle man, obscuring the line of communication between the consumer and the florist, and taking anywhere from 20 to 30 percent of the bouquet price for doing so. Then, because there's no direct line of communication from florist to customer, florists can't say so if they're out of red roses or baby's breath. They also can't tell their customers if they have plenty of lilies, ranunculus, peonies or orchids left over, or could make them something much more attractive than that stock-image bouquet.

"The other big wire services, they make these pictures that are all one-sided, or they do them with stems that are the most full, whereas sometimes we don't get those stems ... They're just a little unrealistic. The wire companies also set a price that we can't really do them for," says Shaylynn Hutchings of TIMP VALLEY FLORAL, a third-generation company located in American Fork. "The other wire companies take 20-30 percent of every order. Plus, you're paying really about $1,400 a month for all of their technology support, membership fees--by the end of it, if you actually add it up, you're really losing money by being members with them."

BloomNation thinks it has the solution to this. Founded in 2011, BloomNation is trying to do for florists what Etsy did for crafters: create a marketplace where consumers and artists can communicate, where buying flowers can become a personal experience once more.

"Flowers are a sentiment of who you are," says David Daneshgar, cofounder and head of sales and business development for BloomNation. "You need a local artisan to hand-deliver it."

BloomNation started after one of the co-founder's aunts came to Daneshgar with the idea to help florists cut ties with the big wire-companies. Daneshgar, then a professional poker player, won the World Series of Poker and decided to put $30,000 worth of winnings into the startup. From there, it was a lot of risk-taking and trial-and-error.

"People told us florists would never come together, that...