Editor’s note: Welcome to The Pitch, a DC Inno special feature in which we spotlight young local startups led by underrepresented founders. These companies may not have much (or any) funding or revenue, but they do have plans — and they’re taking the initial steps to make things happen. Each month, we’ll highlight a different venture in the D.C.-area landscape, with an intention of following their journeys from this point forward. This is the second installment. You can read the first one here.
Old Dominion Flower Co. stemmed from a series of Zoom conversations in fall 2020, when a group of farmers and floral designers started talking about the industry’s pain points.
Among them: The logistical nightmare and administrative burden designers endured when trying to coordinate with local farms, and the equally tough task for farmers to handle that wholesale work while also running their own farmers markets and direct-to-consumer sales.
“Identifying this disconnect pointed us to an obvious solution,” said Megan Wakefield McMullen, executive director of Old Dominion Flower Co. “There needed to be a streamlined wholesale hub that would allow farmers to pool their flowers in one location for aggregated wholesale, and designers need one easy-to-use online platform that would allow them to access all of this product without buying from each farm individually.”
The pitch: The local flower business is setting out to develop a sustainable flower economy. It provides a two-sided marketplace for farms to sell sustainably and locally grown flowers and foliage to florists, event designers and businesses across the events, hospitality and other sectors — within a 90-mile radius of its Leesburg headquarters.
The team: Megan Wakefield McMullen previously worked as an attorney in urban agriculture and community development in Baltimore, then left the legal practice to become a full-time farmer and business consultant. After working with Barbara Lamborne of Purcellville’s Greenstone Fields — one of the D.C.-area’s “pioneers of the local flower movement,” Wakefield McMullen said — she started a small farm and garden design business. That led her to the seven other growers, designers and gardeners who together formed ODFC: Haley Tobias of Fairfax Station’s Cedar Lime and Co.; Sarah Daken of Poolesville’s Grateful Gardeners; Neta Fay Shanholtz of Hillsboro, Virginia’s Shanholtz Farms; Sharla Bond of C&S Farmstead in The Plains, Virginia; Marina Dimitriadis of Clifton’s Louloudi Farm; Laura Hooper of Alexandria’s Foxhill Gardens; and Amy Cordy of Warrenton Virginia’s Drive by Flowers.
The business model: Old Dominion functions as a wholesaler, so revenue comes from the resale of the flowers and foliage sourced from its local suppliers. The company is now working with 16 local flower farms that provide floral products to the site each week. ODFC also follows a handful of core principles that include “minimizing the environmental impact of growing, importing and shipping traditional wholesale floral products; supporting a sustainable floral economy by paying employees fair, livable wages and providing predictable income to farms to allow them to do the same; and providing only top-quality floral products to our customers,” Wakefield McMullen said. The young business generated $150,000 in revenue during 2021, and is projecting $500,000 in revenue in 2022. This year, she said, will be “a year of growth, systemization and process development.”
The challenge: Increasing capacity. The company is looking for a permanent warehouse to manage more product. That’s critical, after launching in 2021 “to far more interest and enthusiasm than we expected,” Wakefield McMullen said. “While we knew the problem we had identified was real, we were not aware of the full extent of the demand for local flowers.” But roadblocks such as shipping disruptions, climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic made the traditional method of sourcing — through imports from South America — “inconsistent, unreliable, and, in some cases, unavailable,” she said. “Designers started turning to ODFC to supply local flowers right away. Our capacity was limited in 2021 by our facilities, staff and delivery capabilities.”
The game plan: Old Dominion, in the Bethesda Green accelerator, will set out to raise roughly $250,000 this spring, Wakefield McMullen said. That will support the footprint expansion and allow the company, now with five employees, to bring on warehouse support and additional delivery drivers as the season progresses. The business will also use the capital to further develop the processes and technology that, Wakefield McMullen said, are “required to manage a highly diverse, seasonal, fragile and perishable inventory.”
