Aron Gelbard: How I built flatpack florist Bloom & Wild

Aron Gelbard isn’t afraid to do grunt work. Early morning visits to London’s New Covent Garden flower market to get a first-hand look at the industry were just part of his research into setting up Bloom & Wild.

Inspired by a college friend who offered snacks online and delivered through the letterbox, Gelbard began to wonder in late 2012 if the same model could work for flowers as well. But there was a major obstacle: sending a bouquet by post is a lot more difficult than small packages of flavored nuts.

“My co-founder and I personally measured thousands of mailboxes across the country to find out what the dimensions should be,” says the CEO.

The solution they came up with was slender packages of flat-packed flowers, which bloom as soon as the recipient arranges them in water.

Since the company’s official inception in February 2013 with employee Ben Stanway, Bloom & Wild has grown to become the UK’s most popular online florist service with sales in excess of £140 million in the year to March 2021.

Like many online sensations, the 40-year-old Gelbard says trying to establish a brand with a loyal following required a change in behavior. Potential customers pay little attention to buying flowers – instead they turn to their favorite search engine instead of a florist.

“People used to type into Google ‘deliver flowers to London’ or whatever, click a few links and hope for the best,” he says.

‘I found that very strange, because we have favorite brands for everything, such as mineral water and cleaning products. This business is about expressing emotions, and I couldn’t understand why people couldn’t even remember which company they bought from.’

For the flower industry as a whole, Valentine’s Day is the biggest holiday on the calendar. For Bloom & Wild, where the most common purchase is for daughters to send flowers to their mother, it’s Mother’s Day.

Gelbard’s business has thrived during the pandemic, when lockdowns and social distancing often prevented people from visiting loved ones and sent more gifts in the mail.

Instead of resting on his laurels, he picked up two European rivals – Amsterdam-based Bloomon and French company Bergamotte – as restrictions began to ease.

Is he worried that the UK, where most of his clients live, is in a recession where households are already cutting back?

“When we get to a time like this where people are tightening their belts and I’m being asked if people are going to stop giving flowers, I’m just looking back over the last 2,000 years of history,” he says.

‘Sending flowers as a gift can be traced back to the ancient Athenians. Back then, different colors symbolized different things and some of those standards still exist today. For example, white flowers are often associated with sympathy.’

More recently, his team has added orchids, succulents and even mini Christmas trees – one of Gelbard’s proud products that, almost unbelievably, also fits through the letterbox. Customer feedback shows that one of the things they love most is arranging the flowers themselves.

The Christmas trees build this in too, complete with packs of decorations to decorate their little branches with. “I have two daughters and they love opening the mini Christmas tree every year and decorating it with me,” he says.

In fact, they flew off the proverbial shelves and helped the company have another great Christmas.

Gelbard comes from a family of entrepreneurs. He says the seed for starting his own business was planted when he worked with e-commerce companies at consulting firm Bain, where he joined after studying languages ​​at Oxford and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

His experience working with online retailers at Bain led him to realize that the best foundation for world domination today lies in building firm roots in technology – as Uber did with taxis and Deliveroo did with takeaways.

Bloom & Wild’s backers include household names in Silicon Valley, including Airbnb investor Index Ventures. That technology has provided Gelbard with a wealth of data and helped it make a £25 million profit in the year to March 2021.

Bloom & Wild now sells flowers in eight countries. But moving to Europe comes at a cost.

Gelbard says the two 2021 acquisitions meant the company made a loss in its most recent fiscal year.

“We are no longer profitable because the companies we acquired in the Netherlands and France were slightly loss-making,” he says.

But he adds: “It made sense to keep investing in growth in Europe rather than staying profitable.”

He expects the company to be back in the black by 2024, adding that there are currently no plans to “plant any more flags” with deals in other countries.

Although he says the company is the online market leader in Europe’s £22 billion floral industry, it still only controls less than one percent of the market. If it wants to grow further, is there an IPO on the horizon? No, he says. Bloom & Wild raised £50 million when it bought Bergamotte, more than enough not to raise again.

Stanway – who left the group in 2015 and later founded savings app Moneybox – initially considered setting up a subscription service, but soon abandoned the idea in favor of gifts.

Add-ons like fancy Prestat chocolates, candles and Cowshed body wash sets, which can be ordered alongside flowers, also sell well. At the other end of the scale to entice money-conscious customers, the company now plans to sell bouquets of flowers in the ‘low £20’ range, compared to its current base price of around £25.

A British competitor, Freddie’s Flowers, has taken a different approach: selling through subscriptions rather than selling ad hoc. Does Gelbard ever think he made the wrong call?

“I will never speak badly of another company,” he says.

“There are many positives to what Freddie’s Flowers do and kudos for that. We just think the opportunity is much higher with gift sending than with subscriptions.

‘Occasions like birthdays are not going away. The number of people who will have to forgo buying £25 or £30 as a gift will be much smaller than the number of people who will have to forego spending £700 on a corridor flower subscription.”