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Where Christina Stembel lives in California, she is surrounded by flower farmers, yet 80 percent of the flowers sold in the United States are imported. She is trying to help change that percentage with her San Francisco-based company, Farmgirl Flowers. “I think that the local flower movement is where the local food movement was about a decade ago,” Ms. Stembel said. Consumers are starting to become aware of where their flowers come from and purchase accordingly, she said. Ms. Stembel, 38, came to the flower business by chance. She was working at Stanford University, responsible for alumni events and given the task of cutting costs. Much of her budget had to be spent on flowers, she found. She started creating her own bouquets, often buying flowers from local farmers, a group she could relate to, having grown up in northern Indiana surrounded by corn and soybean fields. Ms. Stembel started Farmgirl Flowers out of her living room in 2010, creating daily seasonal arrangements of United States-grown flowers and sending them to customers in the Bay Area via bike couriers. The company now has an outpost in the San Francisco Flower Mart, a wholesale flower market, and began shipping nationwide in May. It had $4.5 million in sales last year — more than double the amount in 2014. Forty percent of Farmgirl Flowers’ customers buy again, Ms. Stembel said. Ms. Stembel and other flower designers she has hired create the daily arrangements. She calls her look new modern, and she strives for a whimsical and natural style. She says she is a “design snob” and describes many other contemporary arrangements as generic and cheap-looking. And the bouquets consumers receive rarely resemble the photos online, she added. “Flower arrangements should be beautiful, and it shouldn’t be the thought that counts,” she said. When customers order from Farmgirl Flowers they are not given an option for, say, a dozen red roses, but rather they choose the size of the bouquet and receive the daily arrangement in that size. (Most bouquets cost $38 to $78.) The bouquets are seasonal and dictated by what’s available from the farmers the company works with, many of whom have begun to plant flowers and greenery specifically to suit Ms. Stembel’s needs. She loves decorative kale and dislikes red roses. Most bouquets are wrapped in reused burlap coffee bags donated by local coffee roasters. The limited options allow Ms. Stembel to sell more expensive American-grown flowers at reasonable rates. Traditional wholesalers and florists can’t forecast what consumers will buy. “So they have to have 50 different options, so that they can sell 25. Those 25 have to subsidize the 25 that were thrown out. That didn’t make sense to me,” she said. “To eliminate the waste, we eliminated the option.” National shipping, which started last spring, makes up 30 percent of Farmgirl Flowers’ business, and Ms. Stembel has plans for an outpost on the East Coast in the next year or two. But when she began her business in 2010, many in the industry were skeptical. “At the time I thought this was just another example of San Francisco being seven square miles surrounded by reality,” Kasey Cronquist, chief executive of the California Cut Flower Commission, a state agency that promotes local farmers and flowers grown in the state. Changing the way flowers are sold in the country is “a bit like turning the Titanic,” Mr. Cronquist said. The large flower companies can offer dozens of bouquet and gift options at a wide range of prices. “If you compare her to a company like FTD or Teleflora or 1-800-Flowers, she’s not so big, but she’s a force to be reckoned with. She is quickly showing those companies that there is a consumer audience that loves what she does,” he said. Others in the industry remain skeptical. Every few years a company something like Farmgirl Flowers emerges, “and they tend to have success in their own market in their own niche,” said Thomas L. Prince, the president of Prince & Prince, a flower industry research firm. But when they try to expand nationally, they face logistical challenges and have trouble keeping prices affordable, he said, adding, “It’s a niche concept that works in California because the growers are there.” Ms. Stembel used personal savings to start her company and has been unable to interest outside investors in helping her expand. Investor-funded flower start-ups include BloomThat, BloomNation and the Bouqs. Ms. Stembel says her business model is giving investors pause. Those she has spoken with want her to hire contract employees and delivery workers rather than full-time employees to save on employee benefits, she said. But that’s not the way she’s willing to do business. All 46 of her staff members are employees, including delivery staff, and they all receive full medical insurance paid for by Farmgirl Flowers, a departure from many start-up models. Investors also want her to work with overseas flower farmers for cheaper rates, a nonstarter for Ms. Stembel. “I won’t use imports. I won’t offer an import line. I won’t test it out and see if people care,” she said. “It’s not aligned with what the mission for our company is. Nor do I think it’s the right thing to do business-wise.” Speak to any American flower farmer for long enough and the 1991 Andean Trade Preference Act will most likely come up. The goal was to move South American countries away from illegal drug-trafficking and toward legal industries like flower farming. But once tariffs were removed, flower farmers in the United States could not compete with the prices of South American-grown flowers. The trade deal forced as many as half of the cut-flower farmers in the United States out of business, according to the commission. In California alone, there were over 500 farmers in the early 1990s. Today just over 200 remain. South American flower farmers “have the advantage of labor, the advantage of their weather conditions and sunlight, so they have some natural things and some cultural things going for them,” Mr. Cronquist said. “They also have the support of our government.” For years human rights groups have raised concerns about
