2008 Agora Awardee For Outstanding Achievement in  Entrepreneurship – Medium Scale

DUSTIN B. ANDAYA
Vice President and Marketing Director
Island Rose and Philippine Cut Flower Corporation

“There is nothing like old-fashioned hard work and perseverance!”  These are the words that Dustin Andaya lives by and imparts to whomever he comes across.

Having graduated from De La Salle University with a degree in Marketing, Dustin took on a job in an automobile manufacturing firm.  Earning minimum wage, he worked nights in a TV station for extra income.  He moved on to become a sales agent with a local property developer where he found himself on foot relentlessly knocking on hundreds of doors to close sales.  This experience taught him one of the basic lessons in business and more importantly in life: patience is a virtue.
This paid off quickly as he made it to the position of Sales Manager and eventually Vice President for Marketing and Sales garnering a number of awards and recognitions in the process.  At a young age of 27, he was able to fulfill a life long dream of traveling across Europe on a motorcycle.  During his travels, he managed to earn himself an MBA degree from the Bath School of Management in The United Kingdom. His desire for a life on the road while acquiring his degree was getting more and more difficult until he discovered how use the Internet to manage both his studies and passion simultaneously.

Upon graduating, he came home and applied his experiences to his fathers flower farm.  With his last savings, he founded www.islandrose.net, an Internet based service that allows his potential clients to send flowers anywhere in the Philippines through an online interface.   In the year 2000, e-commerce was an unknown industry in the Philippines and his business concept was met with much skepticism. Despite the challenges and cynicism, he continued to create the first e-commerce retailer to use an efficient nationwide delivery system.

The simplicity of his concept and his marketing sense proved to be the formula to jumpstart wide scale e-commerce retailing in the Philippines. His is approach was adopted by other companies as more consumers turned to the Internet for their shopping needs.

With his slogan “Keeping Relationships Alive,” Island Rose went on to become the largest rose retailer in the country enabling people from all over the world to affordably send farm fresh flowers to their loved ones to the farthest reaches of the Philippines.

Today, Dustin also spends a good part of his time helping other small businesses through talks and lectures.  His message is simple and clear “If a farmer can do it, anyone can do it!”  Hard Work.  Perseverance.

You may want to check these related articles: The Agora Awards – Philippines, E-Commerce is Alive: Island Rose wins an Agora Award.