Postal Petals: Redefining Self-Care with DIY Flower Arranging and Wellness Experiences | Talia Boone

Postal Petals Founder and CEO, Talia R. Boone, entered the floral industry after a groundbreaking career in sports, entertainment, and social impact. She brings with her over 15 years of experience in brand strategy, communications, marketing, public relations, promotions, sales, and strategic partnerships.

In addition to Postal Petals, she is the Managing Director of INTER:SECT, a tactical solutions agency that serves as a catalyst for pioneering ideas, collaboration, and creative opportunities that exist at the intersection of sports and entertainment, business, technology, consciousness, culture, and the arts to promote socially and culturally relevant conversations leading to collective action resulting in measurable social impact.

Talia’s passion of achieving long-standing, systematic social justice spills over into anything she does, including Postal Petals, where messages encouraging consumers to register to vote and highlighting the frequent injustices against underrepresented communities can be found throughout the brand’s site and its social media platforms.

Thanks for sitting down with Confidence Daily! Tell us about what you do.

Postal Petals® is a multi-touchpoint self-care plus wellness company that partners with domestic flower farms to ship bundles of fresh cut flowers to our customers to design their own do-it-yourself flower arrangements as a form of creative expression and relaxation. We are disrupting the traditional floral industry by changing the way people engage with flowers from a ready-to-use product to an interactive wellness experience; thus using DIY flower arranging to meet the booming demand for self-care solutions in both the direct-to-consumer and B2B segments.

How do you cultivate confidence?

An entrepreneur must be smart, forward-thinking, and confident. My confidence comes from my years of work experience: learning by doing. I can look back at a project and analyze what I did well and what I did not do well and I'm not afraid to learn from my mistakes and make sure I don't repeat them. Confidence comes with repeated success and understanding what will work to bring about the best outcome.

What does being a woman-owned business mean to you?

Women are natural-born leaders. They know how to manage personalities and bring out the most in people. They are creative, ingenious, and adept at making a pathway where none seems available. They can juggle multiple responsibilities at the same time and thrive at all of them. Women are level-headed and cool under pressure. They are also skilled money managers. I think we're exceptionally well-suited for owning and running businesses of all kinds.

What was your business origin story?

I was first introduced to arranging flowers a few years ago. It began with me wanting fresh flowers in the house and being curious about what kind of arrangements I could create on my own. Almost immediately, I fell in love with it. It was so calming and relaxing that I started to look forward to the hour or two that I would get to arrange flowers and just decompress and quiet my mind. It became my go-to form of self-care and a way to relieve stress.

Two months into quarantine in 2020, I was super stressed and desperately in need of a floral fix to ease my nerves as the walls in my home began to close in on me. I needed fresh flowers but the LA Flower Market was closed due to the lockdowns. After looking around online for other ways to get my hands on some flowers, I came across a flower wholesaler who shipped large volumes of flowers to clients like florists, event and wedding planners, etc. all around the world. I just cold-called him hoping to convince him to reduce his minimums and ship me a small order of flowers that I could arrange at home.

Through that conversation, I learned about the obstacles that prevented him from accommodating my request, but by the end of our 2-hour call, my mind was spinning. I realized that what I wanted didn’t exist but that could be an opportunity for me to possibly fill a hole in the marketplace. I immediately went to work putting together a wireframe for what the business could look like. That was in May 2020. By late July we launched in beta with nearly 20 domestic farm partners signed up to ship for us. Today, we’re shipping flowers all across the country.

Okay, coming up with a great idea and actually taking the steps to become an entrepreneur and launch your company are two very different things. How did you know it was time to take the leap?

Prior to founding Postal Petals, I founded and ran the tactical solutions agency called INTER:SECT, so I was already very familiar with what it would take to start a business, logistically and financially speaking. When I realized there was a gap in the market for a farm fresh-cut flower delivery service, I knew that if I didn't fill it, somebody else would. I knew I had to move fast. From the time the idea occurred to me to the time I was operational, it was only a matter of several months.

Sometimes entrepreneurship can be a hard and isolating journey. How do you stay confident along the way?

I surround myself with great people. I make sure to work with and hire people with good energy and are supportive. I also have a great network of female friends, many of whom are professionals and entrepreneurs. When one of us has a career or business-related problem, the others are there to listen and support. It's important for women to hold each other up.

If you had to list three traits or attributes that have been pivotal for your success, what would they be?:

1. Be forward-thinking.

2. Be a self-starter.

3. Be able to work well under pressure.

What's one myth you'd like to debunk about your line of work?

The number one misconception about being an entrepreneur is that we're following a pre-conceived path that's laid out for us. Oftentimes, entrepreneurs are trying to build something that hasn’t existed before, meaning there’s no established pathway and we must work hard not only to build the business, but to also learn a new business, industry, or skill set.

What advice would you give to burgeoning entrepreneurs?

The number one piece of advice I give to burgeoning entrepreneurs is to take care of yourself and carve out personal time to reset and refresh.

What words do you live by?

There's an African proverb I love: "If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together.”

Any final words of wisdom?

Another African proverb I love: "Not everyone who chased the zebra caught it, but he who caught it, chased it."