Leaders Series Interview Aron Gelbard, Co-Founder & CEO Bloom & Wild

Founded in 2013 by Aron Gelbard and Ben Stanway, Bloom & Wild has transformed the online flower gifting market, delivering more than 50 million flowers to letterboxes across the UK, France and Germany. 

2019 has seen a successful ￡15m fundraising led by Piper Private Equity and Bloom & Wild is well on the way to realising the mission to become the world's leading and most loved flower and gifting company. 

In the latest Leaders Series interview, CEO and Co - Founder Aron Gelbard shares the challenges he has faced as a first time Entrepreneur, overcoming those challenges and his vision for the future of Bloom & Wild. 

What was the inspiration behind Bloom & Wild?  

The inspiration came from a number of sources. My Dad and both my Grandads were entrepreneurs, talking about business and starting companies was something that was discussed a lot as I was growing up. It was something that I was very keen to try for myself. 

I was born in France and moved to the UK when I was five. My mum is from Israel and my dad from Australia, my background is quite mixed. When you move to a new country as a kid you are really keen to fit in and be accepted. I think as a result I am very motivated by pleasing people - that used to manifest itself in the form of wanting to get good marks at school or do well in the jobs that I had after graduating from University. However, I was never quite fulfilled by it and wanted to do things that would please people on a very much larger scale. 

I felt the flower industry would give me the opportunity to do that because it is a highly emotive purchase that, whilst made only a small number of times a year, is done so often at hugely important and often emotional moments. If there is any sense of disappointment in the purchase, there is a significant negative impact on all. I felt trying to solve that problem would be a hugely worthwhile pursuit because of the positive effect it can have on people. 

I’d worked as a Consultant for a number of years with a focus on e-commerce and B2C, areas that I was really interested in. I loved the idea of the letterbox and home delivery. I know the CEO of Graze. Anthony Fletcher, we were at University together. I’ve followed closely what they have been doing over the years. That had gotten me excited about the idea of using the letterbox to solve a different problem, namely flowers, where historically there have been all sorts of challenges around delivery of the product. 

What have proved to be the three biggest challenges of the last 6 years? How have you overcome those challenges? 

It is hard too narrow it down to three, but if I had to pick three that reflect the different phases of the company, from the outset figuring out our tech was the most difficult aspect. 

I didn’t have any experience of technology and felt that it would be a relatively straightforward aspect of setting up the business. Initially we budgeted ￡3000 for our website and tried to do things really cheaply. We went through a series of developers, all of whom were overseas, none of whom we ever met in person. We went really didn’t understand the importance of developing our own tech culture. 

On more than one occasion the developers we had engaged went completely AWOL, it was impossible to contact them when we were desperate to make changes to elements of our site we knew were broken and inevitably our offering really suffered as a result. 

Eventually we made the decision to bring tech in house. We made significant improvements but it has taken a number of years to get it to the good place we are in today. 

Getting the tech right from the outset was certainly the biggest challenge we have had to overcome, one I certainly underestimated not only in terms of cost, but also the difficulty of managing a tech business as a non - tech leader. 

The second biggest challenge was the business model itself and how that has evolved. When we started we took the view we’d be a subscription company. We thought that it would be really convenient for people to subscribe to regular flower deliveries because of the perishable nature of the product. Getting them delivered through your letter box would mean you’d never be out of fresh flowers. However, we quickly found that people were buying our product as a gift rather than a subscription. 

We started to think about how we could become a gifting company as opposed to a subscription model, which whilst still part of our business, is a very much smaller component now. That switch required a fundamental rethink in terms of technology, the flow of product ordering, the physical product design, the logistics model, the sourcing model. It was akin to trying to rebuild a rocket ship whilst flying to the moon at a million miles an hour! 

We didn’t stop business as usual; that was growing really quickly; but we could see the trend and needed to try to reconfigure. Combining the two was a huge challenge but necessary and over time has proven to be the right move.

Six years in, the biggest challenge is around people and culture and maintaining and evolving that as we scale. We are now 100 people and whilst I have a really good personal relationship with all the people on the team, I am keen to ensure people enjoy the same sense of camaraderie and the desire to achieve great things together as we did as a small company starting out. 

What is the one decision you have made that has proved to have been the most significant contributor to your success?

Probably coming up with letterbox flowers! All those hours of measuring letterboxes around London trying to come up with the optimal size for the box.

