Founder Stories
How Sexism Almost Derailed My Floral Startup
We built our company hoping to source from U.S. farms. It turns out, many wouldn’t work with a woman founder.
It was 2015 and I had been successfully bootstrapping my e-commerce floral delivery company, Farmgirl Flowers, for five years. I’d started with a clear mission — to support domestic flower farms and use their product to create unique daily arrangements that we’d eventually ship nationally. However, that goal was starting to feel increasingly impossible. As a founder, I was running into just about every startup obstacle — some anticipated, some unexpected. But there was one I never would have seen coming, nor would I have believed had I been warned: gender discrimination.
Now, if I were to share all the instances my gender has affected my ability to run, scale, and source for Farmgirl, I would have enough material to write a book. For now, I’m going to talk about just one situation. A situation that is representative of dozens of such instances, all of which had the potential to stop my company in its tracks.
Let’s start back in 2013. We were trying to source flowers from one of the largest, and better known, farms in Northern California. I’d blindly reached out several times requesting…
