Scaling Bloom & Wild into Europe’s Leading Flower Delivery Brand with Aron Gelbard

0:00One thing I'll never forget was we were standing in the street trying to give away people individual flowers in return from giving us their email address and signing up for our mailing list trying to build up an email program. I offered a flower to a lady and she asked me what I was doing and I told her and then she said I'm actually a journalist in a national newspaper and she wrote about us the next day. You get your lucky breaks like that and as an entrepreneur you have to take them. You don't know where they're going to come from.

0:28Alex Chisnall:Aaron Gelbard, co-founder and CEO of Bloom & Wild, Europe's leading online flower delivery brand, and the pioneer, the Letterboxd Flower Format. Do you have an idea how many customers you've served over the years? We have done over 30 million deliveries. I think from the beginning, we realized that brand was going to be important and that we were going to need to stand out. Our goal was that people would not search flowers or flower delivery, they search Bloom & Wild. Welcome to Screw It, Just Do It, the show for those who decided to screw it and just did it. I'm Alex Chisnell, host of this podcast and co-founder of the Festival of Entrepreneurs at the NEC in Birmingham this October 8th and 9th.

1:07Alex Chisnall:This is the podcast that brings you face to face with the entrepreneurs and business rebels who threw caution to the wind and built something extraordinary. Quick heads up, registration is now open for this year's Festival of Entrepreneurs. Join us at the NEC in Birmingham on October the 8th and 9th for two game-changing days with 200 plus speakers and thousands of ambitious founders. Get your free limited two-day pass at festivalofentrepreneurs.co.uk or click my personal link in the show notes. Welcome once again to the show, Aaron. Thank you very much for having me once again, Alex. It's great to be here today.

1:39Alex Chisnall:We've clearly made some progress in the last seven or eight years since we originally talked, which we'll no doubt get into. But I wanted to kick things off by asking you that I understand you come from a family of entrepreneurs, not just yourself and your father, but your grandfather as well. Can you tell us about your experience growing up as a kid, about the good and the bad sides of entrepreneurship and ultimately what inspired you to become an entrepreneur yourself? Of course. So yes, my dad has been an entrepreneur all his life, more than 60 years. Three of my four grandparents ran their own businesses as well.

2:18And I guess growing up in that sort of family, I always hoped to start a business one day. I had a really fortunate start in life. My dad did really well when I was young. And then when I was a teenager, his business fortune became more challenging. and I guess that meant that growing up I saw both ends of the spectrum of entrepreneurship, both what success looked like but also what more difficult times looked like and the impact that that could have in terms of personal happiness, financial security, physical and mental health. And having seen both of those sides, it was formative for me in a couple of ways.

3:00Firstly, it made me want to have a safety net And so despite knowing I wanted to start something one day, I also knew that I didn't want to start something as a teenager from my bedroom. And it made me pursue a relatively traditional path, going to university and then working in business consulting for eight years, which I thought would help me develop some useful skills and also help me build up some savings. And the other thing is it made me very aware of the risk of things going wrong and what can happen if you fly too close to the sun. And I think that's relevant as well, because when you start a business, you position yourself either deliberately or inadvertently somewhere on a sort of like appetite for risk continuum.

3:50And I think that has an impact on what sort of business is the right business for you to start to create. So at one end of the spectrum, some folks like to bootstrap their business, be profitable from day one, never raise external capital, even if that limits their growth and potentially the impact they can have, certainly over the short to medium term. At the other end of the spectrum, there are folks out there that want to raise as much money as possible, spend it as quickly as possible, use it to generate the traction to raise the next funding round. And if it doesn't work out, then they'll go on to the next thing and they're cool with that.

4:31And I realized quite early on that I was at neither of those ends of the spectrum. And I think that's been formative in terms of the type of business that I've gone on to build and how I've sought to try and finance it and what I've tried to do with the money that we've raised.

