Bloom & Wild: The business that blossomed with feedback

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0:47People care very, very much about the sort of experience you give them when they buy flowers. I don't think the CEOs of table companies get emails with people telling them that they either love or hate their tables in the same way. I'm extremely personally motivated by feedback. And I think that's both an Achilles heel and a superpower. From the beginning, I obsessed over treating every piece of feedback as a gift and building a business system to gather feedback, categorize feedback, find root causes and work out what we're going to do about it.

1:22I'm Dougal Shaw and this is the Business Leader Podcast. where we look at the stories and strategies behind modern businesses. Today, I'm meeting with Aaron Gelbard, the founder and CEO of flower delivery and gifting platform Bloom & Wild. The company was founded in 2013 and has enjoyed huge success, expanding from the UK into European markets, including France, Germany and the Netherlands. Gelbard started out at Bain as a management consultant before making the leap into entrepreneurship with his co-founder Ben Stanway, who would go on to found Moneybox. The co-founders decided that the world of flower delivery was ripe for a digital update, despite the fact neither had any background in floristry.

2:04But they realized that the internet could revolutionize the customer experience. They figured out early on the importance of a great customer journey on an app, and also championed the idea of letterbox delivery, with flowers packaged in flat boxes, ready to be assembled into bouquets at home. Bloom & Wild has enjoyed steady growth over the past decade and last year had revenues of£110 million. It has raised more than£100 million from investors, including Index Ventures, and employs over 350 people now. Gelbard believes that one of the secrets to scaling has been his personal obsession with collecting feedback, an idea he applies to every aspect of his business, including himself, as I found out when I met up with him at his company's HQ in central London.

2:53I listen to quite a few podcasts where you've talked about having an entrepreneurial family. So not just your father, but your several grandparents, I think, as well. But tell me a bit more than that. What was your father's line of work? And what was it like to see him going through that growing up? Three of my four grandparents started businesses. They're all Jews from Eastern Europe. They all had to leave for obvious reasons and found themselves in new places and needing to start a new life. and my dad therefore unsurprisingly followed his dad and his mum into starting a business, and he was in plastic manufacturing initially, and he did that from really when he was still a teenager all the way through to when I was a teenager.

3:41He was very successful, he sold his business when I was 11, did very well, and he had the foresight at that time to realize that plastic manufacturing was going to be replaced by plastic recycling and people were not going to want to manufacture virgin plastic anymore and so he took all of the proceeds that he'd made from selling his plastic manufacturing business and started a plastic recycling business and he was absolutely right to do that but he was probably seven or eight years too early and the technology wasn't very well developed. Production was very expensive. Products weren't that commercially attractive and the business was not a success.

4:28And I went from seeing somebody that had, you know, things had always gone well for him in business to somebody that was suddenly finding it more difficult. And that had quite a profound impact on me growing up because I think a lot of the time people who are children of entrepreneurs or who come from entrepreneurial families can just sort of think it's easy or think it's, you know, sailing off into the sunset. and I think seeing both sides of it both you know what you can achieve not only financially but in terms of how motivating and rewarding it is to to build a great business but also what it looks like when it goes wrong and you need to sort of really replan your life and find work and you know the impact that that has on on all other aspects of your life is really significant but But for me, it made me really clear that I wanted to build up a bit of a safety net before starting my own business.

5:27And so despite having this entrepreneurial background, I ended up going to university and then I became a management consultant. I did that for eight years. I went back to study and did an MBA. And in a way, that's a relatively traditional path. but I think the fact that I was aware of the fact that things could go wrong as well as right was what prompted me to do that. As we'll see, Gelbard is fascinated, obsessed even, with the idea of collecting and listening to feedback. This is something he feels is deeply ingrained in his personality. I'm extremely personally motivated by feedback, and I think that's both an Achilles heel and a superpower.

6:13when I grew up it meant that I sort of craved being popular at school or like getting good marks and then the same when I had my first couple of jobs I wanted to get good performance reviews every six months and things like that. I always craved more and more positive feedback. Many entrepreneurs start life as management consultants. It gives you exposure to lots of different businesses and sectors becoming a kind of live education in business growth. Gelbard also had a fundamental realization about himself during this period as a management consultant, which helped to push him into entrepreneurship.

6:54I had a conversation that I'll never forget with the partner that I worked for in my final project at Bain. and he said to me, Aaron, you're doing a great job, but you're too focused on getting things done and not focused enough on the right answer. And I wrote that down and I walked out of his office and I thought to myself, you're absolutely right. I am focused on that. And that probably means that this is no longer the right job for me because Bain's product is the right answer and clients are spending a fortune to get that right answer and people are working really hard on working it out. And for me, once we got to like an 80 % answer, I wanted to sort of try and put it into practice and move on to the next thing.

