Our Story
If you have found your way here, you probably already know us from Lily's Florist, the flower delivery business we accidentally built from a tiny shop in Kingscliff back in 2006, with a baby on the way and zero knowledge of flowers. If you do not know that story, we wrote the very long version on the Lily's Florist website and it took us a month, so we will spare you the full encore. The short version is: we are Siobhan and Andrew, we run an Australia-wide flower delivery network of 800+ partner florists, we have two kids, Asha who is 19 and Ivy who is 15, and most of our business decisions still happen at the kitchen table or on the drive to netball.
Petal & Parcel is not Lily's Florist. It is something new. But the reason it exists starts with Lily's Florist, and more specifically, with a number that had been staring at us for years.
Not Everyone Who Visits Wants a Bouquet
Here is something we are quietly proud of. The Lily's Florist website converts unusually well for an online store, well above what most shops manage. We are not telling you that to show off. We are telling you because of what it says about everyone else who comes through.
Even so, most people who land on a flower delivery site do not order flowers that day. Every shop ever built works that way, online or on a street corner. Some are comparing prices. Some are only looking. But a real share of them, we slowly worked out, were not the wrong customers at all. They wanted to send something lovely to someone. They just did not want a bouquet.
Andrew had been watching the data for years. We both had. You build a business on Google traffic and you learn to read the numbers, but for a long time we were not doing anything useful with what those particular numbers were telling us.
Fresh flowers have constraints. You need a florist to arrange them, a delivery window, someone home to receive them (or at least a safe spot on the porch), and the whole thing has to happen on the same day because roses do not wait around. We love that product and the model works. But it does not work for everyone who lands on the site. Some people want to send a gift, they do not necessarily need a bouquet, they want something beautiful in a box that arrives safely and does not require a stranger to be standing at the recipient's door at 2pm on a Wednesday.
We knew this. We had known it for ages. But the thing you already run takes up every waking hour, so the new idea just sits there, waiting for a gap in the day that never comes.
When Your Teenager Starts Making Sense
Asha is our eldest, just turned 19. She grew up inside Lily's Florist in every possible way. Born seven months after we bought the Kingscliff shop, she has been in the back of cars during flower deliveries, on the floor of florist shops while we pitched our model, in a carrier at Australia Post while we wheeled in trolleys of packages, and in the background of every conversation about conversion rates and cost per click since before she knew what any of those words meant.
In Year 11 she chose a Diploma of Business. Andrew and I joke about it now but honestly, the shift was almost immediate. She started coming home from school with language that sounded suspiciously like what Andrew and I say over dinner, except with actual frameworks behind it. Target markets. Value propositions. Customer acquisition cost. Except, and this is the part that got under our skin (in a good way, mostly), she started applying all of it to us. Actually, her first major assessment was on how Tesla manages their staff, some 'hat' style, I don't knows something like that, haha, clearly I was listening intently.
A lot of people who come to the site decide fresh flowers are not what they need. What are you doing with all of them?
Asha, at the kitchen table, Term 3, 2025She was relentless about it. Relentless in the way that only an 18-year-old who has just discovered business theory and thinks their parents are leaving money on the table can be. Dinner, the car on the way to netball at Coomera, walking Bindi on the beach, nowhere was safe. She came back from a school assessment where she had literally used Lily's Florist as her case study and had identified the non-converter gap as a strategic opportunity. Her teacher gave her a Band 6. Andrew said he wanted to frame it.
Asha did not invent this idea. We had been circling it for a long time, Andrew and I, the way you circle something you know you should do but cannot find the gap in the day to start. But she forced the conversation. She kept asking the question and we kept not having a good answer for why we had not done anything about it yet. At some point, probably one Tuesday night after dinner, one of us said fine, let's actually do this. We cannot remember which one of us said it. We both claim it. Would we have got here without her? Probably. But not this year.