4:48Alex Chisnall:I'm interested to know, I was chatting to a parent's evening for my youngest daughter and she's taking business studies. I was chatting to her teacher and clearly she didn't convey much about her parents and what they do, that we're both entrepreneurs as well. and um you know when i started telling her about you know some of the some of the um business founders that i've interviewed for my podcast as well that you know sparked an interest and um makes me wonder again how much were you exposed to yourself um as a child growing up you said like you your father had you know a successful period and then a not so successful period how much of that were you were you aware of and how much did that impact you and in what what ways would you say?

5:31I was pretty aware. So for a couple of reasons, I guess, firstly, from when I was quite young, my dad talked to me about what he did. And he had a couple of factories for his business, and he took me to see them as well. And I didn't really understand sort of what a factory was or what it did then. But I remember visiting these places and then being, you know, in my eyes, big buildings as a young kid with machines sort of whirring around and loud noises. And and things like that. And it was quite a sort of striking environment as a child. And it made me realize that where he used to go for his work was quite different to where we lived at home.

6:13And it just therefore started to form an impression on me of what I thought a workplace or a business might be. And obviously, workplaces aren't just factories, but that was like a very striking early imprint on my mind because of the size and difference in noise that I experienced. And then as I became a teenager, I started to understand what my dad did a little bit more, what his business model was, how he was trying to make money, what some of the things that were proving challenging were and I really appreciated him wanting to engage me on those topics and that's something that he's continued to do over time and you know I'm not an expert in in his business or his industry but I try to listen to what he's doing and see if I can learn from it and also think critically about it and now that I've become a parent myself I also think about this and with my own children especially my eldest daughter she's really interested in bloom and wild and what we do and she often tells me that she uh wants to get involved with the business one day when she's older and obviously doesn't it doesn't work quite like that but but it's nice to hear that she feels passionate about it she often has ideas and you know even though she's she's only eight for um things that uh we might be able to do as well and then i i get a lot of pride from her level of interest in in what I do yeah yeah no I like that I like that

7:57Alex Chisnall:my eldest who's I think I said to you offline is off to performing arts college for the next three years but she's often said oh well you know it's a short career um potentially and what she's going into she said maybe I'll come and work in one of your businesses one day so it's it's you know nice to have that and they've they've come one of hosted live events and and got involved with that you know with um being on the front desk and meeting and greeting people giving out name badges and i might make sure to introduce them to the you know the guests that i've got so um yeah i love that um what i'd like to ask as well um moving on to bloom and wild then is what was your screw it just do it moment when you decided to to back yourself and and build it i mean how many how many years had you been thinking about it before you actually took the leap and took action as well.

8:47I'd only been thinking hard about going and starting my own business for three or four months when I actually decided to do it. So in the back of my mind, I'd known that it was something that I wanted to do in the long term. But that was always just in the back of my mind. And then in the autumn and the run up to starting, I started to think about it more seriously. I briefly flirted with a couple of other ideas. And then I remember I was still working in parallel as a management consultant. And I went to have a meeting with my boss at the time. Great guy. And I wanted to basically go and speak to some clients that we were working with and try and get them to get an initiative off the ground that we'd been working on and I thought was going to be a good idea.

9:40And I wanted to get their feedback on it and get started with it. And I came to show my plan to my boss. And he looked up and he said to me, you know, Aaron, the problem with you is that you're too focused on getting things done, and you're not focused enough on the right answer. And I'll never forget that. And I thought about it. And I said, okay, and I left his office. And I thought you're absolutely right. And this is why consulting is ultimately not the right job for me in the long term, because in consulting you're in the business of selling people the right answer that is your product but in most other businesses you need to put something out in front of real customers and there's a real danger to trying to perfect it too much with what you think the perfect version is before getting any customer feedback because your assumptions might be completely wrong and so instead you need to work much more iteratively with trying to get something out that you're proud of but that you do quickly and that you then get real feedback from real customers about you have a great process for gathering and harnessing and understanding that feedback and in the early days that's actually easier because it's sort of you speaking to the handful of customers you've got and seeing what they think and acting on it and I'm very personally motivated by doing a great job for people and getting good feedback.

