Floward continues to flourish

With plans for the company to go public in the next two years, Floward continues to flourish. Founded by Abdulaziz B. Al Loughani and Mohammed Al Arifi Floward is an online flowers and gifting destination. In 2017 Floward was born in Kuwait and soon expanded to cover all the GCC countries and the UK. The brand guarantees same-day delivery across the board through its own refrigerated fleet to ensure arrangements arrive fresh to customers.

Floward sources its flowers daily from growers and farmers around the world and partners with local and international brands to offer a wide range of gifts. With an aim to further strengthen its position as a quick commerce gifting platform Floward recently acquired a Kuwait-based fragrance brand Mubkhar with presence in Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain specialising in fragrances and essential oils. The brand has also turned profitable and maintained healthy growth over the past 12 months.

In an exclusive Q&A Abdulaziz B. Al Loughani, Chairman & CEO of Floward shares the brand’s evolution and future growth strategy.

What was the main inspiration behind setting up Floward?

Five years ago, the fresh-cut flowers industry in the GCC was estimated at $1.5 billion with less than 0.5% of it being online. The industry was dominated by traditional brick and mortar stores with no clear leader offline and online. With that in mind we decided to establish Floward following the pure play e-commerce business model. What that means is we buy our own flowers and arrange it in-house at our fulfilment centres across all our locations. Once an order is placed, we prepare it and manage last mile delivery to our customers.

It’s been five years of Floward – could you share some major year-on-year growth highlights?

Although Floward started operating in 2017 we began expanding rapidly in 2020. Since then, we’ve witnessed exponential growth of over 40x and now we operate in 36 cities across 9 countries in the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) and the UK.

Has last mile ever been an obstacle? If so, how did you overcome this challenge?

Addresses are a major logistical issue in our region, and we are no strangers to that challenge. Collecting addresses has been difficult but GPS helped us. In addition, through our automated communication tools (SMS, WhatsApp) senders are now able to send their gifts through us even if they don’t have the recipient’s address. Instead, the process is automatically managed with the recipient and thus we take away the burden from the sender.

How do you leverage technology in your business to manage inventory, analyse data, strategise product creation to ensure profitability?

We sit on a database of more than a million users, and we think there are many ways to utilise data for creating a better experience, which includes leveraging machine learning, artificial intelligence, pricing algorithms, logistic optimisation and category management, among others. We are the fastest growing [online flower and gifting] start[1]up in the MENA region due to the rapid pace of our geographic expansion. To maintain this growth, we need to focus more on depth rather than breadth. This includes expanding our gifting categories, having scientific category plans, improving our UI/UX, utilising our data etc.

Tell us about your future innovation/expansion plans.

Innovation is at the heart of Floward. We are constantly innovating across all our functions to exceed clients’ needs and expectations. Our efforts are now focused on expanding our gifting offering and improving our user experience with plans to take the company public in the next two years.

Please share three tips to build a resilient and sustainable business.

• Work towards your vision
• Build the right team
• Always have the TAM (Total Addressable Market) in mind

On a bad day, where do you seek inspiration from?

I run every day, as it helps me put all the right checks/balances on my day and reflect all pros/cons of my actions. My brain deep dives into the problem, breaks it down to smaller pieces to understand the root cause of it and look for the optimal solution.