Our Story: From Florist.com to LaLa Tacos

LaLa Tacos is a family-operated Southern California taco catering company built from two very different histories: family food traditions rooted in Durango, Mexico, and decades of business experience that began long before we catered our first event.

For founder Aron J. Benon, the road from flowers to taco catering was never planned. But the businesses share more in common than it might appear: recognizing opportunities, understanding what matters to customers, continually improving the business, and respecting the responsibility that comes with being part of important moments in people's lives.

Before Florist.com

Before e-commerce became part of everyday life, Aron owned Floral & Hardy, a successful Southern California flower business with locations in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, and Encino.

Over the years, Floral & Hardy served thousands of individual and corporate customers, including well-known clients such as Michael Douglas, Magic Johnson, Ringo Starr, and Eli Broad.

But regardless of who placed the order, Aron understood something important about the flower business: flowers are rarely just flowers.

They celebrate newborn children, birthdays, weddings, milestone anniversaries, corporate achievements, and some of life's happiest occasions. They also help people express sympathy and say goodbye after someone they love has died.

What might have been one order among hundreds to the business could represent one of the most important moments in the customer's life.

That philosophy stayed with Aron long after he left the flower industry.

The Order From France That Changed Everything

In the late 1990s, Aron started noticing something unusual appearing at the end of television commercials. Technology companies were beginning to display website addresses such as www.ibm.com.

AOL, EarthLink, Yahoo, and other early internet companies were becoming familiar names, but online shopping was still in its infancy. Aron knew virtually nothing about building a website, but he became convinced that the internet was going to matter and decided Floral & Hardy needed to be online.

He found one of the early website-development companies and arranged to have FloralAndHardy.com built. That immediately created another problem: how would anyone find it?

There were very few places to advertise online at the time. Yahoo was known for its directories and shopping categories, so Aron arranged for Floral & Hardy to appear in Yahoo's flower-shopping section.

Then, around 3:00 one Friday afternoon, a printer connected to the computer at Floral & Hardy's Los Angeles location printed the company's first online order.

The customer was in France.

Aron was excited, but instead of simply celebrating the order, he called the customer and asked a question:

How did you find us?

The customer told Aron that he had typed Florist.com into his browser.

At the time, Florist.com redirected visitors into Yahoo's flower-shopping area, where the customer ultimately found Floral & Hardy.

That phone call changed everything.

The Monday Morning Phone Call

That Friday evening, Aron researched who owned Florist.com and discovered that the domain belonged to a small internet service provider in Michigan.

He told his wife that he planned to call first thing Monday morning and that if he could somehow acquire Florist.com, he believed it could change their lives.

At approximately 6:00 Monday morning California time, Aron called Michigan. A man named Mike Flaherty answered the telephone.

Aron explained exactly what had happened with the customer in France. Before Aron even asked whether the domain might be available, Flaherty asked if he wanted to buy Florist.com.

Aron had no budget set aside for purchasing an internet domain. When Flaherty started to tell him the price, Aron thought he was about to hear $50,000.

The price was $15,000.

Aron agreed.

When he said he could get the money together within about a week, Flaherty offered an even simpler arrangement: pay $1,000 per month until the balance was paid.

Aron had acquired Florist.com.

From Online Directory to E-Commerce

Purchasing the domain was only the beginning.

Aron recruited a developer he had gotten to know through the original website project, and for several months they worked together from Aron's home building Florist.com.

The original plan wasn't an online flower store. It was a directory.

Internet directories were a major part of the web at the time, so Aron sold approximately 20 advertising positions to florists and launched the site.

Then something unexpected happened: approximately six flower orders arrived on the first day.

The market had just given Aron a different answer.

He contacted the advertisers, apologized, and explained that Florist.com was going in another direction. The directory concept was abandoned, and the site was rebuilt as an e-commerce company.

Florist.com Gets Noticed

Florist.com grew during an era when many internet companies were raising enormous amounts of venture capital and spending heavily in pursuit of growth.

Aron took a different approach. Florist.com concentrated on becoming profitable, developing strong customer relationships, controlling costs, and finding efficient ways to grow.

The story attracted the attention of the business press.

The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, and BusinessWeek all wrote about Aron J. Benon and Florist.com.

They weren't covering Florist.com because the company had invented a clever slogan. They were interested in how the business had actually been discovered, built, and grown.

The Wall Street Journal later reported that Florist.com had grown annual sales from approximately $247,000 to $3.8 million while spending very little on traditional advertising.

In 2005, Aron sold Florist.com for $9.75 million.

How LaLa Tacos Really Started

Years later, the idea for another business came from much closer to home.

Celina and one of Aron and Celina's sons wanted to start a catering business.

Aron didn't immediately say yes. He said he wanted to do his due diligence first.

That decision started approximately three weeks of research into the Southern California catering industry. Aron looked at traditional catering companies and also began contacting taco caterers throughout Southern California as though he were a prospective customer.

He eventually secret-shopped roughly 35 taco catering companies.

The results surprised him.

Approximately three-quarters never responded. Many of the companies that did reply took more than 72 hours and provided very little information to help a prospective customer understand the service or confidently make a decision.

Traditional catering companies performed somewhat better, but Aron saw many of the same weaknesses.

The research convinced him there was an opportunity.

Not because Southern California needed someone to invent better tacos. There were already plenty of talented people making excellent food.

What Aron saw was an opportunity to build a taco catering company with stronger communication, better follow-up, clearer information, better technology, reliable systems, and the kind of business discipline customers should expect when planning an important event.