11:11And that motivated me in my jobs. And it motivates me out of work as well. But I knew that if I was going to go from being a consultant to having a real product, which I hope people would love, and I'd find out if they did, or I'd find out if they didn't, that would really motivate me. And I thought that my superpower might be that I really do obsess over the feedback I get. And I thought that's where I'd really want to work hard to earn people's good feedback and to respond to people's less good feedback. And actually, I remember going home that evening and deciding that I was going to try and get started on my business in the short term.

11:56Alex Chisnall:Right. And what gave you that confidence to actually then ultimately walk away from, I think you said, eight years in consulting. Was part of that the reassurance that people had gone before you and done that, grandfathers, grandparents, father, et cetera, the feedback from your boss? Or was it like just an inner belief within yourself, do you think? I think maybe a bit of it was family. I think part of it was also friends and peers and seeing other people going and starting businesses and having a go at it. And, you know, it seemed like it was hard work, but that they were also really energized by it.

12:36And I was working hard anyway, and in my job at the time, and I thought, I might similarly get a lot of energy from trying to create something. Additionally, I guess I had some degree of confidence that the consulting industry was not going to go away. And because I'd done it for eight years, and I had a decent amount of experience whether i'd be able to go back to my old job uh if it didn't work out i didn't know but i thought i'd probably be able to find a job doing this somewhere if not um you know at my workplace from before getting started because you know consulting firms are constantly trying to recruit people and train up people who don't have experience and in the industry and you know if you've got the choice between recruiting somebody who's brand new to something and hiring somebody who's got some experience then I think you're in a good place as that experience candidate so I thought that the opportunity would be there and therefore that it was okay to take the risk I also thought this was the right time in life so I'd met my now wife and you know a couple of years before when we were not yet engaged at the time and you know we didn't have children yeah we hadn't bought a home together so in terms of the time to take a risk given I was aware of risk I guess there's this narrow window between and sort of not having any savings or safety net to fall back on which I think is is important to and for when you get started on the one hand not least because I put some of my savings into starting the business and and on the other hand and not having too many responsibilities either.

14:20I think it's harder to walk away from a well-paid job and start something when you've got a mortgage or children or things like that. So it sort of felt like this window between those two things and I think that's a good window in life to start a business, especially if you're somebody that does think about some of the risks as well.

14:44Alex Chisnall:Yeah, agreed. um I when when I took that leap it was again a little bit of a safety net because even though I was married with a with a home and uh two kids or one on one one on the way and one two years old maybe but um I took voluntary redundancy from Virgin Atlantic and it was you know a year salary two years of free travel um so that seemed like pretty pretty good deal at the time but of course a year salary never lasts as long as you never last a year um you started i believe with with around 30 000 of your own savings aaron um how far did that get you before you needed to um start raising some seed funding um it was that was between me and my business partner so um yeah uh it got us uh about six months and uh we knew that that was we knew it was not going to be enough to build a profitable business in the industry that we were trying to go into.

15:45We also had an idea of a milestone that we needed to reach in order to go out and raise some money, which basically, in our view, was we needed to have a website where you could buy real products that would arrive and be of good quality that people would like and want to recommend to their friends and want to buy again. And we were laser focused on what the critical path to that looks like. And in many ways, some of my consulting experience ended up being less relevant than I thought to starting a business. But actually in that early phase, I think some of that project planning capability and just sort of being really disciplined about what you need to get done by when, understanding sequencing, solving roadblocks as they come up was really valuable.

16:33And the£30 ,000 savings that we had might have lasted longer if we'd made better decisions about how to spend it. And there's one story from that period that I'll never forget. We were buying boxes from a supplier in southeast London as samples to send out trial letterboxd allows to people we knew. and we were paying£27 per box, which was more than we intended to charge for the flowers altogether. And this is because we're buying them one at a time and it was a laborious process for this chap to make them for us. And I remember we called him up and we said, can you do us a better price? He said, well, if you buy more boxes at a time from me, then I can do a better price because it'll be cheaper for me to make them.

