Profile

1-800-Flowers.com, Inc. is a floral and gourmet foods gift retailer and distribution company in the United States. It was one of the first retailers to use a 24/7 toll-free telephone number, then the Internet, and then conversational commerce via chat/chatbots for direct sales to consumers[citation needed]. The concept of using the word "flowers" within a Phoneword was originated by William Alexander in the early 1980s. The phone number, 1-800-356-9377, had been randomly assigned to a trucking brokerage in Wisconsin owned by Curtis Jahn and was used for that company until 1981. In an agreement with Jahn that would later be sharply contested, Granville Semmes and David Snow formed a Louisiana corporation that began to use that number to sell flowers in Louisiana, starting in 1982. The use of the number would trigger a series of lawsuits. Their business struggled and that company was dissolved, with its assets going to investors James Poage and John Davis of Texas. The new corporation struggled financially as well. Its assets were acquired in 1986 by Jim McCann, an owner of several flower shops in the New York City area since 1976, under whom the business saw success and growth.