7:45And I'm impatient. And so I thought I would like to get into a line of work where it's really focused on getting stuff done. And so I wanted to start my business And I wanted to start it in an industry where feedback would be really abundant. And it was that that brought me to flowers because people care very, very much about the sort of experience you give them when they buy flowers. Because they buy flowers for people that they love at the most important times of the year for them, their recipient. and so if you do a good job you hear about it from your customers or your recipients more than if you sell them a table and they like it.

8:28If you do a bad job you hear about it as well. I get emails daily from people who guess my email address with both of these types of feedback. I don't think the CEOs of table companies get emails with people telling them that they either love or hate their tables in the same way. And I'm really motivated by that second type of feedback, because I want to avoid it happening again every time, because I care very much about this validation and feedback. And so from the beginning, I obsessed over treating every piece of feedback as a gift and building a business system to gather feedback, categorize feedback, find root causes and work out what we're going to do about it and it was that that made me excited about getting into the flower business and think that I had a chance of building something great in this space because I don't come from a floristry background and I've learned a lot about floristry over 12 years but other people are better at that than me but I think I do have this obsession over understanding what people do don't love about what we do and really making it better and the desire to have brilliant feedback is both an altruistic one because I want to give our customers a better experience and ultimately change our industry and make it one that has very high customer satisfaction rather than the mediocre satisfaction levels that it had when I came into it But I also am doing it selfishly because I want to be in a line of work where I can make people really happy and earn their respect and positive feedback.

10:07Just thinking about it from a personal point of view, I don't often write feedback emails. But one time I did do it was when I organized for some flowers, not from your company, for someone else, to be sent to my mom. And they completely got the date wrong. The whole point of flowers often is they have to arrive on a specific day. yeah um and i did you know write an email and i was angry about that and in the end got some kind of um you know discount for the future but i still didn't feel that good about it and didn't use them so it is it it's a very difficult one isn't it it's very sensitive okay yeah respond on that so this is a topic i'm very passionate about and we find that there's two insights here that i've learned one is customers who've complained to us and where we've resolved successfully have a higher net promoter score and a higher repeat rate than customers who've never complained in the first place actually many of our best customers are not the people who've just had a good experience every time that if you've had a bad experience and been wowed by what we've done about it and for me that's so valuable because these uh these failings are an opportunity obviously we're better off not getting it wrong in the first place you know deliberately make mistakes so that we have the opportunity for people to complain because a lot of people we just suffer in silence and because we want to do a good job but when we do get things wrong and sometimes we do because um because we're all human parts we're dealing with a perishable product partly because we're reliant on um delivery drivers who work really hard but you know can get stuck in traffic or you know the weather's bad or you know we're reliant on things that we don't 100 control and so um using those mistakes as an opportunity to really go the extra mile I think is something that we proactively lean into.

11:51You mentioned the date and this is one this is like a sub point of the previous thing I mentioned but I'm particularly passionate about this. The date is particularly important at days like Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, Christmas which are big moments in our year and Valentine's flowers arriving on the 15th of February or Mother's Day flowers arriving on the Monday after are really not great. So one thing that we've done for many years is we have built technology that ingests data from our delivery partners to ascertain before the flowers arrive but after they've left us flowers or gifts where they are in their journey and because of that from that information and what the probability is of them arriving and at their destination on time and if you've ordered flowers for Mother's Day we encourage people therefore to order for the Saturday rather than the Sunday which gives us time to recover so you've ordered for the Saturday and it's Saturday morning and the flowers are still at a hub near our production studio rather than near where your mum lives then rather than wait for you to complain and then find that it's too late for us to do something about it we will proactively send a second bouquet ideally of the same one that you ordered if we've run out of that then of an upgrade and we always leave space for stock of buquets we can upgrade to and we tell you that we've done this sometimes the first buquet arrives after all because the we have to base this on a probability and sometimes it doesn't but to be honest the you would have complained anyway so we'd have had to send the second buquet afterwards anyway we'd probably had to refund you as well and you'd have probably been angry about it and your mum would have been angry and you've probably told everybody whereas now um you know for the the small amount of waste of sending some people to bouquets where the first one does arrive we are proactively uh delighting our customers rather than trying to do so reactively and the impact that that has on their levels of delight is is outstanding and it's um for me it's a real win-win where it's both great for our customer but it's also good business for us because we for basically the same cost anyway build really strong advocates rather than people who you feel like you do about the other flower company you spoke about talking about feedback another thing i've heard that you do is a kind of a b testing where you'll if you've got an idea for a product or an iteration of your offer you'll try a certain way of one set of customers if i understand it right and a different way of someone else you're kind of testing what works well is that part of your feedback philosophy yes so we do a lot of a b testing we test things on our website we test things in our email program we test things on our app at many places and a lot of people will just measure a b test by like the conversion rate or the revenue and when we measure an a b test result we always measure it by a net promoter score as well as a bit of a hero metric.

