The Story Behind Don’t Buy Her Flowers

Don’t Buy Her Flowers started with a new mum, eight bunches of flowers and the realisation that the traditional gift for new mums might not be quite as helpful as everyone thought. 

What began with magazines, chocolate and doorstep lasagnes became a business built around thoughtful gifts, TLC and making people feel properly looked after. 

We sat down with founder Steph to talk about why she started Don’t Buy Her Flowers, the gap she saw in the market, how the business has evolved and what’s next. 

I’m not sure what I was expecting when I had my first baby in 2010, but the reality was that I felt very overwhelmed and out of my depth. It felt like everyone around me was coping better because being a mum was ‘the most natural thing in the world’, but I had no clue what I was doing. In those early days, I received eight bunches of well-meant bouquets and initially I was a little giddy and ‘ooh a gift for me!’; but by number three I had realised that 1) flowers need looking after and 2) we had no more vases. It struck me as bizarre that the go-to gift for new mums was another thing to care for, when you’re doing more caring than you’ve ever done in your life. 

At this time, friends were having babies and, after my own experience, I started sending them a magazine and some chocolate in a jiffy bag along with a note to say ‘you’re doing a great job, it will get easier’. If they lived locally, I’d take them a lasagne and, crucially, leave it on their doorstep and text to say it was there. I just wanted to offer them some TLC as I realised how much I needed it, and remembered so clearly the friends that had texted me words of encouragement, and my parents driving two hours to fill my fridge, give me a cuddle and then leaving us to it. 

The response from people was that they were so grateful, and would say it was the most thoughtful gift they’d had. The gratitude felt kind of disproportionate to what I’d given them. One friend sent me a voucher for a massage as a thank you, which would have cost way more than whatever I’d sent them. And that was it really – the idea of better gifts for new mums, something that offered TLC and let a new mum know that someone was really thinking of them was the idea behind Don’t Buy Her Flowers.

I returned to my job in marketing, and had another baby fairly soon after, but couldn’t shake the idea – if anything it was even more clear to me after having Mabel that there was something in this. Starting a business felt like a massive leap, so at the start of 2014 I set myself the task of starting a blog, writing honestly about motherhood and relationships. It was like a stepping stone – to do something towards starting the business, to see if other people felt the same as me, but whilst still in my job so I had that security. 

A number of posts went viral – When New Mums Get Angry, A Letter to a New Mum – and that showed me that lots of women felt like me. They loved their babies and felt so grateful, but were finding it hard and felt lonely and isolated by the changes . I loved having a community and it felt very supportive, and when I was finally ready to put the website live in November 2014, that community were amazing and shared it everywhere. They crashed the website!

I felt – and still feel – that new mums need support and reassurance. Even if they look like they’ve got it together, I’ve never spoken to any woman that hasn’t said ‘god it was hard’ years later. I think the idea of flowers for new mums is outdated – something pretty for the lady. Give her chocolate! Cooked meals! Something to soothe her exhausted body! And tell her how amazing she is. That’s what I wanted to do with DBHF. 

I totally underestimated the emotional response to the gifts. Really quickly, customers were telling me that the recipient had cried when they’d opened their gift. And it makes sense – they’re overwhelmed, they might feel like they’re not doing it right, they’re not getting a lot of sleep – and someone gives you a gift that says ‘here, sit down, have a hot cup of tea, have a shower with an amazing shower gel, snaffle a cake, I think you need looking after’. They’re giving you permission to sit down and encouraging it at the same time. That is major.

When someone really sees you – when they want to care for you at a time when I remember I was regularly getting to 5pm and realising I’d not cleaned my teeth yet - it means so much. My children are the best thing I’ve ever done. And that made it even more confusing when I felt exhausted or angry or weepy, because I knew how lucky I was. But the reality is, it’s just quite tough for a while. Especially when we don’t have family around and we’re maybe feeling the pressure of how it looks like everyone else is coping. So someone showing kindness and what felt like recognition that it was at times quite hard, that is so powerful. 

