Shark Tank passed on his company. Now John Tabis is trying to disrupt the flower industry, one bouquet at a time

John Tabis, 40, is chief executive and co-founder of the Bouqs Co., and he’s trying to change the way we buy flowers. The Venice company sells blooms directly to consumers, eliminating several layers of middlemen. Tabis works closely with his Ecuador-based co-founder Juan Pablo Montúfar, a fellow graduate of the University of Notre Dame. In 2012, the year Bouqs was founded, the company had revenue of less than $1 million. Five years later, Tabis said, “we had several days in 2017 where we sold more than $1 million in flowers in a day.”