15:00Net promoter score, you ask people, would you recommend a product or service to a friend or family member on a score of zero to 10? They give a nine or a 10. It means they're a promoter. So they would actively go out and people give a 10 or a nine are the same people that actively go out and tell people you have to try this company. It's great. So you get the network effect. There are two types of network effect. That's the good one. people give a zero all the way up to a six so quite high will actively go out and grumble about it so do the opposite so you know i use uh such and such a company it was rubbish you mustn't use them um and even a six people are still going to um go out and grumble if people give a seven or an eight they're a neutral and they do neither they don't talk about it and there's um it's actually a bane thing um and there's been a lot of um research over the years both into are those the right cut-offs on the score and then also there's a lot of research to show correlation between net promoter score and other financial metrics revenue or market share or profit or even share price so we i guess partly because i worked at bain before we really obsess over net promoter score as a measure of customer satisfaction and advocacy and you can break it down so you can give everything an nps and bloom and wild has an nps but then each bouquet has an NPS and each delivery method has an NPS our website has an NPS and they all ladder up to the company NPS so if the NPS is not drops and we can work out why it's dropped maybe it's because we introduced a bouquet that people don't like anymore maybe it's because one of the delivery partners we use has now got problems maybe it's because one of our we've changed the feature on our website and people are finding it tricky so we can drill down into what the source of the problem is and therefore address it.

16:51And so when we run an AB test, we track the NPS in each variant and if the in the control group in the variant group, and if the NPS and the variant is better or worse than in the control, then that's one of the criteria we use when evaluating whether we should roll out the variant or not. So give me an example of something you've changed because of that. Yeah, so we've been experimenting with proactively contacting customers about deliveries not arriving on time. And this is quite tricky because we can also be wrong about this because the data is imperfect. but if we proactively contact a customer then we see that compensation costs get a little bit higher because in some cases we have customers requesting compensation that wouldn't have done otherwise either because they didn't realize that the bouquet was going to be late because it's a gift or because we were wrong and actually the bouquet arrived on time but customers will ask for compensation anyway once we've said this because they say I had to make different arrangements based on the fact that you told me it might be late.

18:04So we see compensation rates go up, but we see net promoter score go up as well. And then we can offset the two things and work out whether in total it's still worth incurring the higher compensation costs. So that's something that we've rolled out in some of our markets and is, I guess, an example of the sort of thing I mean. And what about products? Because outside you show me your new brownies, which are very delicious. You've got other kinds of gifts that you're experimenting with as well. So are you A-B testing on that? Not anymore. So with A-B testing, I guess the problem is once you, if you're A-B testing something, you can't really talk about it very much.

18:40Because we can't send emails to our customers saying, hey, Bloomin' Well does brownies as well now. And then half of them can't find them. But you wouldn't try it with a specific set group of customers in one region or something? We don't segment regionally. Sometimes we do things in one country first. We're in eight different countries. So sometimes we do things in one country first. if it works well then we try it in other countries um because we um i guess regional segmentation is tricky partly because um we make everything in a single point and then um deliver nationwide so we are two points now for the uk but we don't um operate on a regional basis also we market to customers and who might be in region a but their recipient might be in region b and so trying to have a regional focus saying you know the product x is only available in region a but not region b therefore doesn't work well because the delivery might be not in the same region as the customer um but when we launch something we do a b test we also now we have a loyalty program bloom and wild rewards and we often launch things just to people in our rewards program first and we roll it out to half of them so that's like a closed loop environment and then we can test whether new product type is resonating and measure its nps before expanding it actually with the um our standalone non-autocultural gifts so not flowers and plants the net promoter score is even higher than it is on our flowers the net promoter score on flowers and plants is around 80 and for blooming world uk and and for our non-flower non-plant products it's 85 so So customers are even more delighted.

20:19And I think part of the reason why is there are fewer perishability challenges with some of our other products than there are with flowers, which are a living or recently lived thing. Therefore, in some percentage of cases, there'll be some wilting or some bruising, and it's natural and impossible to get to 0%.

