As Bloom & Wild celebrates a 100 per cent year-on-year jump in Father’s Day gifting growth, Aron Gelbard stresses that it isn’t “a big gesture” brand and now has a product range for all the small moments.
Founded in 2013, Bloom & Wild has flourished. Over 30 million letterbox flowers have been delivered by the ecommerce business that cared enough to measure letterboxes.
Only three years after its inception, Bloom & Wild expanded its offering to include tiny Christmas trees. This “felt like a natural extension from flowers, they are a horticultural product”, says Gelbard, co-founder and CEO. It has since gone on to launch pampering products; food and drink gifts; as well as hampers and gift sets.
“Ultimately, we want to be people’s trusted destination when they want to care wildly for somebody that’s important to them at an important time,” explains Gelbard. “That’s really why we exist, and have done since the beginning. Maybe every company would say that, but we genuinely think that we go to extraordinary lengths to earn that trust from our customers, and to be able to express that care on their behalf.”
For certain shoppers, and certain occasions, flowers may not be the right way to show such care. Bloom & Wild have therefore been organically growing into new gifting categories. Gelbard notes that Father’s Day is a great example.
These curated gifts account for “the fastest-growing part of the business”. A huge amount of work has gone into ensuring the gifting segment is “thoughtfully positioned” for Bloom & Wild’s loyal customers.
“We work with carefully selected private label manufacturers who we work closely with to design and create products that we then brand as Bloom & Wild” explains Gelbard. “Where we work with third-party brands, we want them to have a similar ethos to Bloom & Wild. We want them to feel artisanal. We also look at sustainability credentials. We partner with fellow B Corp brands.”
Good for customers, and business
Sourcing the right products for their customers is never more important than during the big gifting events – Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Christmas. Ensuring delivery of these hand-picked products has never been more curial.
Gelbard warns: “A lot of companies will just take all of their orders to the final day. Then some percentage of them won’t arrive, because carriers may let you down. They’ll just wait for customers to complain afterwards, and then say, ‘Sorry,’ and ‘here’s a refund,’. We think we can do better than that.”
Bloom & Wild are transparent with customers, encouraging them to not leave orders to that final day, and even consider timings: “Eight PM on 14 February, if your Valentine’s gift hasn’t arrived, the effect is quite diminished by then.”
Being proactive during peak events can mean sending a replacement before a customer even complains. “This is great for customers. It’s also good business sense because we’re going to incur that cost anyway when the customer complains. Instead, we’re going to wow a customer rather than leave the customer satisfied with their refund, but disappointed.
“We try to challenge this notion of it’s either good for the customer or good for the business, rather how can we make it both.”
Customers of tomorrow
Ensuring a positive customer experience at any time of the year has always been a key focus for Bloom & Wild, as 40 per cent of its customers discover the brand by initially being a recipient.
Gelbard says: “We have this loop of women primarily sending flowers to other women, and then those recipients becoming customers of tomorrow.”
As primarily a female-to-female gifting company, Bloom & Wild has witnesses senders looking for gifts as little acts of kindness. It may be school mums, colleagues clubbing together, the “sorry you’re have a tough week” package for a friend.
“This has really translated into the non-flowery gifting where because that’s how Bloom & Wild is perceived, we see these small moments being really central.”
Growing into new categories has allowed Bloom & Wild to “drive female-to-male gifting more”, and “from a business perspective, it’s incremental”. Through not just offering flowers, but also cheese scones, brownies, pies and even ‘pubs in a box’, the ecommerce brand has introduced new recipients.
Over Father’s Day, 56 per cent of its non-flower gifts went to male recipients: “Female recipients are still high even though it was Father’s Day” Gelbard notes. “This speaks to the strength of the underlying gifting business during these occasions.”
No tech for tech sake
While Bloom & Wild are passionate about future customers, and their existing ones, they are taking a considered approach to Agentic Commerce and AI-powered retail tools. This is perhaps as they have had “tech-focused” beginning, backed by technology venture capital firms.
“We’ve built all of our technology and data platform ourselves, from the bottom up. And we’ve been working with machine learning algorithms well before AI was the focus of the workplace that it is now,” says Gelbard.
He is excited to introduce new technologies which will help them serve their customers better. This includes an generative AI-powered search tool designed to provide customers with more helpful results, more accurately and quicker than a “traditional, deterministic search method”.
Bloom & Wild have yet to move towards agentic commerce as their customer research has shown they don’t want it for the time being. He says: “People are not just buying something for themself, when they’re buying they want to express some care, they want to craft a message, they want to choose a card and browse a range of options. They want to think about their add-on, they want to configure the delivery date.
“The questions that we’re asking people are the sort of questions that an agent would ask anyway, and the feedback we’ve had from customers is forcing them into a more agentic journey feels like AI for the sake of it. We will continue to monitor what customer expectations are, and if that changes, then we’ll build it. But we’re really conscious of finding this balance between where is the application of AI useful for customers, and where is application of AI not what customers want.”
He concludes that Bloom & Wild will constantly navigate AI considers, and technology solutions more widely as “to blanket reject AI, doesn’t make sense as a customer-first business, because a lot of its applications enable us to ultimately serve customers better.”
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