I had no marketing budget at all, so I wrote, I used social media, I reached out to bloggers and journalists and I focused on making the product the best I could. We launched Create Your Own in 2016 – initially for the Cancer Care Package, working with Stand Up to Cancer. My husband was diagnosed with cancer back in 2010 and our experience was that cancer is so personal – a person’s experience will vary depending on their diagnosis, treatment, care and also how they’re feeling in themselves; as a result, what might offer them comfort is also very personal, so I knew a cancer gift needed to be bespoke. We worked with friends who had been through cancer to suggest products that they had found a comfort. Dame Deborah James was a lovely friend of mine and put together a selection for us – of course it included champagne, cashmere socks and a lambswool blanket! 

That was our first gift box where the customer chooses exactly what goes into it, and we then rolled that out to our Create a Gift Box, the Create a Man Care Package, Create a Teen Gift Box and so many more. More than 70% of our B2C sales are ‘Create’ gift boxes, so our customers want to take the time to put together a bespoke gift box, and that is great as we know that makes for a better, more tailored gift.

Something I think we do really well is engage with our community, experts, and people we admire to really think about the insight behind each product. We’ve had a partnership with baby loss charity Teddy’s Wish since 2020, creating care packages for bereaved parents and donating money to the charity. 

We also really think about product and insight behind including it. What comfort is it offering, or is it a practical help, is it the best quality product of its type for the right price? We work with some bigger well-known companies like This Works and Neal’s Yard, but we also have a lot of SME suppliers, who take so much care to think through everything from their packaging and what they’re sourcing to how they communicate, and they take massive pride in their product. 

Every gift box is gift wrapped and we handwrite the personal message on each tag. 

Within weeks of launching as ‘gifts for new mums’, customers were getting in touch to say they wanted to send a care package but for their brother in hospital, or for a birthday. At this point I realised that the potential market was so much bigger.  

They still wanted thoughtful gifts, but the reasons were so much broader than just ‘new mums’. And actually today, Birthday is our biggest occasion, followed by TLC, Get Well and New Mums. At a time in our lives when many of us feel like we’re in this ‘rush hour’, juggling family and work and responsibility and feeling some pressure to do it all while not looking a total mess, gifts that offer kindness and TLC are actually so welcome regardless of the occasion.  

We’ve found that the reasons behind DBHF in the first place – to offer comfort, to show support, to encourage the recipient to take five minutes for themselves – those are relevant on so many levels for so many occasions beyond New Mums. And still often cause an emotional response, in a good way!

We experienced really steady, incremental growth from launch. I moved the business out of my house and to Gloucestershire after two years and my brother took over operations and we built a team. We’d just moved to a bigger unit in October 2019 when a few months later, Covid struck. Sales went through the roof, we were trying to keep everyone safe and reassured while dealing with massive demand, and it was just a very weird time to be successful – one of my other brothers was a landlord and was going through a very different experience in business to us. 

Coming out of Covid was tough with lots of uncertainty and unpredictability, but one of the major areas of growth for us during that time was in B2B gifting. Corporate gifting is traditionally dreadful – no personalisation, chuck a logo on it, one size fits all and very little consideration of the recipient. Our clients are very much bought into the idea behind DBHF – think about the recipient, how do you want the recipient to feel, what do you want to say about your company, and tailor the gift. It amazes me that so many companies spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on gifts that are just a bit ‘meh’ – it’s like a tick box exercise. But with a bit of thought, those gifts can really connect with the recipient and do a brand piece for the company that is meaningful and offers ROI. 

Currently it’s about 50:50 with B2B and B2C, and so much opportunity in front of us.

At the end of 2025 we were acquired by… drumroll… a florist! It felt like the right time – we needed more resource and support to take the business to the next level and the team at Euroflorist have been brilliant. I’m still running DBHF, with the same team in Gloucestershire, and we have lots of exciting plans. We’re about to launch hampers – with our own CYO speciality of course – and lots of focus on Christmas from now. It feels like we’ve been given an adrenaline injection, with lots of possibility. 

My Instagram for personal updates from yours truly, covering life as a mum and running a business, the DBHF Instagram where we post behind the scenes, funny relatable content (we like to think so), competitions, collabs and announce product launches. The DBHF Podcast episodes can be streamed wherever you listen to your podcasts usually, or on our website along with our blog! 

If you want to see how it all began, take a look back at our New Mum Gift Boxes and our best seller Create Your Own Boxes too.