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CIW Stories: Steven Dyme’s Flowers For Dreams Becomes a Reality

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Flowers For Dreams was, quite literally, a dream—a “pipe dream,” as Steven Dyme puts it—when Dyme walked into CIW 2011’s Social Entrepreneurship Talk. What he heard from stage made him realize that the vision he had for a flower company with a social bent was more than possible.

Dyme’s reasoning? Warby Parker, and the eyeglass company’s policy of providing its wares at “fair and honest prices.” Seeing Warby Parker’s Co-Founder and Co-CEO Dave Gilboa on stage was “validation for us that…there wasn’t just Toms” in the socially responsible business space, Dyme said.

In the spring of 2012, Dyme entered that market with Flowers For Dreams, a same-day delivery service for locally crafted, organic flowers. Layered on top of that is the social good twist: Each purchase of a $35 bouquet benefits a local charity. Over the past two years, the company has donated over $100,000 to charities ranging from the Boys & Girls Clubs of Chicago to Moneythink to RefugeeOne.

Since 2011, Dyme has become more integrated into CIW’s Community of Curiosity. This year, as a member of the CIW Co-op, Dyme gained inspiration from fellow members, including Experience Institute Founder Victor Saad, and has re-connected with other Chicagoans who are reshaping and rethinking traditional business models, like WeDeliver’s Jimmy Odom.

And what does Dyme see as Flower for Dreams’ next step? Expansion, of course, with the hopes of moving beyond Chicago.

Erin Robertson is managing editor at Chicago Ideas.

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