No funding. No formal training. No business plan. Just $70cand a decision to keep going. This Founder Friday, Forever Flowering’s Stacey Culpin shares the honest story of building a multi-million brand from nothing.
“For me, this business has never just been about sales or growth. It’s about what it’s created, the life I’ve been able to build, the team I’ve been able to grow, and something that feels meaningful.”
There are business origin stories and then there are real ones. Stacey Culpin’s is the latter. She was pregnant, she and her partner were struggling financially, and one night they ran out of toilet paper with no money to buy more. “I remember one night we had run out of toilet paper and didn’t have the money to buy any,” she says. “It’s not something I’m proud of, but my partner ended up going to a public toilet to grab some.” She describes that night as probably the lowest point, but also the turning point.
In the weeks that followed, she scraped together $70, made a floral arrangement, and listed it on Facebook Marketplace. That was the beginning of Forever Flowering, a brand that now delivers around 20,000 arrangements each year across Australia and internationally.
The $70 that started everything
“When I started my business, I didn’t have a strategy, a business plan, or any real idea of where it would go. I just knew I had to make something work.”
There was no grand vision behind the first arrangement. No market research, no brand strategy, no funding application. Stacey had $70, a creative instinct, and a need to make something happen. She made the arrangement, took a photo, and put it online. Someone bought it. She made another one. Someone bought that too. “Every dollar I made in the beginning went straight back into the business,” she says. “I didn’t take anything out. It was all about building momentum, one step at a time.”
The business grew slowly and physically. A corner of the home became the garage. The garage became a small studio. The studio eventually became a warehouse and factory setup. Each step was funded by the one before it, with no external capital and no safety net. She kept going not because she had a clear destination but because stopping was not an option she was willing to consider.
Growing without a blueprint
“I didn’t try to scale too quickly. I just followed the demand and built from there.”
Most business advice is built around frameworks that assume you have resources, time, and a degree of financial stability. Stacey had none of those things when she started. What she had instead was a close attention to her customers, what they were buying, what they were asking for, and what they kept coming back for. “Looking back, one of the biggest things that helped was staying really close to my customers,” she says. “I paid attention to what they were buying, what they were asking for, and what they loved. That shaped the direction of the business more than anything else.”
That customer-led instinct is what guided the business through its early years and continues to shape it today. She did not try to build everything at once. She built what the demand asked for and kept her focus narrow enough to do it well. For founders who feel overwhelmed by the scale of what they are trying to create, that discipline is harder to maintain than it sounds.
Redefining a category
The market Stacey entered was not considered a premium one. Artificial flowers were functional at best and cheap-looking at worst. But she could see consumer behaviour starting to shift. People were still buying flowers for their homes and as gifts but they were beginning to question the logic of spending money on something that wilted within a week. “People still wanted something beautiful in their homes or to give as a gift, but they were starting to question why they were spending money on something that only lasted a few days,” she says.
Forever Flowering sits directly in that gap. The arrangements are designed to look and feel like real flowers but last indefinitely. Beyond the aesthetic, there are practical reasons driving the switch: allergies, pets, low maintenance households, and simply wanting better value from a purchase. Over time the brand has expanded beyond flowers into home styling and gifting more broadly, shaped entirely by what customers were already using the products for. “It’s become about home styling, gifting, and creating something that people can keep,” she says.
What she knows now
“Start before you feel ready. If I had waited until I had everything figured out, I wouldn’t have started.”
Stacey is direct about what she would tell someone sitting at the beginning of a business journey. Keep it simple. Start with what you have. Do not wait for perfect conditions because they will not arrive. “It’s easy to overthink things or feel like you need a full plan before you begin,” she says, “but the reality is you figure a lot of it out along the way.” The advice is straightforward but the harder part is the second thing she says alongside it: be prepared for it to be genuinely difficult. “There are ups and downs, and a lot happens behind the scenes that people don’t see. But those moments are what shape you as a business owner.”
The business she has built is real evidence of what that persistence looks like at scale. From a $70 listing on Facebook Marketplace to a multi-million dollar brand delivering 20,000 orders a year. A warehouse and factory. A team. A loyal customer base that keeps coming back. None of it arrived quickly and none of it arrived easily. But it arrived because she kept going when stopping would have been the easier choice. “Build something real,” she says. “Stay consistent. Create something that lasts.” For Stacey Culpin, that is not a tagline. It is exactly what she did.
Keep up to date with our stories on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
