Heaptalk, Jakarta – Back in the first quarter of 2020, where the pandemic was starting to hit Indonesia, Sevenrose founders and the couple Attar Asmawan and Nantia Tri Pritaningrum thought differently to help their finances keep stable. As we have known, the pandemic left a lethal impact where some employees were terminated in most corporate to maintain their equal cash flow as secure as possible. So they plunged into the flower’s eCommerce business model, fortified with the wife’s ability to make a flower arrangement and combined with the husband’s management knowledge and lean startup experience.
In May 2020, Sevenrose launched its first operation – currently in a bootstrapping phase – offers the ‘gifting’ demands from the market where the flower becomes their main service like a preserved flower, flower board, flower supply, for both personal or organizational. They also sell other products such as fruits, cookies, and hampers and become suppliers for those items.
Attar said, in the beginning, it’s pretty challenging. They both have to think quickly and act fast to overcome the slump situation into something more profitable. At the same time, they have to educate people about the value of flowers, both end-users and farmers. They think that education to the community is still limited, so they have to make an extra effort on this aspect, including routinely create content and make some stories about flowers on their website and social media.
“A couple of weeks we are running our business, we are facing some problems. We don’t have sufficient funds to run the business as we want. We also experienced a lack of confidence from our customers because our brand is very young.” Attar said.
So the key is, as a brand, we have to be brave for transforming into digital. This effort is pretty good to show from the journey of their business. Initially, they built the website together as Attar built it from scratch, including the front-end, the back-end, and the user experience. While his wife is supporting the content, regularly helping the administrations like updating the content, promoting on the social media, and coping with the operations. Along with their business growth day-to-day, they are now backed with talents in operations (merchandizer), admin, and social media. Attar and Nantia are mostly taking control at the executive level, like preparing for fundraising, due-diligent filing, scaling up, and more.
The motivation of why Attar is earnestly taking this business has come from two factors. The first one is that the flower market if analyzed in depth by concentrating on domestic production and consumption, is considered a blue ocean, which means a prospective captive market can be acquired since there is still low competition in this segment. In another way, if seen from the farmers’ perspective, Indonesia’s flower commodity is fairly large. Moreover, Indonesia has ideal climatological conditions for growing tropical floral plants, such as Rose, Orchid, Rose, Chrysanthemum, anthurium, Carnation, and Lilium.
For example, in Jakarta, the flower is for all social occasions, such as birthdays, weddings, illness, business attention, etc. According to the Central Research Institute for Horticulture, In Jakarta, more than 900,000 stems of cut flowers are sold per week, accounting for an approximate value of US$ 5.1 million per year, where are the total amount for all major cities is estimated at US$ 6.8 million per year.
“Our vision is to help our local farmers’ welfare. Through our creative commodity export activity, both locally or globally. We also want to be part of the increase in the country’s GDP from the agricultural sector,” said Attar .
Attar admitted this flower sale was quite large as long as they know the right market and read market demand and satisfy them. Sevenrose itself records transactions reaching 3 million per day and can increase two to three times once entering the big day moments such as New Year, Chinese New Year, Eid, and Christmas.
Some big brands that have used their services are RSIA Bunda Jakarta, Bukalapak, Tokopedia, Lundin and will become with BCA in the near time.
Currently, Sevenrose has been serving requests to more than 32 major cities in Indonesia. Meanwhile, some requests for outbound shipments have arrived in recent times. It is because they are not using single-channel selling, as on their website only, but also listing in some marketplace like Bukalapak and Tokopedia.
Their service’s leading value is that they provide uncommon access to the customers for ordering flowers up to the rarest in Indonesia. They also provide the freedom to do custom buckets, custom gifting, and custom fruit parcels without changing the price. (FK)
