Lazy Flora

Idea

Introduction

Lazy Flora is making gardening hassle-free for urban gardeners. We're like Hello Fresh for plants.

We have a passion for beautiful plants, and bringing people closer to nature.

Lazy Flora was started to solve a very simple problem: how to easily get beautiful plants onto an inner-city balcony, with no car, no plant knowledge, and no heavy lifting.

As a society, we're gardening in smaller spaces than ever before. We have less space to grow stuff, but this doesn't mean our need to surround ourselves with greenery has diminished - far from it.

The market potential is huge: UK plant sales are booming, plant-hungry and time-poor millennials are desperate for easy access to plants. Traditional garden centres have been slow to react to eCommerce and the door is wide open. Convenience is king for these busy consumers, reflected by the fact that the UK subscription box industry is predicted to grow to a £1bn market by 2022, an increase of 72% from 2017.

Intended impact

Millennials want to garden: a recent study showed that there's a 29% increase in millennials gardening, but they want it to be easy.

We've taken away all the barriers to plant ownership, and built products that fit in with the lives of our busy customers.

· Time: We curate top quality plants, so customers don't have to spend time researching suitable plants.

· Delivery with 99.2% first-time delivery success nationwide.

· Support customers with 30-day plant guarantee, and exceptional customer service post-purchase

Consumers are acutely aware of environmental impact, and it's increasingly important for businesses to demonstrate awareness of this. We now have:

· Plastic-free packaging for our indoor plants

· Plants for pollinators included in all outdoor collections

· And we raised money for WWF's Amazon is Burning appeal this summer

We believe the opportunity to scale upwards is huge and feel we are in a strong position to become one of the UK's go-to plant destinations for the tech generation.

Substantial accomplishments to date

We've received some incredible endorsements: The Independent named us their Best Buy for plant and gardening subscriptions, and our customers have rated us 'excellent' on Trustpilot.

Our success to date:

· Average month-on-month revenue growth has been 40%.
· Revenue to the end of Q3 2019 is up 400% compared with the whole of 2018.
· Total revenue to date is +£120k in sales from +5000 orders to +1000 customers.
· Our average subscription duration far outperforms the UK subscription box industry standard - in fact, it's nearly double.

Monetisation strategy

Since day one, our primary focus has been on creating a brand that inspires and uplifts people; that fosters a closer connection to the natural world, but that is in tune with the needs of modern consumers' busy lives.

Today, we attract customers through the following channels:

· Organic traffic through highly engaged social media channels
· SEO
· Paid Social Media advertising
· Highly effective email targeting funnels
· PR

We have healthy margins of 40% and above on all our current products, and as we scale, we anticipate being able to increase our margin through bulk discount savings.

We retain customers through the following:

· Exceptional customer service.
· Customer loyalty scheme
· Referrals that incentivise existing customers
· Opportunities for existing customers to benefit from long-term discounts.

Over the next 2-3 years, we aim for our expansion to be generated through increased brand recognition and growth of the eCommerce plant market, as well as through new product launches.

· Our aim is to be the go-to destination for hassle-free gardening in the UK.
· Increased personalisation of products.
· Increased PR.

Use of proceeds

This is a super exciting time to get involved with Lazy Flora and join our mission to make plants and gardening more accessible to modern urban dwellers.

We believe we've established our product market fit, built an amazing team who are passionate about what we do, and developed excellent relationships with our suppliers and customers - all of which gives us a fantastic platform to scale.

The proceeds from this raise will be used to accelerate our sales and marketing reach through the following plans:

· Investment into website optimisation and development of the user journey.
· Investment into personalisation.
· Relocation into a new warehouse to handle our increased number of orders.
· Working capital and cash flow requirements during this phase of growth.

We've built a beautiful business with a happy and fast-growing customer base. We've got incredible plants. We have a brilliant team. And with you on board as an investor, we can scale this company even faster.