The first Beneva Flowers website - built by Rick Swier of Sarasota Online in 1996.

Way back in 1996 I had my first website created by Rich Swier of Sarasota Online. Rich was a true innovator and regular customer at Beneva Flowers. Rich would always tell me about his web development and built a website for Beneva Flowers before most people even knew what a website was – it was a very exciting time!

His company was soon bought out by Comcast, so I moved on to Coastal Web. The owner, Vince, was quickly overwhelmed in a few years as I was learning of all the ways I could retail. Soon it was too overwhelming, and it was time to move on. As I was searching, I also came across a contact in Japan who was looking for a way to sell flowers in the USA. Beneva was soon international as we were brokering orders daily into the USA form Japan!

As my needs were growing, I was getting frustrated by the lack of available options. I heard about a new local company that was just starting up in 1998 called Gravity Free. Owner Scott Heaps and Ray Villares were very innovative and looking to learn more about my needs. Considering I was all retail, Scott seemed eager to learn all he could. I was happy to teach him as Scott was eager to grow.

We quickly found a synergy together as we bounced ideas constantly for many hours and days on end together. I had ideas like reward points we turned into Petal Points and many groundbreaking ideas that Scott assisted. I partnered with Ken Young who helped with the reward points systems and Walter Knoll with operations of the website. It was an exciting time as we integrated with 3rd party sites and Scott and his team at Gravity Free were very helpful in building what we created.

I realized what we had was very special. I had committed to sign up and pay for the development of the floral retailing site called Flower Manager. It was my idea to build a group of the very best of the best florists across the country and so I offered an exclusivity. Scott wasn't thrilled because he was hoping to build his tech company and I was looking to build a user group.

Well, every shop ended up flying myself and my daughter Tina to every location where I personally met with the owners and understood their business in great detail so we could continue growing the application to compliment all sizes of use. We had shops like Griffins that was doing just two orders a day to shops doing 100 orders a day. They all quadrupled their sales and they grew on and on.

I wanted to continue creating new development and moved on to Floralapp. This was a mobile application that was not where Gravity Free excelled. They focused on traditional development as I was needing app development.

We created Floralapp and sold it to Teleflora who now owns it and will hopefully integrated it with the Teleflora retail florists.

In 2015 my company was bought out and I decided to shift gears and pursue web development by invitation. I was looking to align myself with retail florists with an eye for growth. There is so much opportunity to grow that I thought was a good time to pursue that. Leading technology that is still leading the way 21 years later!