Impactful Stories #4: Bloom & Wild

I had the pleasure of catching up with Charlotte Langley, Brand and Communications Director at Bloom & Wild at the end of last year. They’ve been going from strength to strength, recently announcing their series D funding round of £75 million to continue to grow their much loved flower gifting brand.

As someone who turned 30 in Lockdown one in the UK and received more than one beautiful Bloom and Wild bouquet through the post, I can vouch for the importance of the acts of care and generosity facilitated by their service.

Whilst rapidly growing their business, they’ve also been investing meaningfully in their social and environmental impact, which we dive into here.

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Could you tell us about the mission of Bloom & Wild?

Our mission is to make sending and receiving flowers the joy it should be. We want to be the world’s leading and most loved flower and gifting brand. That most loved part is really important and where our impact strategies come in, we want to earn our brand love, and we know that doing business responsibly is really important to our customers.

Where did the prompt or decision to invest in your impact come from?

It was important to us to put social impact strategies in place both for our employees and our customers. We’re a values led business so naturally our people have strong values and we all wanted to build out these strategies, and we know sustainability and charity initiatives are increasingly important to our customers too.

Who is responsible for your social and environmental impact strategies?

It’s different for social impact and sustainability. For social impact it’s the brand team who owns that, my team. Though we work closely with other teams like finance and the people team in order to work out how to structure it and how to involve the whole company.

For sustainability, it is a little more complicated. Our COO led the initial work as we wanted to understand our footprint across our supply chain. Once we had the information around our emissions it came to my team to decide how best to communicate all this information. For us transparency was the most important pillar of that communication. We made sure that if we told our customers something we could back that up with data, this meant a lot of back and forth between us and our operations team to get the right data to back up our comms. Bloom & Wild Sustainability Report 2020.

What are your future social and environmental goals?

On the sustainability side, now we know where our emissions are coming from, we’re committed to reducing our CO2 per bouquet from 2.5kg to 2.3kg in 2021.

We’ve currently bought into a ready made program for carbon offsets, so that we could start offsetting immediately. As we grow we’ll be exploring bespoke projects that overlap with our business.

On the social side we announced a partnership with Carers Trust in 2020. This is a new approach for us. I was keen to build something long term, where our charity partner could rely on us and increase the benefits we could create for them.

We’ve just launched our new branding platform, with the tagline ‘Care wildly’, as we see our customers doing this day in day out, and we like to think we care wildly about every one of their orders in turn. We wanted to make sure our social impact strategy was a seamless extension of this caring mentality. So supporting unpaid carers who sacrifice so much to care for their loved ones felt like something we knew our customers would connect with.

During covid we had a very successful partnership with the National Emergencies Trust, which we donated to through our florist’s pick bouquet. We’re going to continue that mechanism with The Carers Trust and also find more ways to work with them, raising awareness about what it means to be an unpaid carer. We’d like to use our platform, which reaches 2.2 million via email and a quarter of a million on Instagram, to integrate their message.

I also noticed you launching the Thoughtful Marketing Movement over the past few years. Could you share a little more about that?

This is another strand of our social impact strategy. Two years ago we offered an opt out for Mother’s Day emails and the response we had was absolutely massive. We saw many other brands follow suit, which we loved as it meant so many more people could benefit from the idea. We decided to take it one step further so we launched the Thoughtful Marketing Movement to which 160 brands are signed up to.

We’ve had small charities come to us worried that if they do this they’ll lose people and donations. We were able to share data with them that showed that actually these customers weren’t less valuable over the long term because you’re only shielding them from content they don’t want to see anyway. You don’t want to be landing in someone’s inbox and upsetting them, so it makes sense from a branding point of view as well as a customer point of view.

We now have a significant preferences centre. We’ve run events and published articles, helping others set up similar systems. You can join the community of brands here.

How do you engage with your team to surface new ideas and connect?

We use Slack as a company which means you’re well connected to everyone, including ways to submit anonymous innovation. It’s a useful way of everyone feeling like they can share ideas and useful feedback from customers. That’s how the opt out idea came about as our customer delight team was able to feed back that some customers were finding Mother’s Day emails upsetting, and the idea of opting-out came about in response to that.

What were some of the biggest challenges with your impact strategy?

Diving into our sustainability, whilst fulfilling, was a time consuming process. We read a lot of articles and spoke to a lot of people to try and make sure we were doing a good job. It was a steep learning curve, finding out about the Greenhouse Gas Protocols, conversion factors, having to include buffers, assessing our supply chain and each bit of packaging we use. We had to test each change to ensure they still worked from an operational point of view.

On the social side, understanding what a meaningful partnership looks like when working with a charity partner. Making sure that we’re actually being helpful and knowing what to expect in building out those relationships.

What advice would you give to other businesses looking at their impact strategy?

The first step is getting really clear about what it is that you do and stand for as a business. And then it becomes much easier to decide who you want to work with, that authenticity check is super important.
Also consider how you’re going to make your impact sustainable. This is why we raise funds for our charity partner from a specific bouquet we sell, because we know that day in and day out we can deliver for our partner over the long term. We realised that we could have more significant impact rather than ad hoc initiatives and we can structure that financially into our business plan.

You can learn more about Bloom & Wild and send a bouquet online and join their community on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.

If you’d like to find ways to increase your social and environmental impact, book a free consultation call with the Impactful team here.

We’re also looking to feature other impact organisations in our stories series, so if that’s your organisation or you know of an organisation we could speak to, drop us a note at hello@impactful.world.