She loves me? She loves me not? She loves me! Apparently, plenty of Provide Commerce (NASDAQ:PRVD) customers are wild about their mothers, as the company saw a 37.5% spike in Mother's Day orders at its flagship ProFlowers.com website.
The online floral specialist is even raising its current quarter's profit projections slightly as a result of the stronger-than-expected holiday. Provide Commerce, a recommendation of our Rule Breakers newsletter service, is now looking to earn between $0.53 and $0.56 a share this fiscal year, which ends next month.
The company, which specializes in consumer-direct shipments of perishable products like flowers, meats, and fruit baskets, has been all over the map lately. Two weeks ago, the stock got plucked when the company announced that it would be earning as little as $0.52 a share in fiscal 2005. Earlier in the year, the company's guidance had it earning between $0.62 and $0.64 a share, so the revised projections are good news. Since the April 29 slide, the stock has bounced back, running up by better than 20%.
What's really impressive here is the 770,000 orders that the company processed for Mother's Day this past weekend vs. its showing three months earlier. Back then, the company issued a press release boasting of a record number of Valentine's Day orders. Those 520,000 orders translated into just a 27% improvement from the lovers' holiday in 2004, compared to the Mother's Day surge of 37.5%. It's refreshing news that Provide Commerce's growth during seasonally potent holidays is accelerating.
Granted, the company has been spending quite a bit to get noticed. That's why earnings were pruned back last month. Beyond the many ProFlowers.com ads you may have seen online, Provide has relationships with companies like Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN), Martha Stewart Living (NYSE:MSO), and Home Depot (NYSE:HD).
Provide's rivals in floriculture, like 1-800-Flowers (NASDAQ:FLWS) and FTD.com (NYSE:FTD) -- both of whom cater mostly to the traditional floral arrangement market -- have been posting less-than-impressive results. In contrast, Provide remains as a spunky player taking a wrecking ball to conventional wisdom.
Some other pretty floral arrangements:
- On April 29, Provide Commerce did see its shares wilt.
- Rival 1-800-Flowers also provided a rather lackluster quarterly report last month.
- Come and see what else the Rule Breakers team is unearthing these days.
Longtime Fool contributor Rick Munarriz has been a Provide Commerce customer recently, but he does not own shares in any of the companies mentioned in this story. The Fool has a disclosure policy. He is also part of the Rule Breakers newsletter research team, seeking out tomorrow's ultimate growth stocks a day early.
