• Marketing Mag Website

  • Marketing Case Studies

by Jacqueline Burns

on Mar 20

In the spotlight: Roses Only

Advertise with us

“I’ve been in flowers since I was five-years-old,” says James Stevens. From the 1960s onward, his parents owned a little flower shop – a stall, to be exact – at Sydney's Town Hall Station. Having grown up with flowers, it came as no surprise when, upon graduating from university in 1988, Stevens established Roses Only. He and his father now hold equal shares in what has blossomed into a significant privately-owned business, employing 80 people and indirectly providing work to another 300.

Just how much Roses Only has grown since the seeds were planted is unclear. Stevens is cagey about the company’s financials and will only talk in terms of the thousands of orders placed each week. He has resisted the temptation of being ranked in BRW’s various league tables, and has subsequently never laid claim to a ‘fastest growing’ title, or been crowned head of one of Australia’s ‘top private companies’.

“It’s not something that I care to do. I don’t particularly want to disclose our figures because we’re a family business. We keep it pretty close to our chests, though if we contemplate listing in a few years’ time we’ll release some results, I suppose,” says Stevens.

An initial public offering is likely to be the preferred option for the raising of capital for further expansion into international markets. “I feel that the real value will only come to us in an IPO (as opposed to a private-type sale or an investor coming in) because our business and brand is loved enough, and trusted enough, that people will pay what we would regard as a fair price for equity in our brand.”

Many aspects of the Roses Only business have evolved over the years, but the biggest change has been to its sales channel. Originally Roses Only operated out of an upmarket shop in Sydney's glamorous Chifley Tower, alongside Tiffany and various European designers of haute couture. Phone sales were simultaneously managed through a call centre. The advent of e-commerce and widespread acceptance of the use of credit cards, however, transformed the retailer into an online business, and eventually led to the closure of all but one retail outlet.

Within a relatively short period of time, the online boom fuelled a dramatic domestic market expansion and prompted Stevens to export the Roses Only brand overseas.

“We’ve gone from a single-city (Sydney) market to a business that now has distribution in 35 cities and towns around Australia, as well as Auckland, Christchurch and Wellington, New Zealand. Our signature product (the distinctly recognisable boxed roses) is available throughout London and we distribute flowers in a different form of packaging throughout the rest of the UK,” he notes.

Stevens explains how the company's evolution online was at the same time as the explosion of web portals such as Yahoo!, OzEmail, Optus Net and BigPond. “We realised the new technology gave us an opportunity to stand out. We wanted to dominate the new sales channel. Prior to that, we were part of a massively fragmented flower industry.”

  • Article links
  • Article links

Be the first to have your say...

To have your say, login at the top of the page or register free and start commenting.