Bringing flowers to dragons

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This article was published 02/12/2019 (2379 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Catherine Metrycki is leafing out with her growing tech business venture, Callia Flowers.

The 29-year-old founder and chief executive officer of the online floral arrangement delivery business has moved into the Greater Toronto Area after serving western Canada for three years, and cracking $1 million in sales in her first two years in business.

“We’ve grown really quickly. We have really loyal customers, which I’m so grateful for,” the University Heights local said. “The business has grown virally, which is interesting to see.

“What’s most exciting is how it’s been fuelled by our customers who are passionate about what we’re passionate about, which is making moments,” Metrycki said.

The concept for Callia Flowers took root in 2016, when Metrycki recognized a gap in the floral industry. Wanting to celebrate a friend’s promotion, she sought out a way to quickly and simply order and send a floral arrangement.

“I was back-to-back in meetings, it was super busy, and it just seemed like a really overwhelming and frustrating experience,” Metrycki  recalled. “So I ended up sending her a text message, which sucks.

“That was my lightbulb moment: it wasn’t easy for me to use flowers to celebrate this special moment.”  

And like many startups in the burgeoning digital marketplace, Callia Flowers began in Metrycki’s home, where she developed a brand, a basic website and connected with greenhouses locally.  

“We delivered our first box about four months after it was an idea,” she said.
“The first couple of weeks it was my friends, and my friends’ friends ordering, but then we started to get some orders from people that we didn’t know.”

She joined the Manitoba Technology Accelerator and with support from the organization, set benchmarks for growth and what success would look like for Callia Flowers, and continued to build a team that could exponentially grow the business from just 10 bouquets a week.

Callia Flowers is now in 22 cities across Canada and added the GTA to its delivery locations in mid-November.

The business is headquartered in Winnipeg, where Metrycki plans to remain, and employs 10 people full-time to run operations and the back end of the online store, plus an additional roster of floral designers, couriers, and warehouse partners across the country.

Bouquet options are location- and season-specific, and flowers are sourced and assembled locally to ensure timely fresh deliveries, Metrycki explained. Three bouquet options are available at any given time to guarantee efficiency and optimize quality and purchase price.
Metrycki, a St. Mary’s Academy alumna who studied commerce at the University of British Columbia, successfully pitched her business to investors on CBC’s Dragons’ Den earlier this year, and the episode aired on Nov. 21.

“I was a bit naive going into Dragons’ Den. I grew up watching that group and they always really inspired me in terms of being amazing business people,” she said. “They do a great job making it a pressure cooker and putting the focus on entrepreneurs.”

Manjit Minhas, a venture capitalist from Calgary, Alta., and co-founder of Minhas Breweries, Distilleries and Wineries, offered Metrycki $500,000 for 12.5 per cent of her company.

“I think for us it’s going to be an inflection point in the business where we go from being an interesting start-up from Winnipeg, to a company that’s a national brand.”

As Callia Flowers continues to grow — this year it’s projected to double its growth over 2018 — Metrycki said she’s focused on building a business founded in her personal ethics and beliefs. She’s cognizant of the pressures of working in the technology industry and the danger of employee burnout in a high demand, highly competitive workspace.

“The company is built on the incredible work of my team, which is operations, developers, marketers and salespeople,” Metrycki said. “It’s really important to live my values in this business. We’ve chosen to grow quickly, but to grow really intentionally in terms of the people we brought along the way, how we do business, and being thoughtful about making a business that we want to come work in every day.”