Online flower sales from De Duinroos

This story is about the entrepreneur Bas de Groot. He has a clear vision for the growth and modernisation of his flower business. To achieve this, Bas started selling flowers online in addition to his physical flower shop. With my help, he made this vision a reality. The result was a huge increase in turnover.

Your business can also benefit from this approach. I would like to explain it to you in more detail so that you can understand how it works.

To understand Bas’s success, I think it is good to know a little more about the flower industry and the opportunities that Bas saw in it.

About the flower industry

The flower industry is mainly offline, in other words, in physical shops. If such an entrepreneur does anything with the internet, it is mainly promotion via Instagram, which he uses to attract people to his shop. In addition to these local entrepreneurs, there are a few national platforms that sell flowers online.

Bas on the flower industry:
‘There is a lot of potential in online flower sales, also because florists are often older entrepreneurs who have little affinity for the internet.‘

Now that you know what the flower industry is all about, I would like to tell you more about Bas himself and his company De Duinroos.

About Bas and De Duinroos

Bas started at the age of 14 at a flower stall in the market, which he later took over: Bas Bloem. The next step was to take over De Duinroos, a local flower shop in Beverwijk. After the takeover, he completely renovated the shop to make room for the sale of silk flowers and interior accessories in addition to flowers. He also supplies flowers for major events for well-known brands, thanks to his initiative to work with influencer Anna Nooshin. For the online sale of flowers, Bas is a member of Fleurop.

Central to De Duinroos’ online flower sales is Fleurop. This is how it works:

The Fleurop system provides a platform for florists to sell flowers online. Each member florist has its own environment within Fleurop, similar to a small web shop. Customers can then have flowers delivered anywhere in the Netherlands. For example, if a customer orders flowers from a shop in Amsterdam but wants them delivered in Maastricht, the Amsterdam florist will forward the order to the local florist in Maastricht. Although the Amsterdam florist does not deliver the flowers himself, he receives a percentage of the order value.

Bas about Fleurop:
‘I think Fleurop is a great company, which is why I am on the board of the general meeting of member companies. But the standard web shop is outdated. It is not attractive enough for customers and this is reflected in the number of orders.’

It is also possible to link the Fleurop system to another web shop. Bas quickly saw the potential and wanted to create an attractive web shop for his customers, linked to the Fleurop system.

Bas’ question to me:

‘Stéfanie, I want to have the complete Fleurop range in my own beautiful Shopify webshop. I also want a lot of traffic to my webshop.’

To make this possible, I went through a number of steps, as I would in any business. I’d like to tell you more about this process. I’ll try not to be too technical.

🚀 The proces

STEP 1

The first step was to create a link between the Fleurop platform and our own platform. Such a link is called an API. Fleurop developed this API and made it available to anyone who wanted to use it to develop their own web shop. During the integration we discovered that this API was not really finished. So we had to come up with all sorts of workarounds to make it work.

STEP 2

Bas already had a web shop based on the Shopify platform, which he used to sell vases, among other things. The next step was to develop this shop specifically for the sale of bouquets. For example, we developed product pages for specific products such as bouquets and funeral bouquets.

STEP 3

Once the foundations were in place, I developed a marketing strategy to increase online visibility and traffic to the web shop. We used both paid advertising and SEO optimisation to get the webshop to the top of Google when people searched for flowers online.

STEP 4

The combination of SEO and paid advertising proved to be particularly effective. The SEO strategy is particularly effective in the long term, while the paid ads delivered quick results.

STEP 5

We continue to optimise this process, both in the shop itself and in marketing, to achieve ever better results.

Bas on Stéfanie's role:

‘Stéfanie not only knows her stuff, she’s also an excellent project manager. She’s brought together various experts and overseen the whole process.’

🚀

This approach has led to a staggering 570 increase in sales in one year

Bas on the result:

‘Of course there is also a considerable investment. So much so that I sometimes wondered if we should stop. But we persevered and are now breaking even. And now that the foundations have been laid, costs are falling and the number of orders is increasing rapidly.

The Duinroos website

A fantastic result, but above all a very nice collaboration with a real entrepreneur.

Bas about this collaboration:

‘I met Stéfanie when she was still working in an agency and I encouraged her to start her own business. From the very first moment I had a good connection with her, we laughed, cried and roared. I actually owe all my online success to her. She has a huge amount of knowledge and has put all the important elements together.’

About my collaboration with Bas:

‘Bas knows exactly what he wants. Bas is also full of ideas. He involved me in his online process from day one. And when we sit together, there is always laughing, howling, roaring. Before you know it, really cool new ideas come up and it just keeps going.’