We do lots of things with the product, we are now extending our offering internationally, but I come back to the original concept of letterbox flowers as being the one innovation that has fundamentally impacted our success. It has transformed the market to the extent that others now follow. It has become a mainstream offering, which has helped to legitimise our initial thinking. 

The market disruption afforded by our innovation certainly enabled us to move out of the blocks very fast and as a result we have been able to attract funding from that traction. We have been able to use that funding to hire great people, to continue to grow, to extend our offering internationally and so on. Without that initial innovation, which is at the hub of what we do, I don’t believe we’d have been able to realise our current trajectory.  

Despite your success, is there anything looking back that you would have done differently?

I think we should have raised more money, earlier – we might then have spent less time fundraising overall and been able to spend more time focused wholly on growing the business and improving the customer experience

I think with the benefit of hindsight, which I didn’t have as a first time Entrepreneur, I would have understood that a website costs a lot more than ￡3000! Those things I underestimated, I would have set a more ambitious business plan alongside going out to raise a lot more money sooner which would have enabled us to scale quicker as a consequence. 

In the early years there were just so many things I was disappointed or dissatisfied with around our proposition that we just simply couldn’t afford to change. The lack of funding held us back despite the fact that we worked incredibly hard to fix things just as fast as we could. More money would have enabled us to get to better outcomes, faster.  

We had a reset on how we thought about fundraising last year and as a result had a successful ￡15m funding round led by Piper, the first time when we have been really careful not to underestimate how much funding to raise. That change of mindset has meant that rather than shortly focusing on our next fundraising, we have absolute laser focus on just how we can maximise that investment to really accelerate our business.  

What does the next three years look like for Bloom & Wild? 

We are focused on four major pillars of our development. The first is to realise our goal to become the market leader in the UK online flower market (Bloom & Wild are currently number two after Interflora). I think we can get there in the next 3 years based on our growth rate, the underlying retention dynamics that we are seeing, our net promoter score that supports that, I think we can absolutely take that market leadership position in the UK and that is something that the whole team here at Bloom & Wild is really excited about and motivated to achieve. 

Our mission is to be the words leading and most loved flower gifting company. UK Market leadership is part of our goal, but to be the most loved is something that is really important to us and something that we are keenly focused on. Our customer advocacy is really high as evidenced by our net promoter score. We review our ratings scores daily and are focused on what we can do to drive them even higher to ensure the best possible online experience. We continue to develop the product to ensure our focus on higher quality, to make the delivery process better, we are very detail focused and conscious to deliver the best possible experience at every turn for the customer. 

We also have a keen focus on sustainability and are on a mission to make everything recyclable or reusable by the end of the year. It is something that we are making real progress on. An appreciation of and contribution to a better environment and a real focus on our corporate social responsibility is integral to our mission to be the most loved online flower company. 

I mentioned our mission is to be the world’s leading and most loved flower gifting company. We started in the UK and have now expanded in to France, Germany and Ireland. Accelerating our presence internationally is an integral part of our roadmap over the coming years. 

We are thinking about new channels as well. We have recently launched Bloom & Wild on Ocado, which is our first wholesale partnership. The progress we have made with this has been hugely positive and we will look at how we might form other similar partnerships moving forward. 

Our core business will remain online gifting but partnership opportunities allow us to become more of a holistic flower brand. We’d love to be peoples flower brand of choice when it comes to buying for themselves, not just the flower gifting brand of choice.  

What is the one piece of advice you’d offer to the aspiring entrepreneur out there based on your experience of the Bloom & Wild journey? 

Do it sooner! In Britain I think we are a little risk averse. In the US this is not the case, similarly in China in more recent years and when I look at my roots in Israel, there are a disproportionate amount of Entrepreneurs compared to the size of population. Typically, there is less of a stigma around failure, people are less scared to fail and emboldened to try. There is a greater encouragement to step up and give things a go. 

I would encourage any entrepreneur to spend less time second guessing themselves, to accept the risks and understand that they may not succeed but the benefits to trying, in terms of personal development, leadership experience, even financial acumen, are of huge value. 

There are, in my view, huge benefits to your career trajectory and what you can offer a prospective employer if you’ve tried starting a business. As an employer, when I look at someone with four years Management Consultancy experience against someone who had 3 years in Management Consulting and one year trying to start a company that failed, I know who I would prefer to employ and I would probably pay them more as well. 

I appreciate there is a financial cost to business failure that is not to be underestimated and success requires huge sacrifice, but stepping up and having a go is something I have huge respect for and would encourage any aspiring entrepreneur to do, especially with the range of funding options that are available these days.