20:39Aaron Gelbard, as you've heard, is clearly a founder CEO whose leadership style is to be deep in the details of the business. It's an approach to leadership he's had to think about carefully, as a founder who's chosen to remain at the helm of his business as it's scaled, all the way from UK startup to international business. The dilemma is sometimes known as founder mode versus professional mode. A professional mode CEO typically likes to keep himself or herself slightly further removed from the day-to-day running of the business, avoiding the nitty-gritty, instead preferring to focus on long-term strategy and vision while others report relevant details upwards to them.

21:18There's been a lot of chatter about this concept of founder mode and I know you've looked at that as well. It's something I find really interesting and I started this business 12 years ago. Very few of the people who were here over the first four to five years are here anymore. So in a way, there are many things that I'm the only person still left that has seen because people are new or primarily because of that. And so in the mid-years, in the early days, I sort of did everything myself and with a small team. And then in the mid-years, I got a lot of feedback that people found my style too detail-oriented and why was I involved in so many things and I needed to professionalize the various functions.

22:08And I found myself very frustrated and sort of watching people make mistakes that I think we could have prevented. But I was respecting people's desire for me to stay out of things. And I've become more comfortable with that, I think, partly because I've become slightly less fixated on my own personal feedback from my team. And I'll talk a bit about why in a minute. partly because I think with some of the context having walked out of the door with early employees leaving I'm really the last person standing that's seen those things. Being less worried about people getting annoyed by me weighing in on something if I've got unique context or I've seen something before or can spot patterns between multiple functions because I'm the only person that's like a little bit involved in every function I think it's okay and it makes my personal feedback scores a little bit less good than if I didn't do it but I think it's the right thing for our customers and our business and I've become more comfortable with it and the fact that other founders are talking about it and doing the same thing as well makes me realize that it's not just me and in a way this is maybe sort of part of the weight of responsibility of being a founder being the only person that's been there since the beginning across all of the areas.

23:37I mentioned personal feedback. I've always, I guess because of wanting to get good feedback, why I started a flower company, also wanted to get good feedback as a leader, as a founder, as a CEO from my team. And this peaked when we acquired Blumon and Bergamot during the pandemic. and as a result I needed to it's a really weird phenomenon you and people come to work one day and they find out that their company's been bought by another company they've never met the people that work at the other company the people are in a different country there's a pandemic they can't meet them in person people are naturally quite suspicious and rightly so and so I was desperate to earn followership from the folks at Blumont and Bergamot especially Blumon because the Blumon founders left and so we sort of became their management quite rapidly and so I was really the the day-to-day CEO of Blumon as well at that point and I'd never been there and I carried on doing this for about a year and then it was mid-2022 I realised that we needed to get our business profitable, that it wasn't going to be possible to raise money anymore as I mentioned, pandemic was wearing off, costs were going up and there's really no choice but to scale back the size of our team unfortunately and it was the first time that I'd ever announced a redundancy round and I was terrified of it because I'd prided myself on having been sensible about how big the team had got because I was desperate for people to like me And so standing up and telling the whole company that I got it wrong and that people, great people were going to have to be losing their jobs was awful.

25:32And it was obviously way more awful for the people that were impacted and for their friends than it was for me. But it was awful for everybody. And I thought a lot about how to communicate this. And in the end, I decided to go with ultra authenticity. And I was very honest. I was clearly very emotional in my delivery of the message, which isn't the style that I normally adopt. But I thought it was right for the occasion. And I was really honest about, you know, how we got to where we got to and where we needed to get to going forward. And I was worried that people weren't going to like the honesty because it wasn't what they'd really seen from me, especially the folks in our acquired businesses who'd sort of seen me really trying hard to earn their followership.

26:30and actually it was the polar opposite and the um the extreme uh honesty authenticity vulnerability was the unlock that um switched from people I think being a bit mistrustful of me to people um really viewing me as an authentic leader that they could rally behind and in hindsight I should have done that much sooner too. I know you're a details person you mentioned you're very interested in your own personal feedback score so how often are you being you know tested on that score annually by the whole company they'll be given a big questionnaire and you your leadership is part of the questions yes that's right so that obviously means a lot to you when you've seen that when you see that and you you care about it yeah i care about it my my score is very good i'm uh i feel very fortunate in that i always fixate on which department it's lowest in.

