Ebullient boss of flatpack florist Bloom & Wild

Aron Gelbard isn’t afraid of doing grunt work. Crack-of-dawn visits to London’s New Covent Garden flower market to watch the industry first-hand were only part of his research setting up Bloom & Wild. 

Inspired by a university friend who was offering snacks online, and delivering through the letterbox, Gelbard began wondering in late 2012 if the same model could work for flowers. But there was a major obstacle: sending a bouquet through the post is a lot harder than small packs of flavoured nuts. 

‘My co-founder and I personally measured thousands of letterboxes around the country to figure out what the dimensions should be,’ the chief executive says. 

The solution they came up with was slim packages containing flat-packed flowers, which bloom once the recipient arranges them in water. 

Since setting up the company officially in February 2013 with collaborator Ben Stanway, Bloom & Wild has become the UK’s most popular online floristry service with sales of more than £140million in the year to March 2021. 

Like many online sensations, Gelbard, 40, says trying to establish a brand with a loyal following required a shift in behaviour. Potential customers put very little thought into buying flowers – instead turning to their favourite search engine rather than a florist.

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

‘I found that really weird because we have favourite brands for all sorts of things like mineral water and cleaning products. This business is about expressing emotions, and it didn’t make sense to me that people couldn’t even remember which company they were buying from.’ 

For the flower industry as a whole, Valentine’s Day is the biggest holiday in the calendar. For Bloom & Wild, however – where the most common purchase is daughters sending flowers to their mums – it is Mother’s Day. 

Gelbard’s business boomed during the pandemic when lockdowns and social distancing meant people often couldn’t visit their loved ones and sent more gifts through the post. 

Rather than resting on his laurels, he has snapped up two European rivals – Amsterdam-based Bloomon and French firm Bergamotte – as restrictions began to recede. 

Does he worry that the UK, where most of its customers live, is in a downturn already seeing households cut back on spending? 

‘When we get into a time like this, when people are tightening their belts and I’m asked about whether people are going to stop giving flowers, I just look back at the last 2,000 plus years of history,’ he says. 

‘You can trace sending flowers as gifts back to the ancient Athenians. Already back then different colours symbolised different things and some of those norms still exist today. White flowers are often associated with sympathy, for example.’ 

Cool: Even the mini-Christmas tree can fit through letterboxes

More recently his team have added orchids, succulents and even mini-Christmas trees – one of Gelbard’s pride-and-joy products that, almost unbelievably, also fit through letterboxes. Customer feedback suggests one of the things they love most is arranging the flowers themselves. 

The Christmas trees build this in too, coming complete with packs of decorations with which to festoon their tiny branches. ‘I’ve got two daughters and they love opening the mini-Christmas tree each year and decorating it with me,’ he says. 

Even better, they have flown off the proverbial shelves and helped the company have another bumper Christmas. 

Gelbard comes from a family of entrepreneurs. He says the seed for starting his own company was planted when working with e-commerce firms at consultancy Bain, which he joined after studying languages at Oxford and doing an MBA at Harvard Business School. 

His experience working with online retailers at Bain drove an awareness that the best foundations for world domination these days are in building firm roots in technology – as Uber did with taxis and Deliveroo did with takeaways. 

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

Bloom & Wild now sells flowers in eight countries. But the moves into Europe have come at a cost. 

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

‘We stopped being profitable because the businesses we acquired in the Netherlands and France were slightly lossmaking,’ he says. 

But he adds: ‘It made sense to continue to invest in growth in Europe rather than remain profitable.’ 

He expects the company to be back in the black by 2024 and adds there are no current plans to ‘plant further flags’ with deals in other countries. 

Although he says the company is the online market leader in Europe’s £22billion flower industry, it still only has less than one per cent of the market. If it wants to grow further, is a stock exchange float on the horizon? No, he says. Bloom & Wild raised £50million at the time it bought Bergamotte, giving it more than enough not to raise more.

Stanway – who left the group in 2015 and later founded the savings app Moneybox – initially envisaged setting up a subscription service, but quickly abandoned that idea in favour of gifts. 

Add-ons such as posh Prestat chocolates, candles and Cowshed body wash sets, which can be ordered alongside flowers, are also selling well. At the other end of the scale to entice cash-conscious customers, the company is now planning to sell bouquets of flowers in the ‘low £20s’ range, compared with its current base price of about £25. 

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

‘I’ll never talk badly about another business,’ he says. 

‘There are a lot of positives about what Freddie’s Flowers do and kudos to them for that. We just think the opportunity is far, far bigger in sending gifts than subscriptions. 

‘Occasions like birthdays don’t go away. The number of people who will have to forgo buying them as a present for £25 or £30 is going to be far fewer than the number of people who will have to forgo spending £700 for a flower subscription for the hallway.’