Stop...And Sell the Flowers

When Pim Bouwman's friends learned that he was leaving his lucrative post at Arthur Andersen Business Consulting in Amsterdam during the billing boom of 1999, they thought he was nuts. How could you turn your back on all of that money? Then, when they heard that he planned to launch an Internet-based flower-bulb business during the dotcom implosion of 2000, they feared that he was downright self-destructive. How could you start that kind of business now?

(No one, of course, could have predicted that Andersen itself would implode a few years later.) "They said, 'I hope this is a joke,' " recalls TulipWorld cofounder Bouwman, whose spiky hair and faded cords make him look more like a Seattle grunge rocker than like a man packing a corporate AmEx. Even his wife, Marilieke, was a skeptic.

But where others saw only discredited business models and risky personal choices, Bouwman saw genuine business potential -- and a welcome dose of sanity. He was eager to get off of the airplanes and out of the conference rooms. He yearned for a chance to take what he had learned in consulting and build his own company. And besides, he wanted a life.

Bouwman, who had been in charge of change management at the firm, and his friend Olivier Meltzer, who had headed one of the strategy and finance groups for the firm's consulting wing, had been on the fast track, pulling down big salaries and supervising high-prestige projects. But the professional grind -- the long hours, the relentless pressure, the constant travel -- was wearing thin. They had wistfully spoken of quitting, of doing something together, but progress always intervened. "Every time I'd think of leaving, I'd get a promotion," Bouwman quips.

On a shared vacation in Tuscany in 1999, they watched the old men of the village gather for coffee. They compared their lighthearted demeanor with that of the burnt-out senior partners at their own firm. Marilieke's pregnancy was the spur that Bouwman needed to finally step away. Says Bouwman: "I felt that if you have kids, then you should really have them, and not just see them sleeping in bed and maybe a bit on the weekends while reading your email."

Meltzer, who is single, wasn't worried about raising kids. But he had his own reasons for leaving. "I was just tired," he says. "I had gotten to the point where I felt like I was rowing against the stream." Plus, the traditional consultant's role -- dropping in on a project, offering recommendations, moving on -- was becoming more frustrating. "It took so much energy, and it was so difficult to make a difference," he recalls, wearily. For both consultants, it was time to take the leap -- with or without a net.

Flower Power

Leaving Arthur Andersen was exhilarating at first: Anything seemed possible. But from a thousand ideas spawned in the Tuscan sun, none seemed just right. Then, one night in a bar, a friend suggested to Meltzer that he look at how classic Dutch products were being marketed around the world. At least on the Net, she said, the presentation of Dutch goods was lousy.

Intrigued, Bouwman and Meltzer, along with a third partner, Paul Duurland, began investigating. They found sites offering wooden shoes, cheese, windmills, chocolates, stroopwafels, and Delft china. But the most interesting possibility involved the quintessential Dutch product: flower bulbs. Every year, the Netherlands exports about 7 billion bulbs, worth roughly $750 million. American gardeners buy more than $340 million worth of Dutch bulbs a year, making them the world's top market for imported bulbs, particularly those destined for home gardens.

While daffodils and hyacinths have their fans, tulips are, by far, the most popular flower. Indeed, they have been generating irrational exuberance among grown men, at regular intervals, for centuries. During the height of the Ottoman Empire, in 1520, Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent venerated the flower, insisting that his underwear be embroidered with tulips and that gold tulips set with precious stones adorn his battle helmet.

In 1637, the Dutch themselves were so mad for tulips that one bulb -- a purple-flamed beauty called Violetten Admirael van Enkhuizen -- sold for 5,200 guilders. (The average wage for a Dutch carpenter that year was about 250 guilders.) Five years later, Rembrandt sold his greatest masterpiece, The Night Watch, for 1,600 guilders.

By mid-1999, tulip mania had surfaced again -- this time in the United States -- as a cliché of the frenzied Internet era. Few pundits could resist comparing high dotcom stock prices to the historic craze for fancy flowers. And, in a weird twist of Internet-gardening alchemy, the updated cliché reignited an interest in the original phenomenon: There was a flurry of books on tulip fever, and a Spielberg movie is likely later this year.