27:26This year it was high. It was lowest in our Netherlands customer delight team, which is a team that we acquired from Blumon. In a way, I understand that I hadn't spent much time with those people. I didn't really understand their work very well or how it differed to some of our customer delight in our other countries. And I made a deliberate effort to spend time chatting to lots of people in that team at our recent Blumon winter party. I went and spent an evening a couple of hours shadowing them and understanding their work better and I think those things have really made a difference and when I see somebody in that team asking a question on one of our Slack channels I'll go out of my way to try and help them partly because I seek validation as I've been very honest about but partly because I want to understand every part of the business better and I guess the the reverse of some of the founder mode piece that we talked about is at Blumon I'm not the founder so I don't have all of the context since day one I've got a good amount of context because we've owned the business for four years now and so where there are these knowledge gaps I'm really keen to try to infill them.

28:44In terms of growth obviously you've done really well growing so far you've attracted a lot of investment through acquisitions you've got positions in other international markets now so how do you carry on this growth are you looking at different ways to raise capital or are you going to concentrate more on acquiring more customers in the UK market what's your position at the moment yeah and we've raised a lot of money so far we've deployed the majority of that on acquiring two businesses Blumand in the Netherlands and Bergamot in France and And those acquisitions have served us well. Capital raising for consumer digital companies is challenged.

29:23It's a challenged environment right now, challenging for companies. So we're fortunate that we have a strong financial position and are profitable. So we are increasing our financial health rather than decreasing it every year. So our robust financial health coupled with challenging fundraising environment in our sector means that I don't want to raise money for now. It's actually been a big part of the reason why we've shifted from focusing on only on growth to having this period post-COVID where we focused on profitability. and so I don't intend to go out and raise more money at the very least until conditions for doing so meaningfully better.

30:07That said, there's a lot of growth opportunity which we can achieve without going out and raising money and I guess for us the two biggest vectors of growth are category expansion and geographic growth. So from a category perspective, as we've discussed, we're really growing our non-flower, non-plant gifting business That's growing over 100 % year on year now. And we're getting exceptionally strong feedback per the 85 NPS score on these new products. And we're able to cater to more types of occasion by playing in other product categories like brownies or whiskey cocktail kits or games night hampers or things like that.

30:51we're able to cater to a wider range of recipients at this occasion or there are other occasions like Father's Day which haven't been particularly strong for us altogether and now because we have a wider and more diverse product range we're much better able to serve those occasions that means that we're more useful to our customers customers tend to love and bloom and wild and rate us highly they join our rewards program they download our app but they don't use us that many times a year But if we can be more useful to them because we can cater to more occasions and more recipients, then we strengthen our relationships with our customers.

31:28We also introduce more new people to Bloom and Wild. So the number one way that we acquire customers is by people receiving our product and loving the product and then going on to be a customer themselves. So now that we have got wider, more diverse range, we're able to introduce more recipients into our business who will then become customers of the future. The other big growth angle is international. So we're not looking to get into new countries, but we're in eight countries already. In the UK, we're the market leader in online flowers, but in our seven other markets, we're not. So really scaling our business in particular Germany and France is the two largest other markets that we're in.

32:11And we think the market share gain opportunity is significant. Those markets also have lower online penetration in our category than there is in the UK. So more people are buying flowers from physical stores still. But there is a strong shift towards online. And because we can replicate many of the things that customers like in the UK, so good digital experience, great product quality, reliable name day fulfillment, great customer delight. We're seeing that turn into high net promoter score and attracting new customers, retaining them, turning recipients into customers in those markets as well.

32:53And we plan to continue that. and a last closing thought you're obviously somebody who's thought a lot about entrepreneurship and you went in with your eyes wide open partly as you said because of your experience growing up and witnessing your father's journey if you could go back and give yourself some advice at the start of the bloom and wild adventure what what advice would you like to pass on i was probably a bit too conservative and I think I should have been more prepared to take more risk sooner. So I've always tried to chart the course between on the one hand not being an SME and on the other hand not flying too close to the sun.

33:32And I think there were times where I erred too much towards the conservative side. And I think in a way that was naive of me because I was out pitching venture capitalists and they want you to dream big and shoot for the moon that's how their business model works and rightly so and actually for folks that invested into our business early on we've delivered great returns already and you know our business is now over 100 million in revenue which is much more than what I said it was going to be in the business plan that I showed them but I think I was always very grounded in reality rather than focusing on what the bigger vision is and where this business might be able to get to one day.

34:16And I think that can become a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. So if I was to speak to my younger self, I think I would have encouraged myself to supplement some of my analytical realism with more of a dream of where we could get to and then work out along the way what additional steps we need to take to get there.

34:41You've been listening to me, Dougal Shaw, speaking to Aaron Gelbard of Bloom & Wild for the Business Leader podcast. Please do rate and subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts. We do two episodes every week. And if you head to our Business Leader website, you can sign up to our weekly newsletter where you will find lots of content like this, as well as opportunities for your business.

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