"Transform negativity into lessons, propelling you forward."
Slava Bogdan СEO & co-founder of Flowwow, tech-entrepreneur with a 10-year leadership experience in e-commerce business.
Building a glocal (global + local) marketplace that brings ultimate joy to your loved ones around the world.
Check out more interviews with entrepreneurs here.
WOULD YOU LIKE TO GET FEATURED?
All interviews are 100% FREE OF CHARGE
Table of Contents
We are thrilled to have you join us today, welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive interview! Let’s start off with a little introduction. Tell our readers a bit about yourself and your company.
Slava Bogdan: Thank you for inviting me to join the conversation! I am happy to be able to share the story of our brand. I am the CEO and co-founder of Flowwow, a global gifting marketplace that connects 14,000 local brands from a thousand cities with customers in 30+ countries.
Together with my co-founders Andrey Makeev and Artem Gambitski, we launched the platform in 2014 with a mission to help SMEs scale their business online.
Another crucial part of our mission is to make the process of gift-giving more personalised and enjoyable for people worldwide.
The story behind the company’s creation is simple yet no less interesting to me: my friend (and future Flowwow co-founder) Andrey and I met in the park and were discussing our latest business venture, a tour voucher code aggregator.
We saw an increasing demand for services that collect a lot of similar offers in one place, however, there was no marketplace boom in sight.
Suddenly, I recalled a moment from several years ago when I was struggling to surprise my mom with a birthday gift while in Greece.
It was a nightmare to find a gift, make a payment, and then track the parcel. First surveys among our friends confirmed customers’ pains in similar scenarios, while interviews with potential sellers showed that small businesses are ready to receive orders and pay a small fee.
This is how a simple idea exchange in the park, combined with a challenge that we were willing to face, turned into a company.
Originally, Flowwow was a floral marketplace, but the pandemic provided us with a unique opportunity for growth, and we became home to local brands, having opened 10+ new categories in 2 months with 800k orders (+77% YoY) and 98% positive customer feedback.
In 2022, we bootstrapped with $6,000,000 to enter 24+ countries, leveraging product localisation and marketing instruments to attract new customers and sellers.
Rethinking the $30 bln online gifting market, together with my team I drove Flowwow to double its year-over-year revenue growth, and for 2023 only, the platform has proceeded almost 3,000,000 orders.
Despite the promising results so far, like any entrepreneur, I’ve encountered a lot of challenges in my journey, whether it was the exponential growth, financial losses, rapid team scaling from 50 to 300 employees in 6 months, or practically simultaneous expansion to dozens of countries.
I’d love to use my expertise to support other people with a vision, help them learn from my mistakes, and potentially give a helping hand to a promising entrepreneur from Poland, Mexico, Turkey and the MENA region to launch their future unicorn.
In the past year, what is the greatest business achievement you’d like to celebrate with your team? Please share the details of that success.
Slava Bogdan: I think it’s our launch in the MENA region. We’ve had concerns there wouldn’t be much response, but we’re seeing significant growth in the UAE market and interest from both sellers and customers.
These are further confirmed by our figures this Valentine’s Day: the number of gift buyers had increased almost ninefold compared to 2023 when we first entered the Emirati market.
What advice do you wish you had received when you started your business journey and what do you intend on improving in the next quarter?
Slava Bogdan: It’s a good question! I wish I had known these 5 things at the beginning of my Flowwow journey: practice the power of letting go, build a supportive community, balance optimism and realism, delegate and take good self-care, and trust your intuition.
Don’t let your negative emotions lead you – direct your energy towards thinking of ways to fix it instead. Low moments are our teachers that propel us towards growth.
Find a community of fellow entrepreneurs: all of you face similar problems – someone might have already found a solution and can help you while you help someone as well.
There are times when you need to be a realist, so make sure your glasses aren’t too rose-coloured.
The conversion will never hit an instant high, the client will not become a once-a-week purchaser overnight, and 10 talented programmers won’t join your team simply for an idea.
At the beginning of my career, I tried to rely solely on my resources, which led to a terrible burnout. You need to build a team as a form of taking care of yourself and sustaining personal resources.
