How to save your blooming business (while home-schooling three kids!)

Pre-pandemic, Whitney Bromberg Hawkings’ online flower delivery business, FlowerBx, was fast becoming an internationally recognised brand.

Its pared-back aesthetic of single-variety flowers in opulent bunches — 20 light pink peonies, say, or 50 white tulips — was a hit with fashionistas and organisers of upmarket events; a world Whitney knew well as the former PA to Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent designer Tom Ford. In five years, she had expanded the venture into 21 countries.

Then Covid-19 hit. With half of FlowerBx’s business in supplying hotels, designer shops and society parties — orders that collapsed overnight — Whitney wasn’t even sure it could survive.

‘Every day was bringing a bombshell of bad news,’ she says.

The cancellation of Chelsea Flower Show alone cost FlowerBx £500,000 in abandoned plans for shop window displays in the area.

As the Everywoman organisation for women in business begins its search for this year’s top female entrepreneurs, sponsored by the Daily Mail, businesses have begun to count the cost of the pandemic. Yet Whitney — a winner of the White Company Brand of the Future Everywoman Award in 2017 — had one obvious ace up her sleeve.

As an online-only business, she could still operate when bricks-and-mortar florists were forced to shut.

With Mother’s Day looming, ordinary customers scoured the net for a site that could still deliver flowers — and FlowerBx stepped into the gap. ‘The problem was keeping supply chains working to deal with the huge demand,’ she says.

Like most florists in the UK, FlowerBx imports stock from mainland Europe. ‘There were nail-biting moments when we wondered whether the borders would stay open. All the while I was honestly working harder than I’ve ever worked in my life — while also home-schooling three kids.’

In the end, the lorries kept on coming and FlowerBx boomed: direct sales to individual customers increased by 700 per cent during lockdown.

‘So many people were missing birthdays or graduations or just missing each other. Sending flowers was the one thing they could do to stay connected,’ says Whitney.

People still needed flowers for funerals, too. Quite early on, FlowerBx signed a deal with two of the three biggest funeral providers in the UK.

Starting her own business has meant a radical lifestyle shift for Dallas-born Whitney.

For 20 years she worked in the fashion industry, travelling by private jet and staying at the world’s best hotels. She met her husband through work — Peter Hawking is senior vice-president at Tom Ford menswear — and even had apartments of her own in Paris and Milan.

‘Working for Tom Ford was my first job and it was just so fancy,’ she says. ‘I had a velvet sofa in my office, a single orchid on the desk, a candle burning.’

Yet after she turned 40, she began to want a career that didn’t constantly place her at someone else’s beck and call.

‘Tom and I were attached at the hip,’ she says. ‘It was the greatest gig in the world but it was also 24/7. He always said you needed a ten-year plan, and there I was, thinking: “Am I really going to be 50 and still seating editors at fashion shows; asking permission from other people to do things?” ’

She was also pregnant with her third child — Wallis, now four, is sister to Barron, 12, and Snowdon, ten — and yearned for the flexibility her own business could give her.

In fact, the work is just as full-on. Nowadays she is up at 5am, heading to a warehouse in north-west London.

‘I work all day and every weekend — there’s no off switch at all,’ she says. ‘But I’ve never been happier.

‘For the first time I’m owning my success. I love flowers and beauty, but what I wanted to do was create a solution for something that didn’t exist.’

It was her ‘disappointment’ with existing online flower delivery services that made her think here was an industry that hadn’t been disrupted in any way, and should be.

‘I’d send a bouquet to my mother-in-law and get a picture back to say thank you, and I’d think: “No, that’s not what I wanted to send you at all!” ’

Her backers include Venezuelan entrepreneur Carmen Busquets, the founding investor in online designer outlet Net-a-Porter.

‘I’m surrounded by amazing women investors,’ says Whitney, ‘but trying to raise funds does involve meetings with men who don’t really get it. They don’t know when you throw a dinner party there’s someone thinking about the flowers. They’re not the ones remembering their niece’s birthday.’

Covid-19 halted her latest round of finance-raising but she still aims to roll out FlowerBx across the West Coast of America this autumn.

Winning a NatWest Everywoman Award was a game-changer, she says. The networking organisation for female entrepreneurs began its awards in 2003 to celebrate the achievements of women in business, with the Daily Mail sponsoring the Aphrodite Award (see box, left, for details).

‘Getting that recognition made people pay attention,’ she says. ‘But the best thing about Everywoman has been the friendships I’ve made, especially with Chrissie Rucker [founder of The White Company].’

She adds: ‘I’ve learned how tenacious I am during this crisis. I realised I’d do anything to make the business work.’