17:23So we said, OK. and he said if you buy a thousand boxes at a time instead of one box at a time then i can reduce the cost by 90 instead of charging 27 pounds a box i'll charge you two pounds 70 a box and ben my partner and i looked at each other and we thought um this is a much better deal and and you know we've been through a few and sort of iterations of the box sample and then it's probably not going to change again so we'll then we'll go ahead and we'll buy them this will be a good investment and for this initial phase and then the and the next day while we're waiting for the boxes to arrive I remember I spent actually two days walking around central London trying to find businesses who would agree to receive our box for free as a trial and I'm not a very good door-to-door salesperson or even a door-to-door giver-awayer and it took me two days to find 20 businesses that would agree to receive these boxes and I remember it being sort of a hot day and this being a challenging process and then we sent the 20 businesses some flowers in our new boxes that we from our new stock of a thousand boxes and then the day after when they arrived I called these businesses up to get their feedback I can picture this really clearly where I was sitting all in my flat all over and every single one of the businesses said you know nice flowers but um it was weird because some of the um the flowers and had these brown spots on them are they meant to be there and the brown spots had not been there when we'd shipped out the flowers and as i um i looked into what had happened i realized that um the flowers had developed um basically a disease in transit and that was because they hadn't had enough ventilation while they were traveling and in I know a lot more about this now than I did at the time but with some types of flowers and without ventilation they can sort of get kind of sweaty is like the best way of describing it and they can they can develop this condition called botrytis and this just wasn't something that we thought about and we now had 980 of our thousand boxes left which were no use and we sort of thought what could we like punch holes in them with a hole punch and then still use them that didn't work and you know in hindsight it was one of the and the most important early mistakes that we made because we tried to to run before we could walk and from that I learned that even though you can be impatient to sort of get to the next step in the business you do need to go step by step and you need to gather learnings and that will just take time and you'll always be learning and trying to short circuit that process just doesn't work but can

20:13Alex Chisnall:be very costly and therefore very risky yeah so yeah a costly a costly lesson at the start that's that's good to know for for other entrepreneurs in that initial initial phase for sure and for those who who aren't familiar with with your business yet and I know you you must have I mean Do you have an idea how many customers you've served over there? We have done over 30 million deliveries. Wow, wow, wow. Yeah. And it's funny, I always remember after interviewing initially like seven or eight years ago, I then became a customer and then telling other people and it's those obvious dates like, you know, Mother's Day, Valentine's Day.

20:54Alex Chisnall:But as we'll go on to talk about, there's another side to the business that's very exciting as well. But for those who aren't familiar with the business, what specific problem were you setting out to solve initially yourself and your co-founders, Aaron? When you send somebody flowers, you are trying to express an emotion to somebody that you really care about. And the flowers tend to be a vehicle for conveying that emotion. And as an industry, we do a really bad job of helping our customers express emotions. and people don't have a favorite brand a lot of the times a lot of times people will go to google and they'll type in flower delivery and just click a few links and hope for the best they might not even remember what company they're ordering from they don't know whether the flowers that they've ordered are going to show up they don't know whether the flowers that they've ordered are going to be the ones that do show up whether it will be different flowers they don't know if they'll be on time and they don't know how long they're going to last they can end up being expensive and so there's all sorts of things that make it not a good experience when you buy flowers and then it can be difficult to do on a mobile phone and you're not sure about the sustainability credentials so this felt like an industry that was broken and which was why people didn't have a favorite brand and people have favorite brands for all sorts of other far more functional products.

22:23But yet when they want to express an emotion to somebody that they really love, they don't have one. And so that was our initial insight was, can we create a brand that people genuinely love in an industry which really should have that, but doesn't at the moment? And in order to do that, what can we do differently? And I guess we thought about a few things which was sourcing flowers directly from growers so that they cost less last longer and so that the supply is more predictable and there's less substitution of people getting not what they ordered so that was that was one thing and secondly giving people a great digital experience so making it really easy to and to order online and and therefore reducing some of the friction associated with the industry.

