Have you thought enough about the correlation between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction? Meenakshi Lala, CEO of premium online floral company UrbanStems, posed this question to the audience during the 2025 Women in Retail On the Road: New York City event, held Oct. 28.

Lala spoke about how she empowers her teams to be decision-makers and execute on their ideas. She sees a throughline from employee trust and ownership to authentic customer satisfaction.

“Delivering happiness doesn’t start with customers; it ends with them. It starts with the employees, the teams … that are making it happen,” Lala told the audience.

Lala shared an example of how UrbanStems’ supply chain and product teams developed a solution that improved customer satisfaction rates by 50 percent in just a few months.

“No farm in the world could have driven that metric. It was empowering the internal team to exercise what they believed was the right approach.”

Women in Retail Leadership Circle members can view Lala’s full presentation here as well as session recordings from all previous On the Road events here.