Getting You Your Flowers

I spent a morning working as a bike courier for UrbanStems. I was not quite up to the task...

Leg Day is a newsletter about pursuing joy as a city cyclist. This story is about UrbanStems, which offers next-day delivery on beautiful floral arrangements across the U.S. and same-day delivery in NYC, DC, Dallas, Miami, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta and Miami. You can check out their bouquets here and use promo code LEGDAY15 for a 15% discount. If you use any of the links to the company website in the piece, I may earn a small commission.

The typical bike courier has little choice over what they deliver. When working, their fate is up to the hands of a dispatcher, who controls where they have to go, what they’re expected to carry, and how much time they have.

That’s the kind of bike courier Khalil Fletcher was when he started almost a decade ago. He was selling sneakers, and became a courier as a way to get more consistent income. He became an expert at carrying a staggering amount of product through the city on his fixie—50 lbs of paper, a car seat, a new Dyson stick vacuum—for a constellation of different delivery services and dispatchers. Then, one Valentine’s Day, a fellow courier told him about an opportunity to work with UrbanStems, a relatively new flower delivery service that needed help with the extra volume.

Flowers are not typically the kind of product one associates with bike messengers. It’s hard to imagine a delicate petunia surviving a trip on someone’s back, especially when you account for New York City’s dense traffic. But UrbanStems has been successfully using bike couriers to help with deliveries since it was founded back in 2014. Today, if you order flowers in D.C. or Manhattan, it’s basically guaranteed to arrive on a bike.

Being a courier for UrbanStems, Khalil quickly found, was different than for other courier companies. For one, he started his day at the distribution center, a bona fide office with a bathroom, microwave, and fridge. But more importantly, when he’d start his day with UrbanStems, he didn’t just know exactly what he’d be delivering, he knew exactly where he would be going.

“With a traditional company …dispatchers will just throw you anything,” said Khalil. “You’ll do a pickup in Midtown with a drop off in Wall Street. Then they’ll give you a pick up in [the Lower East Side] going back up to Midtown, doing a whole circle. Sometimes you’ll just sit on standby, where you’re getting paid nothing.”

Since UrbanStems has a fully integrated distribution center in New York, the company can actually communicate more completely with its couriers. By the time they arrive at the office in Hell’s Kitchen, all the day’s deliveries have been arranged, boxed, properly tagged, and divided up to ensure they can be efficiently delivered in a relatively sane path through the city. “Having your route established before you start is a godsend,” said Khalil.

Another difference? Unlike Uber drivers, Seamless riders, and TaskRabbit “taskers,” UrbanStems bike couriers are usually not independent contractors, but rather UrbanStems employees, says Andy Zalan, head of courier operations. Himself a former courier, for over two decades at other companies and with UrbanStems near the beginning of its operation in D.C., he says he’s tried to create the kind of environment and pay structure he would have liked to see as a courier. A lot of the couriers he now oversees are full-time employees who get health care, paid time off, and holidays. And even the ones who aren’t are paid an hourly-rate when they are asked to come in, with commissions for each delivery they make. “I want UrbanStems to be considered a premiere workplace,” said Andy. “No one is going to get rich being a bike courier, we’re not trying to fool anyone. But we can do a lot to treat people right and pay them fairly.”

The system has worked well for Khalil, now one of the people in charge of the UrbanStems New York City distribution center. When I arrived last week, he was sorting several dozen boxes of flowers that would be taken to office buildings, stores, apartments by the four UrbanStems couriers that were working today, leaving six out in the middle of the floor. “Those are for you,” he said.

Thankfully, he didn’t mean for me to carry around myself. I spent the next few hours following behind Fletcher in his fixie—a stunning purple v2 from Brooklyn Machine Works—while he carted all the bouquets in a ludicrously capacious messenger bag. The drop-offs are easiest, he said, with apartment buildings that had doormen. You can leave the box with someone who you can be pretty confident will actually make an effort to give it to its intended recipient.

Office buildings are hit or miss. Sometimes the people working at reception are nice, and let a courier take the elevator up to the right floor. More often, the courier has to call the phone number associated with the order, hope it’s the one for the recipient and let them know to come down for their package. “It’s sometimes a little tricky, because the person isn’t always expecting a call,” Khalil said. The one time we had to deliver to an office building, the person didn’t pick up. They did, however, respond to a text, and gave Khalil the correct number for giftee. Matt H. got their flowers no problem.

The only time I truly thought we weren’t going to be able to make a successful delivery was at an apartment without a doorman. “Gotta play the buzzer game,” Fletcher said. No one responded, and our call went unanswered. Khalil had just started to get in touch with Chad, our dispatcher for the day, to ask him to see if he could get another number, when the person we were looking for walked up to the front door. It just so happened they also had an UberEats delivery waiting too.

We had left UrbanStems HQ at about 10:45 and were back by 12:08. Six deliveries in just under an hour and a half didn’t sound so bad to me, but I asked Khalil how long the same route would have taken him.

“Honestly, if I was by myself that would have taken me like, 30 minutes,” he said.

Oh.

Guess I’m not going to quit my day jobs!

Thanks for showing me the ropes, Khalil!

Three Great UrbanStems Options:

The Valentine ($90) - Classic for a reason.

The Satin ($72) - Just a bit more intrigue.

The Sun Beam ($55) - For the snooty “flowers are actually a bad gift, don’t give me something that will die” contrarian in your life

A few random things I learned from UrbanStems CEO Meenakshi Lala:

• Not all flowers are supposed to be fed with those flower food packets, including tulips. In some cases, “by adding flower food, you are going to fast track the blooming process and hence not be able to enjoy them for as long.”

• The biggest week for UrbanStems isn’t actually Valentine’s Day. It’s Mother’s Day!

• Similarly, Lala said studies have found most men don’t get flowers until their funeral. Thankfully, I am not most men.

• If you’re looking for V-day retribution, the Bronx Zoo will let you name a cockroach this year. This was something Lala and the UrbanStems rep and (Leg Day subscriber!) Charlotte were talking about while my internet was having problems at the beginning of our call.