23:16And then thirdly, and you mentioned this, and this is now by no means all we do, but it was what we were known for at the beginning. We came up with the idea of doing flowers through people's letterboxes. And I was inspired by a company called Graze, which does snacks through people's letterboxes. And I was a customer of that business and actually knew the guy that ran that business at the time I was getting started as well. And I just thought it was so clever and it made me wonder whether the letterbox could also solve some of the problems we see in the flower industry with them needing to tell the person to wait at home, which ruins the surprise, or delivery problems and then people going back to delivery offices a couple of days later to collect flowers that are past their best.

23:59And it made me wonder whether there's a different way of doing it. What we didn't realize was that But in addition to this, these advantages, which did turn out to be the case, we thought that people would tolerate the notion of arranging their own flowers because of the convenience of them coming through the letterbox. What we learned, which was not what we expected, is actually they didn't just tolerate it. They actively sort of really enjoyed it because it meant that you didn't just get a thing to look at. you've got a creative process to engage with and you have a sense of pride with your own creation that isn't the case if you just take something out of a box and plonk it in a vase.

24:40And that was an insight that we didn't expect. And because of that, we also, I guess, unearthed the growth model that we didn't expect, where people who were recipients of our flowers went on to become customers of our flowers and in the future and it turned out that our main growth model was for our recipients to become our customers and that's remained the case over the 12 and a half years that we've started with nearly half our customers and consistently year in year out discovering us by having initially been a recipient and then going on to become a customer and that's been so powerful for us because it's meant that we've been able to and to grow rapidly without having sort of astronomical marketing budgets because we can rely on some of this, letting our product do our selling for us and people receiving the product and getting on to become a customer.

25:36Alex Chisnall:What was the percentage again there, Aaron? Just to reiterate that. Wow, that's phenomenal, isn't it? Thank you. That is phenomenal. So yeah, clearly the product, the experience, the customer journey has been such that people want to do that. And there's obviously probably, from my recollection, a prompt in there to actually take action and become a customer yourself. Yeah, amazing, amazing. And you talked about trying to give away those 20 businesses initially. How did you then go about getting your first customers? Initially, we asked everybody we knew to try it. And then we asked them to ask everybody they knew and we set up a basic referral program quite early on, which is quite generous.

26:23And that meant that there's this sort of novelty. And then we were very fortunate and got some great PR early on. I think in particular, one thing I'll never forget was we were standing in the street trying to give away people individual flowers in return for them giving us their email address and signing up for our mailing list to try and build up an email program. And I offered a flower to a lady and she asked me what I was doing. And I told her and then she said, I'm actually a journalist in a national newspaper. And she wrote about us the next day. And I hadn't even realized that we were near the offices of this newspaper or where they were.

27:07It was completely fortuitous. And that, you know, you get your lucky breaks like that. And as an entrepreneur, you have to take them. and you don't know where they're going to come from.

27:17Alex Chisnall:But you were working hard to get the luck that came to you, clearly. Have done since the beginning and continue to do so today. If you're enjoying this conversation and thinking, I need to be around more people like this, then I've got the perfect solution for you. The Festival of Entrepreneurs is where 5 ,000 to 10 ,000 ambitious entrepreneurs come together to learn from the people who've actually done it. It's on October the 8th and 9th at the NEC in Birmingham and I'm giving my listeners free two-day passes. Real entrepreneurs, real stories, real strategies, exactly like what you're hearing right now, but live and in person.

27:53Alex Chisnall:Go to festivalofentrepreneurs.co.uk and get your free two-day pass before they're gone. And at what stage, I'm interested to know, did you shift from solving a problem to intentionally building a brand? Because as you mentioned before, People previously wouldn't even know the name of the brands that they were buying the flowers from necessarily. And I remember doing exactly the same thing, you know, Googling Interflora, Nearest Florist, all of that kind of stuff over the years. So I think from the beginning, we realized that brand was going to be important and that we were going to need to stand out and that people and our goal was that people would not search flowers or flower delivery.

