Don’t just care – care wildly. At least that’s the mantra Bloom & Wild uses as a guide for not only their marketing, but through every step of their organisation, from deciding what products to launch, to how they employ tech solutions in their sustainability journey. Having interviewed the company pre-Covid, we decided that, after everything that’s happened in the world, we needed to speak to this Challenger again to find out how they weathered the storm and came out blooming. So, just in time for spring, Chief Marketing Officer Charlotte Langley sat down with eatbigfish to give us the low-down on all things flowers.

We interviewed your co-founder and CEO Aron Gelbard back in 2017 when Bloom & Wild was only a few years old. How has the business changed over the last 8 or so years?

*Charlotte Langley, Chief Marketing Office at Bloom & Wild, photo credit: Tom Griffiths*

So clearly, between 2017 and 2025 there was a small thing called COVID, which for a business like ours, was pretty transformational, because of the role that we play for people. We play in a segment we call ‘care from afar’, and that was obviously completely top of mind for people during that period. And so, we acquired a lot of new customers over that time. We were fortunate as a business. It was a very busy time for us. But more than that, we could really lean into and show people what we do best – help them connect with somebody they care about.

We always say internally that we know it's not about the flowers, it's about what they are saying and what that person is trying to communicate with the flowers, or now other gifts as well. So, we try and be quite humble about that because yes, our products are really important because we have to give someone an amazing experience, but the real ‘why’ is because they're really trying to express something important. And so, during that period of time, I think, we opened a lot of people's eyes to how we can do that for them.

Concurrently, we were also developing our Care Wildly brand platform, which has been really important for us to articulate what we do for people, and shifting our marketing mix from heavily performance-driven to including a lot more brand work that actually tries to express who we are and what we do more boldly than our competitive set.

We've also done a lot of work on sustainability over the last five years. We've become a B Corp but more than becoming a B Corp, we have a really solid strategy and we've done some really interesting stuff in that space, like designing our bouquets to carbon budgets, not just financial budgets, which I really don't think anyone else is doing. We're using our tech DNA to do that, because we've built a stem database that can help us manage that, and we're also now trying to iterate on that to see whether we can get AI to proactively suggest stem switches for us to help us hit those carbon budgets.

What does it mean to Bloom & Wild to ‘Care Wildly’? Why is this your brand platform?

When we were creating the brand platform we spoke to customers and people in our target audience, and what became clear was that the way they show care was really active and intentional. They are doing all they can to show up for the people that matter most to them in big and small moments. So, the ‘wildly’ element is really testament to our customers who are super thoughtful and supportive.

It also speaks to who we are as a company. ‘Care’ was always one of our company values. It was quite a unique value already though because using a word like that for a company that is ambitious and fast paced and VC-backed is quite unusual, but now as ‘care wildly’ it is much more evocative of the way that we as a team try to serve our customers, and how we support each other. And it's a really good reminder of what our customers are doing. So, on all three of those aspects, it's stronger and more evocative.

What assumptions of your audience are you denying through your brand and marketing?

A core assumption that got us to the brand platform of ‘care wildly’ is that care is feminine in the most traditional sense of that word. It's soft. But actually, what we see is a real spectrum of care. It can be softer and more supportive, but it can also be really cheerleading, or quite angry, or thoughtful. And so, when we looked at advertising in our space, there was always a softly smiling woman, often with a man behind her. That's not what we do. We major in female-to-female gifting, that speaks to those powerful support networks that women have. Obviously, as we grow, we're expanding the recipient pool, but it's still, at its core, largely women who feel responsible for and take pleasure in having a wide impact, a supportive and caring impact on lots of people around them. Whereas I think the category was very focused on a romantic relationship between a man and a woman and hadn't really thought outside the box as to what was going on, or the kinds of relationship and connection it could champion.

*Image credit: Bloom & Wild / Goodstuff*

Can you tell us a bit more about your relationship with your customers? How do you meet them where they care?

There are lots of places online that you can buy stuff, but we are truly gifting first. We have built everything for that. It is possible to buy a subscription and buy for yourself on our site, but really our core DNA is in this gifting proposition and so because we understand the importance of that gesture, it has always been so important for us to obsess about the customer experience. We definitely have an internal culture of really caring about the details, because we understand how important what we're doing for our customers is emotionally – it's not just a transaction.

The customers get a feedback loop from their recipients too. So, making the customer happy automatically involves the recipient having a good experience. So, we can ask our customers things like, when you are gifting to somebody that you're not able to see for a while, what is it that's important to you? And they will say things that are very much about the recipient experience. They love the fact that our unboxing is so much stronger than our competitors, and it really has a journey. So, we tend to focus on the senders in terms of understanding what it is that we can do for them in that moment where they are trying to communicate something important to somebody that they can't be with, who they care about.

