1-800-Flowers.com CEO Jim McCann is excited about the prospects for elevated customer engagement as the integration of Harry & David proceeds.
Florist and gift retailer 1-800-Flowers.com announced the acquisition of Harry & David Holdings in September 2014 for $143 million in cash. At the time, a release said the combination of the two companies would create a gift retailer with more than $1 billion in annual sales.
Harry & David produces and sells fruit, gourmet food products, and other gifts. Its brands include: Harry & David, Wolferman’s, and Cushman’s.
During 1-800-Flowers.com’s fiscal second-quarter conference call on Jan. 28, McCann said that Harry & David and the Harry & David brands will be coming on to the company portal this spring.
“Our consolidated database, now that it’s fully consolidated, we have a terrific database of really attractive customers from a demographic and income point of view, and we now have the CRM tools … to properly mine those databases for growth,” McCann said, according to Seeking Alpha. “And we have the celebration suite of services, passport, rewards, and reminders that goes into the efforts that will drive organic growth for us.”
McCann labeled it “an all-star collection of brands” that the company can focus on with those services, platforms, and database.
“We’re focused on purchase frequency, increasing that amount of customers, and driving every increasing lifetime value from that customer database,” he said. “We continued to execute our integration initiatives for Harry & 
David and we are now ahead of our forecast of capturing operating synergies across our platform. These efforts are helping us to keep on track to hit our full-year EBITDA and EPS guidance. The acquisition of Harry & David last year marked a significant step in our strategy to expand our offerings so that we can solve for our broader range of customers gifting and celebratory needs.”
The addition of Harry & David, Wolferman’s, and Moose Munch helped catapult 1-800-Flowers.com into a leadership position in the growing gourmet food and gift basket category, which now represents more than half of the company’s annual revenue.
“This category is predominantly a holiday season business, representing more than 75% of our total sales for this past quarter,” McCann noted. “As such, the year-over-year growth in this area on both the reported and comparable basis was the primary driver of our overall growth for the quarter. It was a solid quarter and a solid first half. We would have liked to have more top-line growth, but we did have growth, but it was modest. We delivered strong EBITDA and EPS and the Harry & David integration is ahead of plan, which enabled us to reiterate our bottom line guidance.”