Camp Farmgirl, Year Three

A few years ago, when this whole company was working from kitchen tables and spare bedrooms scattered across the country, I decided we needed one week a year in the same room. We called it Camp Farmgirl, which is admittedly on the nose, but fun nonetheless.

That first year was almost entirely bonding — hugging people we'd only ever seen from the shoulders up, and learning that a person can be very different in a conference room than they are in a 2x2 Zoom square. Also a lot taller than you'd think, it turns out. Year two was a hybrid situation: still plenty of remote folks, plus a whole crop of brand-new local hires as we came back to the office like most everybody else. So it was half offsite, half the world's most sincere name-to-a-face exercise.

Then this year came around. And I'll be honest with you: this has been the busiest summer of my life, and that's saying something after 2020 and 2021. We're also nearly all in person now (five remote holdouts, we love you, this is not about you). Which meant the classic version of camp — icebreakers, a facilitator asking us our favorite flower — started to feel a little beside the point.

Because we are up against some genuinely hard things right now. The way Google surfaces websites has changed enormously with AI, and for a company that people find by searching for flowers — with no outside funding to translate into an enormous marketing budget — that change has hurt. A lot. At the same time, fuel surcharges have climbed so steeply that the cost of getting flowers to your doorstep, cold and fast and looking like the photo, has swallowed our margin whole and then some. Neither of those is a fun sentence to type. Both of them are true. And, unfortunately, they're true at the same time.

So I asked myself when this team has actually bonded the most in fifteen years. And it has never, not once, been at a ropes course. It was the peak weeks — the ones where we looked at the order count and said "70,000 bouquets? In a week? Well. OK. Let's do it," and then genuinely did not know if we'd make it, and then made it. It was Covid. It was the shutdowns. It was layoffs, which remain the hardest days of my professional life. Turns out the glue isn't the fun. The glue is the hard thing, done together.

So we turned Camp Farmgirl into the thing we actually needed: a week to sit down as one team and take our biggest problems apart. Breakout groups. Task forces. Whiteboards used for their intended purpose for once. Kat ran the transportation breakouts, Rebeca led the marketing ones, Kit took on new revenue streams, Christie worked on how we make all of it add up financially, and Ignacy and Robert bounced between every room figuring out where engineering could help. The rest of the team huddled and researched and brainstormed and agreed and disagreed and — most importantly — did the work, together.

And then at night we got on a boat. We had the kind of long dinners where nobody looks at their phone. We even took a line dancing lesson, because why not (!!), about which I will say only this: Natasha has a hidden and frankly unfair talent, and the rest of us have a tiny bit of hidden shame.

So. What came out of the week is, mostly, lists. Long ones. Unglamorous, deeply un-Instagrammable lists that we are now working our way through at what we around here call farmgirl fast. But a few of the items on them are yours to know about.

On fuel. Some context, plainly: in the first half of this year, we spent almost $1.5 million more on shipping than we did during the same stretch last year — for slightly fewer packages, shipped from closer locations. That math does not math. It now costs us meaningfully more to ship the box than it does to fill it, which is a pretty enormous problem when your business involves shipping a lot of boxes.

What we're not going to do about it is skimp. Not on varieties, not on sizes, not on any of the things that make a Farmgirl bouquet feel like a Farmgirl bouquet. That was never on the list.

What we are doing is chasing every possible way to bring that cost down — shipping from more locations, working with more regional carriers, and fighting to get real delivery guarantees back from the big carriers, who make that frustratingly difficult to do. Some of it will take time, but we're moving as fast as we can. And if you happen to have an in at FedEx or UPS and feel like doing us a solid, we would be very glad to hear from you. (Only half joking.)

And if you've noticed our prices creeping up lately, along with seemingly everything else in the world, this is a big part of why. Raising prices is the very last thing we want to do. We spent fifteen years building a company that was, quietly and stubbornly, profitable — bootstrapped, no investors, no outside money, in the black, and awfully proud of it. The number at the bottom of the page is red right now, and pretending it isn't won't help anyone. Being here to send your flowers next year, and the year after that, depends on us getting it back.

On marketing. We are going to try a lot of things over the next several months. Some of them will work, some of them absolutely will not, and you're probably going to notice us in your inbox more than usual while we figure out which is which. I know. I'm sorry in advance.

The changes to how Google works have made it genuinely hard for a company like ours to get found, and we would very much like to still be here for the long haul. So please bear with us while we test our way through it. And if you'd rather hear from us a little less, there's a link at the bottom where you can change how often we email you without unsubscribing completely. No hard feelings either way.

If you do want to help us, though, there are two really simple things that would mean more than you probably realize. The first takes about four seconds: if we've landed in your Promotions tab, or anywhere else that isn't your main inbox, drag one of our emails back over. Email providers pay attention to that, and it helps make sure the emails you actually want from us are the ones you actually get.

The second costs nothing: tell someone about us. Truly. You don't have to buy anything. If you love our flowers, or this company, or something we've done over the years, just tell a friend. We're the only bootstrapped company in our corner of this industry, which means our marketing budget is a tiny fraction of what many of our competitors can spend. We've never been able to outspend anyone, and we're definitely not going to start now. Word of mouth has always done more for Farmgirl than any ad we've ever run, and right now, it would help us more than ever.

On everything else. There's a lot more on those lists than the two things above, and plenty of it we don't have answers to yet. I'd rather tell you that than pretend a week in conference rooms in our design barn solved everything. We'll keep you posted as they turn into actual answers.

Why am I telling you any of this? Partly because we've never really kept much from you around here, and it feels strange to have spent a whole week talking about the future of this company and then say nothing about it. But mostly because you are the reason there was anything to plan. Every one of those task forces was, when you get down to it, a group of people in a room trying to figure out how to keep sending you flowers that show up looking like the picture — for fifteen years and counting, and hopefully many more.

Oh — and we planted Gunnii Hill while we were all together. We named our Farmquarters Gunnii Hill long before there was an actual hill of gunnii here, mostly because we've loved eucalyptus forever and have used it in our arrangements since the very beginning. We were also told we really shouldn't be able to grow it here. Naturally, that made me want to try.

I started a few test plants two years ago and they're now pushing 12 feet tall, so apparently the eucalyptus didn't get the memo. I've been growing more and more of it from seed ever since, in the greenhouse our own Tim the Toolman built for us out of upcycled patio doors and windows, and during camp we finally got a whole hill of it in the ground, right in front of the design barn.

So yes, we are essentially reverse-engineering the name we already gave this place. In our defense, Martha had Turkey Hill, and once you've seen a woman name her farmhouse and then build an empire on it, it's very hard not to want a name of your own. Long may she reign.

It'll be a few years before most of it is big enough to cut.

We planted it anyway.

xx, Christina

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