His brand pioneered the concept of ‘letterbox flowers’ and has gone on to sell more than 50 million flowers across the UK, France and Germany. But Aron Gelbard, co-founder and CEO of Bloom & Wild, has revealed how his revolutionary idea nearly fell at the very first hurdle.
‘When we started, we assumed there was a standard letterbox – unfortunately (there’s) not,’ says Gelbard in the latest podcast from Piper’s second season of ‘How I Grew My Brand’ interviews with leading entrepreneurs.
The discovery forced Gelbard to take matters, literally, into his own hands. ‘I went around London with a notebook and ruler, measured thousands of letterboxes and typed them all up into a spread sheet… and used this to figure out how small a box would need to be to get through about 90 per cent of letterboxes.’
Bloom & Wild launched in 2013 and has since blossomed into the country’s best loved flower delivery brand, employing more than 70 staff and disrupting Europe’s £14bn fresh cut flower market.
In an intriguing encounter with broadcaster Mary Nightingale, Gelbard tells how the roots of his obsession with customer satisfaction can be traced back to moving to Britain, at the age of five, with his mother from France. ‘When you move somewhere new and you try to fit in, you always to try to please people and get validation – and that stuck with me.’
He also describes the biggest challenges of fast growth, reveals what keeps him awake at night and explains why he feels Britons are ‘a bit too scared of failure’.
Gelbard’s interview is the second episode in Season 2 of Piper’s How I Grew My Brand podcasts. The first interviewee in the series was Ella Mills, founder of Deliciously Ella.
In Season 1 of Piper’s How I Grew My Brand podcasts, Cassandra Stavrou, co-founder of Propercorn, Alex Reilley, co-founder of Loungers, Nicola Elliott, co-founder of Neom Organics and Ajith Jayawickrema, founder of Turtle Bay share their stories about growing successful brands.
All the Piper podcasts, along with the latest featuring Ella Mills, can be streamed on Spotify, iTunes or SoundCloud
