UK finalist 2021
Aron Gelbard
CEO & Co-Founder, Bloom & Wild
Nothing gets in the way of an entrepreneur with a big idea. That’s why a then 30-year Harvard MBA and management consultant Aron Gelbard broke out from a comfortable California-based career path and began measuring London letterboxes in 2013. It was just one part of developing a master plan with Bloom & Wild co-founder Ben Stanway, to create a transformational, technologically led and customer-driven new business model in fresh flower delivery.
Today, Bloom & Wild is a fast-growing UK online flower and gifting company, with fresh, long-lasting, letterbox-delivered flowers as a leading product line. With revenues exceeding £100mn, the business has already expanded into France, Germany, Austria and Ireland.
Aron led the effort to reduce the supply chain from up to 10 days for traditional florists to just 4 days for Bloom & Wild, thus optimising the customer experience in this perishable sector.
For the first year of Bloom & Wild, I wondered if what we were doing would ever be a success. On our first Mother's Day, nearly a year after we started, I had 1000 orders to process by hand, I knew two things — firstly that I'd created something that was working, and secondly that I was going to invest in technology to develop a proper scalable process.
Bloom & Wild use data-driven forecasting to minimise perishable waste and pinpoint trading peaks; all letterbox packing is 100% recyclable and the business has a carbon-neutral footprint. This is all part of Aron’s and his team’s mission to build a company that not only delivers brilliantly for its customers but does so in the most responsible way possible.