28:36they search bloom and wild and we also realized quite early on that this was not um what uh we ben and i were strongest at um and it was one of the areas where we're going to need to uh bring people into our team who are really good at this and and you know over time that's been many areas but i think in the early days of building a business sort of you can't afford to have somebody help you with each thing but you also do need people to help you with some things because if You try to do everything yourself and it just won't end up being good because nobody's good at everything. And so recognizing what you can do and what you can't do and what the profile of person you need to help you is on the things that you can't do and knowing where to look for them turns out to be one of the really important sort of skill sets in the early days of building a business actually never goes away.

29:27And that remains the case now, something that we really need to focus on.

29:31Alex Chisnall:And one of the hardest things going on, you know, my experience of, you know, nearly 600 interviews over the years of founders from businesses, you know, from, you know, single digit figures to billion pound businesses. I was chatting to Rowena Bird from Lush with like 18 ,000 staff I think they've got now and still, you know, the biggest challenge recruiting the right people, but keeping the right people for that stage of the business's growth. 100 % agree and in order to um to both recruit and keep the right people um I think you need to have the right culture and the right values because um as your business gets bigger it becomes less about you as a founder and like you know you forming relationships with everybody and you starting the tone I still do try to form relationships with everybody I still try to get to know as many people as I can I know nearly everybody um in my company not just by name but I try to to You get to know them and know about them and their families and things like that.

30:30And I work really hard at that. And it does come naturally to me as well. So I guess that's part of it. But you need some sort of scaffolding around it. And for us, values have been really important. Going back to my feedback from my old boss, one of our values now is think deeply, act swiftly. and the thinking deeply is important too. So you don't want to just act swiftly without any deep thinking altogether because then you do end up making mistakes and mistakes are costly as we talked about. But I think forming the right set of values has been really important for us and probably our most important value is care wildly and this has been right at the heart of the business since the beginning and if I go back to the start I said that I had this obsession with feedback and that because of that I thought that we'd be able to earn the trust of customers because they trust us that if they had feedback for us that we do something about it and more of the same if it was good feedback and fix it if it was bad feedback and I do think that the the level of care that I put into this is extraordinary and remains extraordinary to this day and I have now tried to make that level of care something that's not just my way of working but it's something I look for in people it's something that I try to develop in people in the team and I ask people around me to try to develop it in their teams as well.

32:08And I think that's been critical for making the business continue to succeed. It's also been critical for creating a place where people want to work and we don't just care wildly about our customers. We also care wildly about each other and about ourselves and we work hard, but we have a kind way of doing things. We're humble. We think about others day in, day out. and that's the type of person that we look for. And I do think it's possible to, this is not a zero-sum game, it's possible to both be caring but also be extremely ambitious with what you're trying to do. Some of our biggest wins as a business have been where we've been able to do both of those things in parallel.

33:00And often I think people running businesses can think that investing in things that show care for your customers can be sort of too expensive and therefore you shouldn't do it and it's going to be bad for your business. And time and again, we found the opposite to be the case. Probably the example that I'm most proud of here is our investment into opt-out from emails, so thoughtful marketing. So in the early days of Bloom and Wild, we would periodically get emails, especially at sensitive times of the year, like Mother's Day, which is a really big trading period in a business like ours. And from people saying, you know, I love Bloom and Wild, but I'd really rather you didn't email me about Mother's Day.

33:46It's a difficult time of the year for me. We'd add these people to a database and we'd not email them. And then when the occasion passed, we'd return them to the main database and start emailing them again. We discussed this as a team and we thought, if we're getting these requests, maybe instead of just seeing if people ask us, we should ask them if they'd rather not hear from us. And, you know, it just felt like the right thing to do if some people were asking about it. There might be other people that were suffering in silence. And on the one hand, we might miss out on some sales by not emailing people at a busy time of the year.