Exclusive Q&A: Jason John, chief marketing officer, 1-800-Flowers.com

1-800-Flowers.com is leveraging technology innovation all year round.

Chain Store Age recently spoke with Jason John, chief marketing officer, 1-800-Flowers.com, about how the specialty gift retailer integrates next-generation technology into its promotional activities.

1-800-Flowers.com is currently running an artificial intelligence (AI)-based campaign called MomVerse for Mother’s Day.

What is the MomVerse, and how did you develop the promotion?
The MomVerse is a concept to create or generate a poem or a song for the amazing moms in your life. That could be your mom, or it could be your sister or a friend or an aunt. You can select who the poem or song is for, and then input the interests or other personal details of their special mom.

MomVerse then outputs the poem or song for you, and the customer gets the opportunity to post it on social media, or copy and paste it into a text, or use the song or poem however they see fit.

The solution is powered by ChatGBT. We thought this was an awesome opportunity to provide a free service, because customers have different budgets that we need to cater to.

What other preparations is 1-800-Flowers.com making for Mother’s Day?
From a volume perspective, Mother’s Day is a very important holiday for us. All the cross-functional teams, like marketing, operations and technology, have to prepare well in advance to make sure that we are creating a seamless, easy, engaging and enjoyable experience for the consumer when they want to shop a holiday occasion.

1-800-Flowers.com is planning to deliver approximately 23 million stems for the holiday. We know what to expect from an order and traffic volume perspective.

Ensuring that our sites are operable and able to handle that traffic is something that we're well-versed in and have been doing for a long time. The process includes things like pressure testing. Making sure that we are on and available for our customers is the number one priority.

From a supply chain perspective, it's not only just about taking the order online, but making sure that an online order is fulfilled at every level and that the customer is satisfied with their complete end-to-end experience.

We have a whole floral network that is managed by a team here that provides a lot of communication and engagement with that community to make sure that we're in sync and working together to fulfill the customer needs.

What does 1-800-Flowers.com do to help maintain consumer interest during your non-peak periods?
We want to provide more and better customer relationships all year long. There are still birthdays and anniversaries. And unfortunately, there are events that happen in your life that are not so happy.

MomVerse is an example of us taking a step to utilize technology to provide customers with a freemium opportunity to connect and engage. Maybe there’s somebody you haven't spoken with in three years, and they popped into your mind, and you want to send them an e-card or create some sort of special message. 1-800-Flowers.com wants to be there for you to connect and engage in those relationships.

Our peak periods revolve around the holiday time periods, but we are being built as a company to help customers with those relationships on an everyday basis.

Are there any other future plans that you can discuss?
We have been embracing live shopping and social shopping in a bigger way with our 2022 acquisition of livestreaming platform Alice's Table. We are focusing on more of the experiential side of the business, whether that's with some opportunities via YouTube videos and presents; or for premium opportunities, such as working with influencers and chefs.

1-800-Flowers.com wants to lean in on more of those experiences and live events to get our customers to really understand the depth and breadth of the offerings that we have from a product perspective. We have a very wide breadth of offerings with 17 brands in our portfolio, ranging from gourmet foods to flowers to candy to experiences.

[Read more: 1-800-Flowers.com acquires corporate gifting platform]