A Box, Not a Bouquet
The concept was simple, at least on paper. Build a separate brand that sells the kinds of gifts people want to send when a bouquet is not the answer. Dried flower arrangements. Bath and skincare gift packs. Pamper hampers. Candles and botanicals. Things that are beautiful and thoughtful but do not wilt in a delivery van, do not need a florist to build them, and can ship safely in a box from our end to a doorstep anywhere in Australia.
Separate brand, its own website, its own name. We did not badge it as a Lily's Florist spin-off, because the customers and products and buying occasions have almost nothing in common. Lily's Florist is for the person who wants a hand-tied arrangement delivered by a florist today. Petal & Parcel is for the person who wants to send something gorgeous in a gift box and is happy for it to arrive in two to four days via courier.
But it was about more than traffic and conversion rates. We had spent 18 years watching people spend good money on fresh flowers that, honestly, last about a week. Sometimes less in a Queensland summer. There is nothing wrong with that, it is what flowers do, and we built an entire business around it. But we kept hearing from customers, on the phone, in emails, in reviews, some version of "I wish it lasted longer." One of our dried bouquets, The Keeper, we named it that for a reason. It sits on a shelf for a year or more. A candle burns for 40 hours. A pamper hamper gets used over weeks. The gift keeps going long after fresh petals would have hit the bin.
And we wanted to do it properly. Australian made and Australian grown wherever we can get it. Eco-friendly packaging, recyclable, no pointless plastic wrap that gets ripped off and thrown straight in the bin. If that sounds like a company line, keep reading. We have form.
Organic Soap, Baby Bottles, and a Villa Full of Stock
Before Lily's Florist existed, before we had any idea we would end up in flowers, we ran a physical shop in Kingscliff called Down to Earth Organics. Natural skincare, eco-friendly gifts, wholefoods, and eventually baby products. This was 2006, 2007. The organic market was not mainstream yet, it was still the aisle in the health food shop that smelled a bit earthy and cost twice as much, and half the people walking into our store had never bought a natural product in their lives. We believed in it though, genuinely, we were using the stuff ourselves and had been since before Asha was born.
We built a website for the shop and started selling online, which in 2007 felt about as futuristic as it sounds now. Nobody we knew was doing ecommerce from a small town on the Tweed Coast. But it worked, slowly at first, and it taught us everything we know about selling products online. SEO, product descriptions, packaging, shipping, customer service through a screen instead of a counter. All of it learned from that poky little shop.
Then the BPA scare hit. We were catching up with an old school friend of Andrew's (Dave) and his wife Geneva mentioned that American parenting forums were in meltdown over BPA in baby bottles and toys, and that the panic was about to arrive in Australia. We had a shop full of the stuff, a website we could add to, and the internet marketing skills we had been building for two years. That afternoon we registered baby-bottles.com.au and started building. Four weeks later, we had a standalone website stocked with every BPA-free product we could source in the country. We were the only dedicated supplier in Australia at the time.
It went berserk. The American panic crossed the Pacific faster than we expected, forums lit up, the news picked it up, and every parent in the country started Googling BPA-free baby bottles at the same time. Our little site ranked number one for just about every search term you could think of. We were featured on the Today Show, Today Tonight, and half the parenting blogs in the country. We could not pack fast enough. As quick as we packed 20 parcels, 50 more orders landed. Our two-storey villa in Casuarina filled to the ceiling, spare bedroom, living area, all of it. The local post office owner must have thought we were running a warehouse. Andrew wheeling a Woolworths trolley through the post office door multiple times a day was not something that happened in Casuarina in 2009.
The money from that baby products frenzy is what funded the early growth of Lily's Florist. Without it, we could not have built the flower websites for our first partner florists. So in a weird way, BPA-free baby bottles paid for an Australia-wide flower delivery network. Life is strange like that.
We sold the organic and baby product businesses in 2010 to go all in on flowers, and we have not regretted it. But we never stopped caring about the things that made Down to Earth Organics what it was. Source properly. Know what is in the product. Use packaging that does not make you feel guilty the moment it hits the bin. Stock Australian made where it exists. Those were our rules in 2006 in a tiny shop on the main street of Kingscliff, and they are the same rules we apply to every product on this site now, almost 20 years later.
