Christina Stembel

Mar 14

Founder and CEO of Farmgirl Flowers

Christina started Farmgirl Flowers with a mission—to revitalize American flower growers. She is the daughter, granddaughter, and great-granddaughter of corn and soybean farmers from Indiana, so American crops mean a lot to her. She was disheartened when she learned that most flowers we buy in the US come from outside the country. She began her business in her tiny San Francisco apartment by studying Youtube videos and making arrangements from the flowers she purchased at the San Francisco Flower Mart.

Christina followed the “burn the ships” approach to starting her business. She quit her full-time event coordinate job a Stanford and invested all of her life-savings, $49,000, to get her business up and running. She delivered flower bouquets for free to cafes in the area in exchange for them prominently displaying the bouquets along with her business cards. By the end of her first year in business, she’d made $56,000 in revenue, and by the end of year three, she’d made $920,000. Talk about scaling up quickly! By the end of 2020, Farmgirl had hit over $60 million in revenue, up from $32 million the year before.

Christina sweats all the details. From diagnosing problems with delivery routes to following the expenses closely, she knows it’s all the little things that add up to creating the big picture. Christina grew up in a very restrictive household that didn’t believe girls needed college educations because they were just going to get married and have babies. Christina knew she wanted something different for herself. And while she never did get her college degree, she did leave how for NYC right after high school and crafted her own future.

Powerful Quotes by a Powerful Woman

“Trust your gut but know your numbers.”

“I tell my team all the time that I messed up. I hope that letting my team know that I mess up all the time allows them to feel safe and know that they aren’t expected to be perfect.”

“I really went all in on the local flowers but working in the agricultural space in North America as a female founder was extremely challenging because of gender, and there are many farms that to this day would not sell to me but sold to many of our male-owned competitors.”

“My guiding light was a quote I saw on Instagram: ‘I don’t care that no one believed in me. I believed in myself.’ Even though people thought I was a little nuts and crazy it didn’t matter because I believed in the idea for Farmgirl so much and I believed in myself that I could make it happen. That was enough for me.”