Whether in business or life, the bedrock of every relationship begins with a strong foundation of trust and communication. It’s a shared philosophy that has catapulted the floral and foods gift retailer and distributor 1800-Flowers.com into a $3 billion company and helped it navigate new and shifting disruptions to the retail market since its 1976 launch.
The company has transformed from its inception as a brick-and-mortar store to a dial-in retailer and now a sprawling online marketplace that includes a portfolio of brands selling everything from lush flower arrangements to baked goods, greeting cards, and other gifts.
“We do 25 million different gift orders a year,” says founder and CEO Jim McCann in a wide-ranging video interview for Fortune Executive Exchange. Cultivating relationships, he stresses, is at the core of the business, which sees an uptick in orders around Valentine’s Day and Christmas. But what’s helped propel the company to new heights, McCann says, is an almost myopic focus on building customer relationships and brand loyalty.
“We really are in a relationship business. And as such, it's causing us to say, ‘What do we spend our time and our dollars and our technology on to be true to the fact that we want to be in a relationship business and help our customers have more and better relationships,” McCann says. “That's our guiding light in terms of where we spend our capital.”
He's allocated much of that capital to technological innovations in an effort to reach new audiences and adapt to emerging platforms over the years. McCann says he’s made a concerted effort to create a company that's ubiquitous and easily accessible to customers so they can “act on their thoughtfulness very conveniently.” And that endeavor helped the e-commerce gifting giant reach a billion dollars in sales years ago.
Mobile devices, in particular, catalyzed the retailer’s growth. “Mobiles completely revolutionized our business, and that’s when we crossed a billion-dollar threshold,” the CEO says. After a meeting or a meaningful interaction, users no longer had to wait until they returned to the office to send a gift from a laptop or a PC. With mobile devices, they could quickly order a bouquet from the back of a taxi through the 1-800-Flowers app and go on with their day. McCann says the app is even more sophisticated these days, offering voice interactivity so customers can simply speak their orders into the phone.
Beyond technology, McCann credits his business success to steering some 3,000 employees through the myriad changes that have hit the retail sector over the last decade. He recounts the best business advice he received—from none other than JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon—on missteps when championing employee buy-in to a vision or sweeping organizational change.
“[Dimon] said, "Jim, you spend way too much of your time evangelizing.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘You spend too much energy and time trying to get everybody in the organization to get it," McCann recalls. "They don't all need to get it. They just need to have the faith that you get it and that if they do their job of moving things from here to here, and everybody does that, it'll roll up into a beautiful noise. A beautiful crescendo."
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