This story appears in the November 2025 issue of Entrepreneur. Subscribe »
In 2018, Michael Jacobson was fresh out of college when he got an unexpected call. His uncle had been running a local flower shop called French Florist for 40 years, but he was burned out and wanted Jacobson to help him sell it. Jacobson said yes — but the more he learned about the floral industry, the more he realized there was a bigger opportunity there.
The way Jacobson saw it, all local florists suffered from the same three problems. First, most orders came through aggregators like 1-800-FLOWERS, whose commission and fees often took north of 40% of a sale’s revenue. Second, local shops couldn’t buy directly from flower farms, so they had to go through expensive middlemen, which reduced the freshness of the flowers. And third, local shops were working with outdated technology. If Jacobson could solve all of these issues, he figured, he could build a competitive business — so he became the CEO of French Florist, and transformed it into a budding franchise which is on track to have 11 locations by late November. Here, he explains how he did it.
Related: Franchise Success Isn’t Automatic — It’s Earned. Here’s How to Do It Right.
How did you free yourself from that 40% cut to aggregators?
Because we were already paying such a high commission, that gave us a lot of budget to try to acquire clients more directly.
In other words: You were already losing 40% on these orders, so why not spend that money on marketing your own business?
Yes. When someone buys directly from you instead of an aggregator, you get that client’s data — and the second time they purchase from you, you’re not paying that acquisition cost anymore.
What attracted those customers?
We invested into website conversion rate and search engine optimization, plus ads. Your traditional florists might get 10% to 40% of their clients from the internet. We get 95% while still getting the same amount of walk-ins. We also got creative on the client retention side — which is equally as important as client acquisition. We send a handwritten card to every first-time client. We also tried to increase our average order value to help our unit economics. It was not one magic pill that made the business explode.
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