Going Up Against Big Carnation

“This is a slow time of year, but still we’ve been busy anyway,” says Ray Le Du, standing in his Manhattan flower shop, Blue Water Flowers, trimming a shipment of tulips just in from the Netherlands. A glass-door cooler by the entrance is filled with velvety red charm peonies—a best-seller even at $12 a stem, says the florist, who almost lost his business during the recession when law firms, hotels, and other big clients stopped calling.

Le Du credits the uptick in orders to BloomNation, an online marketplace where customers can order arrangements from a network of independent florists. Shops such as Blue Water pay BloomNation a 10 percent fee for every sale. In exchange, BloomNation builds a store within its own website for each florist, dispatching a photographer to take pictures of sample arrangements. It also gives businesses tools to collect and analyze their sales data, including contact and order information for past customers.