The category expansion is really important here. So we are, of course, known for flowers, but we're having real success in growing our broader gifting range. I think the reason that that's so successful is because we're helping our customers show up for more people, for more occasions. And when you're a gifting business, it’s really important to think, what is the spectrum of care that you can show up for? And so, expanding the product range has really helped us do that, and we've worked with our customers to do that. So, when we started, the first thing we did was go out to some of our loyal customers and ask, what would you consider sending? And actually, the answers surprised us a little bit. I think we thought initially that we might lean in harder to more home and lifestyle products. But actually, we've had real success with freshly baked products like brownies. There's a connection that people make between fresh flowers and fresh food, which has proven to be really strong. And as we evolve, we always try to do it with that care wildly lens as to how we can do this more thoughtfully than our competition.

Who is the Bloom & Wild customer? Is it a certain demographic? Or is it driven by something else?

So inevitably, you do have to have a sense of demographics for things like media buying, where you can't buy an attitude. We are very heavily female-focused with a lot of our gifting missions also being female to female – mums, sisters, best friends, that kind of thing. So that's really important, but in terms of age range, actually for us where you might think a DTC brand is very focused on younger customers – we don't see that. This is more of a mindset of people, largely women, who have this kind of support network, who they are also working hard to support. It’s that care from afar mindset.

This care from afar segment is where we play and what we do best. It's been really good to focus everybody's minds internally, because we've done things like expanding into plants, and at one time, particularly during COVID, self-purchasing plants was a big thing. But actually, now that we're past that time, we can have some self-purchase plants, but really what we want to focus on is the giftable plants. So, when we were designing our broader gift range, really knowing that it’s going to be sent directly to the recipient, that immediately says, okay, the unboxing is really important. It has to be a proper gift experience. It's not just about nice products that someone is then going to put in their own gift bag. And so, I think that care from afar mindset focuses the mind and also gives you that important sense of what you're not going to do and what you're not going to fix.

Although you are known primarily for flowers, you mentioned that Bloom & Wild has tech in its DNA. Can you tell us a bit about how this tech-side infuses the work that you do?

So the thing I always think is really unique about Bloom & Wild is that we are very, very data savvy, and we have this tech DNA, but we also have a lot of human empathy. We bring those two things together to inform how we act on the data. The best example is probably our batch resends activity at peak times, which is when we use our algorithms to predict which deliveries are likely to be late or lost, and we proactively resend the delivery to get it there on time. The recipient might end up with two bouquets, but we think that’s worth it to offer the best experience we can. Similarly, we have tech that aggregates contacts with our customer delight team into actionable quality data. We could leave that for a quarterly review of metrics, but instead, knowing how important each delivery is, we action these quality issues in real time, swapping out problem stems for example. Our thoughtful marketing is another example where we’ve used tech to respond with empathy to what our customers are going through. When we heard from a few customers that they’d rather not receive Mother’s Day emails, we found a way to scale this through segmentation of our emails and even our on site experience. Overall, we use tech in a way that is rooted in our values and genuinely focused on strengthening the customer experience.

You’ve seen huge growth over the last decade, how do you maintain your strong brand identity as you go from start-up to scale-up?

For the Bloom & Wild brand, that comes from a culture of questioning ourselves out loud when we're coming up with a campaign idea. Does this say ‘care wildly’? How does this support our ‘care wildly’ brand positioning? And that's a question I ask all the time. Could we do something to make this an even stronger explainer of what it means to care wildly? So, actually, that is something that we do in the brand team, which then means that the kinds of campaigns and activations that we run are very linked to that, which means that the rest of the company gets it, because it is very tightly connected to the brand platform.

When it comes to your external communications, are there any barriers you come up against in getting internal approval?

We minimize barriers by rooting things in customer insight. So a good example is when we decided to stop selling red roses at Valentine’s Day. The idea came from an internal conversation, because there are lots of problems with red roses at Valentine's Day, because the demand for that particular stem type is so huge on one day and then falls to zero the next day. So, from a sustainability point of view, it's not good. Also is this even really right for us as a brand? Because this is completely different from what people are buying year-round. And actually, this is what men are buying, and most of our customers year-round are women. So why are we suddenly changing our range for one week of the year to suit people who are not our core customers? But the recipients are our core customers, so what would they want and what would they buy? So, we did a piece of research on it to see if our hunch was right. And it came out that, yes, it was absolutely right, and people didn't think that red roses were thoughtful, and it wasn't really what they wanted to receive. In fact, it was the last thing they wanted to receive. So that gave us the confidence that our instincts were correct.

So, what’s next for Bloom & Wild?

It's really about, how we can build on our heritage in flowers to really genuinely become a gifting destination. So, using all the strengths that we've built up in terms of brand trust, quality of our range, the experience that we deliver, responsible sourcing, all of our sustainability credentials, the great UX, and digital experience and take all of that through into the next phase. The opportunity from a business point of view of gifting is huge, but also it makes us much more useful to our customers. So, really nailing that, bringing more and more people with us on that journey, and doing that in the way that really resonates with our customers, is going to be the next important phase.

“What is the spectrum of care you can show up for?”: Charlotte Langley, CMO of Bloom & Wild