With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1351663
FROM TOP: TANYA GOEHRING; COURTESY OF NATURAL POD APRIL 2021 BCBUSINESS 35 A fter a few years as a busi- ness analyst, Kamila Alikhani decided that she wanted to do something else but wasn't sure what, exactly. "The typical millennial problem," the 35-year-old says with a laugh. Having just given birth to a cou- ple of children, Alikhani thought that maybe being an ultrasound technician was for her. But while taking prerequisites for a univer- sity program, she stumbled across a book called Designing Your Life by two Stanford University pro- fessors. "At the end of the book, they make you write your ideal job description—not the position, the description," Alikhani says. "And mine was to create beauti- ful spaces for people." She ended up working part- time at a flower shop and fell in love with the job. "I just felt like it was for me, and I was super com- fortable," she remembers. "But there was always this nagging feel- ing that something wasn't right. I could see how much waste was created, and not that I was zero- waste all the time in my life, but the amount of it was disturbing. So I just thought, This is it, I'm going to do it." Alikhani, who is originally from Uzbeki- stan, founded Bloomiér in a West Vancou- ver home studio in June 2019, with the goal of creating a zero-waste flower shop. The first piece of that is its subscription model. Alikhani and her team of three part-time employees don't keep flowers on hand to fill out the storefront display or for walk-in cus- tomers. They only cultivate as many as they need to fill their orders, which currently go out weekly, biweekly and monthly to some 40 clients big and small. When the company has a large order for a wedding or corporate event (which isn't as often lately, for obvious reasons), it collects the flowers and turns them into smaller bed- side bouquets for hospices and seniors homes (thankfully, plants can't carry coronavirus). Though Alikhani had some doubts about the business at first, it took her six months to break even, and Bloomiér has been growing ever since. "A lot of it was, will people understand what I'm trying to achieve? Will people see value in it? Is the industry too set in stone that people won't see the difference? I think that worry was in the back of my mind. Yes, it's an actual busi- ness that makes money, but I wanted to still bring some goodness to the world." Along the way, Bloomiér has saved some 6,000 flowers from going to waste. "We have never thrown one out," Alikhani says. Environmental Sustainability W I N N E R Bloomiér THEBUSINESSOF GO OD CUTTING EDGE Kamila Alikhani brought much- needed change to the flower trade R U N N E R - U P Natural Pod To hear Christopher Roy tell it, environmental responsibility and stewardship have been baked into Natural Pod's DNA from the outset. The company was founded in 2006 with the goal of making high-quality, environmentally sound toys. Although the product has since changed–it now produces sustainable classroom NEW SCHOOL Natural Pod helps classrooms go greener