That due diligence became the beginning of LaLa Tacos.

Our Culinary Roots Begin in Durango, Mexico

While Aron's business experience influenced how LaLa Tacos would operate, the food has a completely different history.

Celina's father operated taco stands in Durango, Mexico, and many of the recipes and flavors served by LaLa Tacos today were inspired by those family traditions.

That distinction is important to our story.

Aron didn't enter the catering business believing he had discovered Mexican food. The food already had authentic family roots.

The opportunity was to bring those traditions together with a professionally operated Southern California taco catering company capable of serving everything from family celebrations to large weddings and corporate events.

From Corporate Flowers to Corporate Taco Catering

There is another connection between the two businesses.

Floral & Hardy and Florist.com served both individual customers and companies. Corporate clients relied on the businesses for flowers celebrating employee milestones, client relationships, events, achievements, and important occasions.

Decades later, Aron found himself serving many of those same types of customers in an entirely different way.

Flowers had become tacos.

Today, corporate taco catering is an important part of LaLa Tacos, serving companies and organizations throughout Southern California.

The product changed, but many of the business principles remained familiar: understand what the customer needs, communicate clearly, arrive prepared, execute reliably, and continually improve the operation behind the service.

Wedding Catering and More Than 950 Weddings

Today, LaLa Tacos has catered more than 950 weddings, making wedding taco catering one of the most important parts of the company.

Couples throughout Southern California choose LaLa Tacos for wedding receptions, rehearsal dinners, and other wedding celebrations ranging from intimate gatherings to large events.

LaLa Tacos also provides corporate taco catering, private-event catering, birthday catering, celebrations of life, military-event catering, staffed taco bars, delivery catering, and on-site taco catering.

Based in Temecula, California, LaLa Tacos serves customers throughout Riverside County, Orange County, San Diego County, Los Angeles County, the Coachella Valley, and other Southern California communities.

Temecula Catering Built for Southern California Events

From its Temecula base, LaLa Tacos has grown into an operation capable of handling events throughout Southern California.

The company has invested in custom-designed taco carts, specialized catering equipment, technology, expanded menus, and systems designed to make planning and executing events easier for customers.

LaLa Tacos has also catered events at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, including work performed under an authorized catering contract.

Whether LaLa is providing wedding catering, corporate taco catering, a private celebration, or catering for a large military event, we believe great food is only part of the job.

Communication matters. Preparation matters. Timing matters. Equipment matters. Staffing matters.

And doing what you told the customer you were going to do matters.

Important Moments, All Over Again

There is one part of Aron's story he never expected to repeat.

At Florist.com, customers trusted the company with flowers connected to some of the most important events in their lives: newborn children, weddings, milestone anniversaries, birthdays, corporate achievements, and final goodbyes.

Decades later, LaLa Tacos finds itself invited into many of those same moments.

Today it may be wedding catering for a couple celebrating one of the biggest days of their lives. It may be corporate taco catering for a company celebrating an important achievement. It may be a first birthday, a 50th anniversary, a retirement, a military celebration, or a celebration of life bringing a family together after someone they love has died.

The product changed completely.

The responsibility did not.

An event may be one of several on LaLa Tacos' calendar that weekend. For the customer, it may be a day they have been planning for a year and will remember for the rest of their life.

We never want to lose sight of that difference.

A Family-Operated Southern California Catering Company

Today, Aron and Celina remain actively involved in LaLa Tacos.

The company has grown considerably, but it remains a hands-on family-operated business supported by a team responsible for coordinating, preparing, delivering, and catering events throughout Southern California.

The culinary traditions from Celina's family in Durango and the business principles Aron developed over decades of entrepreneurship have come together in a company that continues to evolve.

We continue looking for better technology, better equipment, better menus, better communication, better systems, and better ways to make an important event easier for the person responsible for planning it.

Earlier Career & Media Coverage

Aron J. Benon and Florist.com were featured by major publications during the early growth of internet commerce.

Los Angeles Times
“Online Florist Lets Relationships Blossom Into Business” — September 2000
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-sep-20-fi-23849-story.html

The Los Angeles Times published an extensive profile of Aron and Florist.com covering the company's approach to online retail, customer relationships, operations, and growth.

The Wall Street Journal
“Domain Blossoms” — April 2001
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB987539678189748562

The Wall Street Journal profiled Aron J. Benon and Florist.com, including the company's growth and its approach to building a profitable online business with very little traditional advertising.

BusinessWeek
2001 — BusinessWeek article reprint
https://www.dqindia.com/indian-high-tech-somehow-it-all-clicks/

BusinessWeek featured Aron and Florist.com in its coverage of profitable internet businesses it described as the “mighty mini-dots”, companies succeeding without the enormous venture-capital spending that characterized much of the dot-com era.

Recognize the Opportunity. Then Go After It.

One lesson Aron has carried from one business to another is that opportunities don't always drop into your lap.

You have to pay attention, ask questions, investigate what you don't understand, and recognize something other people may have overlooked.

Then, when you believe you've found a genuine opportunity, you have to be willing to go after it.

One phone call to a customer in France ultimately led Aron to Florist.com.

Years later, Celina and their son's idea of starting a catering business led Aron to conduct three weeks of due diligence, uncover a gap in the market, and help build LaLa Tacos.

Flowers and tacos could hardly be more different.

But the philosophy behind the businesses remains remarkably similar:

Take the customer seriously. Recognize the opportunity. Keep improving the business. And when someone trusts you with an important moment in their life, treat it like one.