Entrepreneurs: Don't Buy Her Flowers founder knows what gifts will deliver

Newborn mewling in her arms, sick-stained baby grows stacking up in the washing pile, new mum Steph Douglas was on the sofa “weeping and leaking and feeling overwhelmed” when a string of flower deliveries arrived at her door.

“I knew they were well-meant, but it just struck me as bonkers that the go-to gift for new mums is another thing to care for, when you’re doing more caring than you’ve ever done in your life.”

At the time, Douglas was on maternity leave from her marketing job, working on Government campaigns including London 2012.

She went back to that, but when her friends had babies she’d leave a magazine, chocolate and food on their doorstep, “something that was for them, and importantly always with a message saying ‘it will be ok’,” she explains.

Then she had her second child two years later.

“It reaffirmed my idea that someone needed to make a ‘new mum’ gift offering a bit of TLC, and made me realise that juggling work and family and two pick-ups every day was that much harder. So maybe I should do my own thing.”

Now Douglas’s five-year-old business, Don’t Buy Her Flowers, has expanded from new mum gifts to occasions from birthdays to bereavement, with turnover set to hit £1 million this year.

Its popularity was fuelled by social media.

“I’d started a blog and Instagram about the reality of parenting, and my posts went viral. That helped me steer people to DBHF when I launched my website. Initially it crashed with so many people saying, ‘yes! I didn’t want flowers!’”

Initially Douglas made the hampers in the spare room of her home in Twickenham, offering three gift packages, including a £29 “care package” for new mums, with a magazine, chocolate, cakes, tea, and a scarf, “date night in”, a hamper of massage oil, chocolates, champagne and candles

Don’t Buy Her Flowers

Fact file

Turnover: £500,000 for 2019, expected to double this year.

Staff: 10

Business idol: “Rather than one person, I’ve learnt loads from business podcasts, especially How I Built This, Conversations of Inspiration and Rethinking Business.”

“I sourced things from smallish British suppliers who were willing to do wholesale on small quantities at the beginning,” Douglas explains. “And I made as big a bang as I could without a budget” to spread the word. Social media provided much of the push: Douglas and DBHF now have 100,000 Instagram followers and another 15,000 Facebook fans.

The bestseller is a “create your own” package, where gift-givers pick from beauty, food, drinks, books, magazines, clothes and activities for kids, and DBHF wrap it up with a handwritten note.

Average spend is around £50.

Running the business from home for the first two years meant Douglas faced some awkward moments when kids and corporate life collided.

“I had some girls who used to come to the house to help me pack orders. And my two and a four-year-old would burst in and run up the stairs, wailing about needing a poo while I was trying to present this professional façade... I can remember one of the girls saying ‘so, is this your actual job?’”

Douglas is now a mum of three and has moved DBHF to its own premises: “we’ve just moved to a bigger warehouse as well as having a base at the co-working office space in Battersea Arts Centre, and grown to a team of 10.

“It feels a long way from packing orders on the floor of my spare bedroom with the kids in bunk beds in the boxroom.”

Christmas saw sales rise 68% on the previous year, in part thanks to a surge in corporate orders: “companies increasingly want thoughtful gifts to say thanks to their staff, especially flexible workers who might not be in the office much, and for their clients.”

Rather than seek outside investment, Douglas, who is 38, sacrifices speedy growth and reinvests profits. “[Selling] equity might make expansion faster but it comes with outside influence that potentially we’re not ready for.

“There seems to be a current view that you have to start a business with a plan to grow fast and hard and sell. We grew up with Dragons’ Den and The Apprentice. But building a business is hard and a lot of commitment.

“I want to build Don’t Buy Her Flowers into something I’d proud of, a place where people love to work and where customers love our products. If that takes time, that’s OK.”