Freddie's Flowers
Freddie's Flowers
How the UK's flower DTC grew to £5m in annual revenue by door-knocking and face-to-face marketing
Longtime readers will know that I am quite the fan of the mantra: you don’t choose your marketing channels, your channels choose you1. You can’t crowbar in an organic SEO approach to a market where no-one knows they have a problem to solve yet.
Most consumer ecoms or DTCs are operating in a world where performance marketing – via paid social – is going to be the main artery of growth.
But rules are there to be broken. Enter: Freddie’s Flowers.
Freddie’s ignored the current digital-native rulebook of starting with Facebook marketing and instead focused on door-to-door sales.
It worked. By the end of 2017, Freddie’s had grown to £5m in turnover with ~26,000 customers. Predominantly acquired via door-to-door sales.
I recently caught up with Will Dobson. Will and I spoke about his time both as commercial director at Freddie’s Flowers, as well as his time at Able & Cole before that. I want to say a huge thank you to Will for these insights. All quotes below are attributed to him.
How Freddie’s Flowers acquired 26,000 customers without spending money on digital ads
Origins: Abel & Cole
First we must go back to Abel & Cole, the organic veg box which preceded the current explosion of DTC excitement.
When I joined the startup world in the early 2010s, the ‘new guys’ were Graze and Naked Wines. But behind the fanfare and inspo boards of these companies, were Abel & Cole.
Abel and Cole was founded in a basement in Catford in September 1988 by Keith Abel and Paul Cole. Their first delivery method was buying old Post Office vans spray-painted white. Their first acquisition strategy was Keith Abel selling door-to-door.
“Keith launched Abel & Cole by selling potatoes off his back. It really was his bread and butter,” Will tells me.
In 2011, Freddie Garland joins Abel & Cole into their sales team. That year, Abel & Cole were doing £35m in turnover, and would go on to 3x that over the following decade2.
“Abel and Cole had a big canvassing operation for a long time,” says Will. “Freddie started off as a canvasser there, and learnt his trade from Keith Abel. Freddie ended up leading that canvassing operation.”
Fast forward three years, and Freddie takes the leap to launch his own business: Freddie’s Flowers. “Keith and Ted Bell, who was CEO at Freddie’s in the end, both invested a lot in Freddie’s.”
From day one, canvassing was part of the Freddie’s operation.
"Freddie was core to the sales process, but so was Keith. Keith was heavily involved in training. He'd take them to the pub, corral them and tell them how to pitch and drive sales. He's quite a character, Freddie too. And that worked really well."
The strategy early was to go after high intent customers with best chance of success, and employing the most likely people to succeed. What did that mean for Freddie’s?”
Freddie rounded up a group of his mates.
“To put it fairly bluntly, they all went to private school and spoke in a way that appealed the the residents of Wandsworth. He had a big group of friends who were earning good money, and some were earning a lot of good money, the good ones.”
It was clear from day one though, how important the brand and culture was at Freddie’s. With a canvasser as the founder, it naturally fell into place.
“It was a snowball effect. People really wanted to do it. Lots had just come out of uni or out of school. It was a sociable job, a cool company to work for, and that all filtered down to the sales pitches. They had fun doing it.”
Moving beyond door-to-door
By the time Will joined in 2017, they were starting to experiment away from door-to-door and into other face-to-face opportunities.
Many will remember the infamous Freddie’s bikes. Not the delivery ones, but the ones that would park in various parts of London on the weekends with a bouquet in the front basket. I remember seeing them myself on Bellenden Road in Peckham, but soon they were everywhere.
Beyond that, there were events, and popups. “We definitely hit a point where we’d saturated door knocking,” Will says. “I built a tool that would allow the team to look at the areas where our best customers were, and we’d go right back there for our events.”
“Doors CPAs were always so much lower than other face-to-face, but the LTV was higher in events.”
Even with the lower LTVs, they’d still payback within nine months, and an LTV:CAC ratio over three years over “over 3.”
Freddie’s were laser sharp on data. And this is one area (see key takeaways below) which I think would separate Freddie’s from many teams.
They had league tables for canvassers, not based on volume of sales, but by lifetime value of those customers. And over time, canvassers moved towards events because sales per shift were so much higher.
“Chelsea Flower Show, for example, there were just customers coming through in droves. And so canvassers were really trying to get those shifts.”
When Will joined in 2017, Freddie’s were at 17,000 active customers – almost all through door-knocking. By the end of that year it was 26k and £5m in turnover. By the start of 2020, acquisition was more evenly split between digital and face-to-face, and then covid happened.
A lot of founders and marketers are people who have spent the majority of their lives behind computer screens. Going digital is native to them and there is comfort in it. We talk all the time with digital channels that opportunity lies in areas with little competition. It feels to me that there’s still a lot of opportunity in door-to-door, and offline more broadly.
But if you’re going to go down that route, here are the five big learnings I took away from my conversation with Will…
Five key learnings from the Freddie’s Flowers growth story
1. Build a smart commission structure
“We incentivised good sales behaviour. At the start, we passed back a share of incremental profit gained through retention to the canvasser. Later, we had different commission tiers based on retention.”
The result: much better sales operations that baked in long termism and future value early.
2. Don’t outsource your sales operation
If knocking on a strangers door fills you with terror, then you might naturally think about outsourcing it. But be careful. Will shared anecdotes from both Abel & Cole, and Freddie’s Flowers, that showed the downside.
“At Abel and Cole, they had a big canvassing operation at one point that went downhill once they outsourced it: CPAs go up. The salesman mentality is quite hard to control when it’s not in-house. The brand starts to suffer and we got bad feedback when that did happen.”
“[At Freddie’s], we never outsourced anything. We had complete control over the pitch, how we paid them, where they went, and it worked well.”
This is something I’ve seen with smaller tests we ran (not in door-to-door) at both Thriva and Pact as well.
3. “It’s great for Jobs to be Done”
A side benefit of the sales approach is the amount of customer learning you’re doing. Either through door-to-door or at events, people are coming up to you and telling you what they want.
“It’s a great way to understand customes’ Jobs to be Done. It’s market research.”
That’s something you cannot get when showing a Facebook ad to someone.
4. Be laser-focused in unit economics
This is something that came out of my conversation with Tom Hillman earlier this year too3. The best marketers are those laser-focused on unit economics.
“My job was to police the marketing team,” Will told me, “analyse customer behaviour so that we really knew how much we could spend acquiring customers.”
Freddie’s tested everything in their face-to-face operation but everything was tied back to lifetime value. And with nine-month payback periods, you need to know that the LTV that follows will follow suit.
5. Be smart in targeting
The sales teams at Freddie’s used Zoopla to identify wealthy streets with expensive houses, but if they didn’t get the responses they were expecting, they call back to HQ and change tack.
The early days was targeting the wealthiest areas of London, with privately educated kids who the wealthy demographic shared an affinity. You have a wealth of data you gain through this and Will repeatedly mentioned how targeted the capabilities were.
Once again, a huge thank you to Will for the conversation and all the transparency with this article. It’s been a real joy to learn this myself and get to share it with you all.
Know someone who might enjoy this case study? Forward it on, and hit like.
Performance marketing is your growth engine. Notes from Amphora.
Abel and Cole. GlobalDatabase.
Lessons learnt from Transferwise. Notes from Amphora