In 2009, Asha was a baby. We were packing BPA-free baby bottles at 1AM in our villa, terrified the tape gun would wake her up. That noise, if you have ever used a packing tape dispenser at midnight you know the one, it haunted us for years. Asha still jokes about it even though she cannot possibly remember. She is 19 now. We are packing gift boxes in the same Pottsville garage. Same tape gun noise. Same 11PM starts when a batch needs to go out. Except now the baby is the one telling us our packaging needs to be more sustainable and our Instagram grid is inconsistent.
The name came quickly, which almost never happens for us. We are historically terrible at naming things (Down to Earth Organics, baby-bottles.com.au, Kingscliff Florist, I mean come on). Petal & Parcel just landed and stuck. Siobhan liked that it sounded like an actual shop you might walk into on a high street. Andrew liked that it was two words and a domain was available. Asha liked it because she said "it sounds like something people my age would buy from." Sold.
No partner florists. We pack and ship every order ourselves. The dried flowers, the gift packs, the bath products, all of it comes from our hands into the box and into the post. This is not a network model like Lily's Florist. This is a product business. We make it, we wrap it, we send it. If the ribbon is wonky, that is on us.
We Start the Way We Always Have
We have built two businesses before this one, and both grew the same way. Not from a standing start with a marketing budget, but by making something worth finding and then being easy to find. Lily's Florist grew on Google rankings, on content, on people landing on the site and deciding we were worth a try. Baby-bottles.com.au was the same story. The right product at the right moment, number one in Google within weeks.
Petal & Parcel begins from a better spot than either of those did, because this time we are not starting cold. We have eighteen years of customers who know what it is like to be looked after by us. So that is where we are starting. Telling the people who already trust Lily's Florist that we have made something new, maybe with a small card tucked in alongside their flowers, and letting it grow from there. We may well lean on other channels as we go. For now the plan is the one we trust most: do good work and let it travel.
Andrew built the Shopify store. He handles everything on the digital side, always has, always will, probably. Siobhan curates the products and writes every description. The look and feel of the brand is hers. Asha runs the socials and weighs in on everything else, usually while eating toast.
Still at the Kitchen Table
We are not going to pretend this is bigger than it is. Petal & Parcel launched in 2026 and we are still in the early days, the part where everything is new and slightly terrifying and exciting in equal measure. If you have read the Lily's Florist About Us, you know that feeling is familiar to us. We had it when we bought the Kingscliff shop with no experience. The villa in Casuarina filling to the ceiling with stock gave us the same feeling. And driving to Murwillumbah with Asha in the back seat to pitch our first partner florist, that was the worst of the lot. We seem to seek it out.
We chose every product on this site the same way we used to choose stock for the Kingscliff shop in 2006. Does it do something specific? Is it well made? Would we give it to someone we actually like? If the answer to any of those is no, it does not go in the box. We learned years ago what happens when you stock things just because they look good on a shelf. You end up explaining to customers why the soap smells like a candle factory having a bad day.
Asha just turned 19 and started university this year, studying primary and secondary education. She wants to teach, the way Siobhan's parents Bill and Julie did. In between lectures and assignments she runs the Petal & Parcel socials and brings everything she picked up from her Business Studies diploma to whatever we are arguing about that week. Pricing, positioning, what to post and when. Most of her opinions are annoyingly well reasoned. Ivy is 15 and still thinks the whole thing is boring unless it involves the dog or her phone. Bindi the dog supervises packing from her bed in the corner.
We are still a Mum and Dad business. Just with slightly more grey hair, a new brand, and a teenager who was right.
Thank you for being here, especially this early. We have no idea where this goes. But then again, we had no idea where a daggy florist shop in Kingscliff would go either, and that turned out alright.
Siobhan, Andrew & Asha