‘Resourceful’ you are much more valuable for your business than the ‘exhausted’ you will ever be – this simple discovery at some point has changed everything for me.
Trust your intuition when making decisions: who to hire in the team, who to take money from, which project to launch, etc. The more I talk to entrepreneurs who have created something terrific, the more I hear about intuition.
Online business keeps on surging higher than ever, B2B, B2C, online shopping, virtual meetings, remote work, Zoom medical consultations, what are your expectations for the year to come and how are you capitalizing on the tidal wave?
Slava Bogdan: Because we pay close attention to trend-tracking and listening to our audience, I believe this year our business can grow more than double compared to 2023. We’ve also got an ambitious but achievable plan to process and deliver a minimum of 6,000,000 orders.
For our industry in general, it seems the sustainability focus will continue to play a crucial role in customer decision-making. We notice people in the MENA region are becoming particularly conscious of buying products from smaller brands as they are more environmentally friendly and contribute to the local economy.
Sustainability is an important part of our company’s ethos: at Flowwow, we don’t deliver between regions, thus minimising emissions.
We know our customers will be able to find something to their taste in the wide range presented by local artisans on our platform, so it makes cross-regional delivery unnecessary and avoidable.
I think we’ll see more independent brands driving economic growth in the region. For Spain, for example – one of the countries we operate in – SMEs represent more than 99% of all companies and employ around 75% of the active population.
We want to continue to bring small businesses closer to customers, helping local brands gain visibility and providing shoppers with a range so exciting and diverse they don’t need to order a cross-country shipment.
Business is all about overcoming obstacles and creating opportunities for growth. What do you see as THE real challenge right now?
Slava Bogdan: As the gift-giving category demonstrates lower online penetration than average in e-commerce, our challenge is to elevate the customer experience of ordering flowers, gifts, and sweets to a new level.
We aim to instil more confidence in the order quality and improve delivery speed.
This will significantly transform our field, as there are currently many players who have long fallen behind modern standards, especially in terms of technology.
In your experience, what tends to be the most underestimated part of running a company? Can you share an example?
Slava Bogdan: Many people have a pretty good understanding of what a CEO or executive does, but I am always glad to break it down for those who don’t or aren’t sure.
I’ll start with what this position is not – this is not operational work. There are a lot of observations and actions in this role that shape the future of the company, and this responsibility often goes unrecognised.
CEOs deal with tasks that shape the future: it’s about finding the money needed in 18 months and building a team or finding a team leader to begin their work in a year. The larger the business becomes, the more long-term tasks the CEO handles.
Previously, I was one of the people who thought that CEOs continuously issue orders and directives and that all decisions depend on them.
But I understand now that, if the company processes are happening exactly as described above, it’s a sign of a bad CEO who couldn’t build a strong, smart, and independent team.
However, I’d like to provide a disclaimer that this statement represents my opinion only as different leaders and companies might have a different take on the subject.
Essentially, the CEO’s task is to ensure two key resources for the business – the team and the money.
At the same time, it is necessary to maintain balance, improve teamwork, develop leaders, evolve and update. To sum it up in one sentence, you ensure that the large organism – that is, the business – functions, grows, and lacks nothing.
What does “success” in 2024 mean to you? It could be on a personal or business level, please share your vision.
Slava Bogdan: I believe it’s in our business’ DNA to make the world a better place, so our success metric includes the amount of smiles, love, and happiness that people bring to each other through the gifts they order on Flowwow.
By automating the acts of gift-giving, we’re bringing local brands closer to customers and saving everyone’s time and energy for those whom they really love.
Another metric we use to evaluate our company’s success in 2024 and beyond is the number of independent brands and artisans made more visible with our platform, giving them an opportunity to introduce their products to a broader audience.
Brooke Young, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Slava Bogdan for taking the time to do this interview and share his knowledge and experience with our readers.
If you would like to get in touch with Slava Bogdan or his company, you can do it through his – Linkedin Page
Disclaimer: The ValiantCEO Community welcomes voices from many spheres on our open platform. We publish pieces as written by outside contributors with a wide range of opinions, which don’t necessarily reflect our own. Community stories are not commissioned by our editorial team and must meet our guidelines prior to being published.
