- Bloom & Wild, founded in 2013 by Aron Gelbard, is a tech-forward online florist best-know for their letterbox delivery services.
- They have since become the UK’s top-rated flower company and the fastest growing online flower company in Europe, now operating in Ireland, Germany and France.
- Bloom & Wild have raised over £20 million in venture capital funding and were recently named the second-fastest growing tech company in the UK by Deloitte.
What is Bloom & Wild?
Bloom & Wild is the UK’s most loved online florist. We’re using technology to reimagine the experience of buying and receiving flowers to make it the joy that it should be, connecting people more thoughtfully so that our customers can be there from anywhere.
What makes the company unique?
Bloom & Wild are the original letterbox online flower delivery company. Each letterbox bouquet is designed to be posted through the door, with no need for anyone to be in for delivery. The stems can then be arranged into a unique bouquet, and as they are sent in bud (blooming over the next 1-2 days), they can be enjoyed for much longer than flowers that arrive in bloom already.
We also offer a selection of hand-tied bouquets, that arrive pre-arranged, and plants.
How do you use technology to innovate the experience of buying and receiving flowers?
Technology is at the heart of what we do at Bloom & Wild. We build and maintain as much of our technology stack as possible, which gives us a unique advantage, as we can leverage that technology to exactly suit our business model and processes. This means our teams work on the technology the customer sees; in our case, this is an Angular web application and native iOS and Android mobile applications, together with the technology used by our internal teams and suppliers, which is a bespoke Ruby on Rails based platform backed by PostgreSQL, Sidekiq, Docker and AWS.
Our business trades in the UK/IE, France and Germany and is peak period focused, with Christmas, Valentines Day and Mother’s Day forming the largest trading periods across our markets. This presents a unique challenge to our technology, and designing systems that can scale to handle peak load is important. Our systems are also designed to be both country and language agnostic, meaning that our engineers can make changes in common codebases which are then built into our multilingual websites and apps.
What role does machine learning play in your business?
Machine learning plays an increasingly large role in our business, and we invest heavily in our data science capabilities as well as in our core technology team. Being able to use technology to automate our business processes across the team is extremely important since it allows us to continue to scale in a cost-effective manner. We are always looking for ways in which we can use our bespoke systems and data as an enabler for this; whether this is using machine learning models to drive more efficient website merchandising, warehouse management or customer service, for example.
What’s next for Bloom & Wild?
We are always innovating, and this is one of the reasons why Bloom & Wild is such a great place to work as an engineer. As we continue to scale, explore new markets and opportunities then we’ll continue to choose the right technology solutions to suit the business problems that we are trying to solve. We’re really proud to be the fastest growing online flower company in Europe, and we intend to continue to use our technology as a key enabler to drive our future growth.
You can read more about how we use technology and what it’s like to work in our technology team over on our tech blog – Code & Wild or follow us on Twitter.
