Rhea Karuturi & Yeshoda Karuturi
Their Company
Hoovu by Rose Bazaar offers packaged puja flowers, disrupting a $1.2 billion traditional flower market. By extending the shelf life from 2-3 days to 15 days and partnering with online and offline grocery platforms, the company eases the process of making fresh flowers available to everyone. Backed by TechStars, the company sells its offerings on Amazon and Big Bazaar. Rose Bazaar has been featured on Money Control, YourStory and Vamcast among others.
Their Journey
Raised on a floriculture farm, Rhea and Yeshoda grew up around conversations on harvest cycles, auction prices and freight rates. They saw how the industry changed from unorganised, fragmented markets to the setting up of the International Flower Auction Bangalore, the first exports of cut roses from Bangalore and the awe-inspiring Kenyan farm, which was the world’s largest rose farm. While first working in the cut flower industry, Rhea and Yeshoda saw first hand the enormous scalability in the industry. Realizing this opportunity, the two were able to partner with farms to reduce the turnaround time to 12-24 hours and extend shelf life from 2x to 5x, something unheard of in the current industry. Rhea and Yeshoda aim to do for puja flowers what they saw happen to cut flowers - a supply chain that works, that adds value to the farmer and the end customer.