Anubhav Sharma launched his Melbourne-based online wholesale flower business Blush Petals in 2019 with his wife Parul Sharma as Marketing Manager.
Then hit COVID-19 and many local events were cancelled. The pandemic also affected the supply chain and stores. So far a new business, such as Anubhav’s, getting hold of stock became a challenge.
The first year was a roller coaster, Anubhav told Floral Daily:
“Before the vaccine roll-out, we’ve had many lockdowns: businesses hadn’t even had a chance to get back on their feet from the previous lockdown and they were being faced with a new lockdown. This resulted in weddings and events getting cancelled. Fortunately, flowers kept up pretty good: during the lockdowns, the demand for flowers from online retailers increased.”
A bit of research and Anubhav found that local competitors were not able to meet this demand.
Anubhav told prospa.com that during the pandemic he spotted an opportunity as there were people working from home who still wanted flowers.
Anubhav who is an engineer by trade and has handled large-scale infrastructure projects in Singapore and Dubai put his logistical experience to use.
He chartered flights to import the flowers that would keep his online business going even during the pandemic.
“The reason we’re successful today is because we remained committed to delivering products to our customers on time.”
Throughout the pandemic, Anubhav’s business increased from one million stems per week to between 1.5m and 1.7m per week.
“It has been very stressful, but we managed to fulfil our orders and engage our workforce.”
He now has commitments directly with customers and also has deals with supermarkets and other stores.
“As a company, we don’t want to disappoint our customers, so to overcome any sort of issue, we decided to charter our own planes for the Mother’s Day and Christmas shipments. In this way, we could fulfil all our orders.”
He attributes his success and growth of the business to solving the supply chain issues and a strong digital marketing strategy.
“We launched a new website, shot new photography and invested heavily in our social channels. We used email marketing to keep our customers up to date with what we’re doing, while Instagram has been used to engage new customers and show them our portfolio of products.”
Anubhav believes he established new product lines that used to be the stronghold of another competitor because the pandemic motivated him to think out of the box.