Nothing says I love you quite like flowers. But flowers need water, and sending them during Cape Town’s worst drought in 100 years was kind of insensitive. As citizens were limited to just 50L of water per day, Netflorist, South Africa’s biggest online florist, had to act fast. Because as the Cape was drying up, so was business.

Instead of telling people to say it with flowers, Netflorist changed their business, and told them to say it…with a cactus.

We started by revamping the Netflorist website, and switching out all the media to advertise cacti. But after years of tradition, people needed more convincing. So, for every cactus sent, Netflorist donated R10 to the national drought relief fund on their behalf.

As Cape Town dried up, so did Netflorist sales. Firstly, people could not care for flowers with so little water (50l per person a day), and secondly, it felt insensitive and bad for the environment to send them at this time. Netflorist needed to change their business model in order to maintain revenue through this period. So, rather than say it with flowers, Netflorist asked South Africans to help Cape Town out, and say it with a far more water-wise cactus. The second hurdle was to convince people to change their ways after years of tradition, which is why Netflorist said they would donate R10 from every cactus sale to the Cape Town drought relief fund.

We revamped the Netflorist website, changing flower bouquets to an assortment of cacti, and changed all the media to cacti too. We also created media for every occasion, letting people know that whether it was a birthday, baby shower or get well soon, say it with a cactus, and Netflorist will donate R10 to drought relief for each purpose.

And people started to talk about it, sharing the business change on Social Media.

After a period, it started to rain in Cape Town again, removing any chance of Day 0. With that, restrictions loosened up, and so did the campaign - returning to business as normal.

Before long, the cactus had become a new symbol for love and care all over South Africa, and while business should have withered away, sales spiked by 46%

But best of all, hundreds of thousands of Rands were donated to the drought relief fund, and just as we were about to change our name to Netcactus, it rained.