My small business journey began in 2014. Taking a tiny dream of owning a flower business, I'm still loving the grind a decade later.
I'm Tammy Myers, the founder of Lora Bloom. After building a corporate career for nearly ten years, I decided to walk away from it all. I thought I'd try the stay-at-home-mom life. That lasted about three months before I started looking for new opportunities. This led me to going back to school earning a Professional Marketing Certification at the University of Washington by the following year.
As natural marketer and seller, I decided to test my skill set and launch First & Bloom, a small flower business working out of my kitchen. Little did I know, I had discovered a newfound passion in the floral industry that would carry me through the next ten years!
Life as an entrepreneur can be really lonely.
Looking back, I often felt even more alone in my corporate career. Feeling like my goals weren’t really mine, someone else was determining my path. After 10 years, I’ve been able to achieve so much! It may not have always felt that way in my pocketbook, but I know my skillset could be transferable if I ever wanted to return to corporate life.
I started by gaining as much business as I could. From local deliveries to weddings, business accounts and corporate events, I hosted risky pop-ups and talked to anyone I could about selling flowers. Attending networking events, large wedding shows, and even the occasional floral workshop, it was all to press brand awareness. The hardest times were the holidays, like Valentine’s and Mother’s Day. People think it’s guaranteed profit. It’s not. For the first several years, I barely broken even if at all.
Owning a flower business isn’t all roses.
Actually, it's some of the most manual labor a person can do. It looks beautiful and glamorous, but most of the time I was wearing sweatpants, cleaning dirty buckets in the cold and developing green-stained calluses all over my hands. My back often went out from heavy-lifting, and I was always stressed about turning a profit on a perishable product. My hands finally gave out too. I developed something called trigger-finger in my left hand and needed surgery years later.
It was hard work for not a lot of pay, but it enabled me to be there for my son as he started school. As much as I daydreamed of having a retail location, it just never made financial sense with sky high commercial leasing rates in my market. I worked out of my home and kept business expenses to a minimum.
Looking back, I realize my time in the corporate world was a gift in disguise.
Managing a $22M+ hotel market for 4 years and spending another year in online media as a campaign manager was an incredibly eye-opening experience that gave me leverage as a business owner.
With a strong background in online conversion, merchandising, branding, sales, managing accounts, working long hours, and so so much more, I focused on online sales. The very first site I built was hideous! The second I paid someone to build on Weebly. Thereafter, I always built and managed my own sites. To this day, the most superior platform (in my opinion) is Shopify. It's hands down the best and what I use now and would always recommend to my clients.
How did Lora Bloom start?In 2019, I built a new brand called Lora Bloom. Created as an online floral marketplace, local florists could sell unique floral products for customers to order flower delivery in the Seattle area. This eco-friendly, third-party platform unfortunately launched at the same time as Covid. By the end of 2021, I was exhausted! Generating 100k in sales, it wasn't a failure! Though I didn't always feel so positive, I'm incredibly proud of my achievements during that time. |
When I finally shut down Lora Bloom, the online floral marketplace, I quickly pivoted back to running First & Bloom and strictly focused on local delivery. Covid did one good thing. It put a lot of focus on supporting local businesses. All of a sudden local flower delivery was booming. This was when loss turned into profit. Hustling 5 to 6 days a week, I started turning a profit and paying myself a salary for the first time, ever! I quickly learned to operate profitably by limiting my offerings. Those last couple years were amazing!
In tragedy, new opportunities can bloom.2023 was very hard. Early in January, I experienced a personal tragedy changing my life forever. My neighbor was killed by a tree on our property. I was the first one on the scene. It destroyed me. Struggling mentally for most of the year, a career change was needed again. I seemed to have lost my passion for selling flowers. With professional help, I was able to make some very difficult but necessary decisions. I decided to permanently close First & Bloom, what I felt was my identity for 10 years. As I write this, I'm still recovering from that tragic day. I have spent much of 2024 trying to figure myself out again. I just want to say to anyone reading this, if your mental wellbeing is struggling, please seek help. The healing process of PTSD is far more extensive and impactful than I ever thought it would be on a person's life. It's taken time, but I am so grateful to be in this new space of opportunity. |
Bringing it all together.
In the last year, I've learned designing flowers is like riding a bike. I can whip up an arrangement in the blink of an eye, but now I have found joy in growing my own flowers (if the deer don't get to them first).
I’ve also learned I love helping other business owners succeed in business. Learning things painfully, at times, I have developed a strong network of resources built on my dynamic and extensive experience in marketing, sales, media and the journey in starting a business from the ground up.
To learn more about how I can better help you on your journey in business ownership, send me an email. I want to help you. tammy@lorabloom.com
