A Better Florist got clobbered on Valentine’s Day. Here’s what happened

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Valentine’s Day is meant to be a time for flowers, chocolate, romantic dinners, and posting smartass memes and comments online to make fun of people who like all those things.

For flower delivery startup A Better Florist, it was a day of mad scrambling to meet overwhelming demand – and failing.

Yesterday, on February 14, the Singapore-based startup’s Facebook page was inundated with comments from angry customers. People’s orders were late or never delivered. Some of the orders that did make it into the hands of customers were subpar – flowers were wilting, cards were hastily scribbled, balloons were missing.

To make matters worse, people were trying to get through to customer service, only to have their calls and emails go unanswered. It stoked a fire of Facebook rage that was blazing for most of the day yesterday and into this morning.

It’s something of a cruel irony for co-founder and CEO Steve Feiner, who started the company in 2015 with a vision of providing a better service than traditional flower sellers after a horrible experience he had ordering flowers for his then-girlfriend’s birthday.

“We let countless customers down. We simply did not do our jobs,” a dejected Steve tells Tech in Asia.

Swamped

It was around noon on Valentine’s Day that Steve and his team knew things were not going to work out well. Order volume for the day was 20 times what the startup usually faces, so much so that it had to shut down orders two days before.

This amounted to just under 2,000 orders, which would have been almost 3,500 if not for the shutdown. “I suppose this type of demand comes rarely but it’s 20 times your usual day,” Steve says. “These really are manageable problems and we just didn’t manage them.”

Steve tries to identify the main areas that broke down in the process. One was failure to anticipate bottlenecks. “We had 70 couriers showing up, with 900 orders to do in that first time slot,” Steve says. Trying to service them all created congestion. The next time slots suffered.

Order volume for the day was so large that A Better Florist had to shut down orders two days before.

Rude awakening