Coronavirus Diaries From the C-Suite

What It’s Like to Realize Your Business Might Not Survive This

The clock is now ticking for many companies. For this one, it’s got until Mother’s Day.

Christina Stembel at her new distribution center in Watsonville, California. Photos courtesy of Farmgirl Flowers.

Coronavirus Diaries From the C-Suite is a new Marker series where leaders share how the pandemic is impacting their businesses.

For Christina Stembel, the founder and CEO of Farmgirl Flowers, a 10-year-old bootstrapped company that offers rustic floral bouquets, the clock is ticking. On March 16, in the scramble to contain the spread of coronavirus, San Francisco gave nonessential businesses just 12 hours’ notice they’d need to shut down. That included Farmgirl’s warehouse in the city’s Patrol Hill neighborhood. Besides the logistical nightmare of a lightning-fast shutdown that forced her to toss $150,000 worth of fresh flowers and furlough 95% of her 197 employees, Stembel — whose company was, pre-Covid-19, on track to hit $50 million in revenue this year — is furiously trying to get her business back up and running somewhere close to capacity by Mothers Day, the floral industry’s Super Bowl. It’s the holiday that keeps the floral industry afloat through the lean summer months when many flower sellers already experience a 30% to 50% drop in monthly revenue. To set up the first of…