My wife grows dahlias.
She runs a licensed nursery out of our house in Longmont, Colorado — greenhouse, grow spaces, the whole operation, just suburban-scale. If you know a dahlia grower, you know — they’re not “just flowers.” She knows them all by name (Café au Lait, American Dawn, Thomas Edison). She frets over them in the greenhouse. She packs each one like she’s mailing a piece of herself.
She doesn’t ship every day. But when shipping season comes and orders go out, every batch gets the same ritual: weather.com on one screen, Shopify on the other, trying to figure out which packages might hit freezing temperatures somewhere between Longmont and a customer’s front porch.
Our zip code — 45°F, fine. But what about the destination? What about that stretch of highway where it drops 15 degrees overnight?
She’s lost plants in the mail. Did everything right — checked the forecast, packed each one with care, shipped on time. And still, somewhere between our door and someone’s front porch, the cold got to them first. She takes every single one personally.
I’m an engineer. When I see the person I love doing something painful and stressful, and I know technology can fix it — I fix it. Not because it’s a “market opportunity.” Because she cried over dead dahlias and I have the skills to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
So I built TempSureShip. It checks weather at the origin, along the route, and at the destination. It knows whether your packaging can handle the forecast — and when it can’t. It tells you whether to ship, what protection you need, or whether to wait — and it tells you why, in plain words, because “algorithm says no” doesn’t help when you’re staring at a batch of packed orders on a Tuesday morning.
Then I realized she wasn’t alone. Chocolate makers do the same kitchen-table weather check in summer. Wine sellers maintain spreadsheets for insurance documentation. Candle makers wrap every box like it’s July even when it’s 72°F outside. Skincare brands ship everything 2-Day Air because they can’t tell which orders are actually at risk.
They all care deeply about what they ship. None of them should be guessing.
I built it with love for one dahlia grower, but it’s for every merchant who’s ever whispered “please don’t freeze” into a shipping box.