Bloom & Wild Group arranges personalized content for customers

Introduction

Launched as a startup in 2013, Bloom & Wild Group has trailblazed Europe, becoming its leading online flower- and plant-delivery company. Following two acquisitions in 2021, Bloom & Wild rebranded to Bloom & Wild Group. Today the company operates three brands and serves customers within eight European markets.

As the company continued to diversify its offerings, grow its customer base, and maintain the content required to support both, it ran into a problem — its legacy content management system was to blame. Bloom & Wild Group’s digital teams were required to maintain content manually across various properties, which meant updating content or creating customized experiences were slow to fruition.

Bloom & Wild Group’s digital teams were required to maintain content manually across its properties in a legacy CMS, preventing team members from making rapid updates or creating customized experiences for customers. Bloom & Wild Group’s mission, “Be the destination for making life a little more thoughtful and beautiful,” was constrained by its legacy digital infrastructure.

Such challenges prevented Bloom & Wild Group from providing a customer experience that aligned with one of its four brand pillars, “care wildly.” The company needed a new content solution that would allow it — and the creativity of its internal teams — to further blossom. Contentful was that solution.

Brightening the workday with a new content solution

Before Contentful, Bloom & Wild Group’s marketing site was a string of hard-coded webpages and platforms. There was no unified place to store or access assets. Additionally, both publishing and editing content demanded technical prowess.

“We needed a platform that empowered people to easily deliver content to customers without developers being responsible for making all of the changes,” Acquisition and Discovery Engineering Manager Jamie-Lee McLeish said.

It chose Contentful to begin its journey toward a new content approach. First, teams migrated the company’s homepage to Contentful. The result was a dramatic increase in publishing speed and much-needed flexibility to meet changing market conditions.

“Our content changes quite a bit,” Acquisition and Discovery Lead Syed Kazmi said. “You can see the homepage changing from day to day, depending on sales. If there’s a favorite for customers, we want to put it in front of their eyes because we know they love it. So we have to change things very quickly.”

Just as important, the Contentful Composable Content Platform® changed the way the Bloom & Wild Group’s teams work together, extending those that can make adjustments directly, empowering marketing and sales teams to make changes at the speed of business.

Migrating to Contentful also allowed Bloom & Wild Group to create event-specific experiences for customers, making recommendations based on previous purchases and communicated preferences. For example, customers who bought flowers around Mother’s Day receive related, holiday-specific content and offers. In contrast, those who have opted out of Mother’s Day-related messages are shown completely different content.

“We only want to put content in front of the customer that they want to see,” Kazmi said. “By asking our customers if they want to see occasion-specific content they can choose to opt-out, and based on their request we are able to adapt the site completely. This is great for potentially sensitive occasions like, for example, Mother’s or Father’s Day.”

Pulling together a consistent arrangement of content

Contentful has given Bloom & Wild Group fertile soil to support future growth. Adopting a composable approach to content allows Bloom & Wild Group to rearrange text, images, and other media to quickly meet changing business needs.

“This componentization has made the process for us a lot easier in the long run because we can leave the content to our team members and let them use it as they see fit,” Kazmi said. “I see it as a massive box of Lego which you can just pick and choose and rearrange the page in any order you want. And that’s really useful to be able to do.”

This modular approach to content will become increasingly important as Bloom & Wild Group extends its roots even further.

In April 2021, Bloom & Wild Group acquired Dutch flower company bloomon and its loyal customers in the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, and Belgium. The linguistic diversity tied to these new areas presented a new content operations need. Bloom & Wild Group needed the ability to quickly update content across web properties in various locales. The company is currently in the process of migrating bloomon’s digital experience to one powered by composable content and Contentful.

“One of the key things we’ve been looking for is consistency,” Kazmi said. “Now we can spin up whole pages within a matter of seconds without having to completely rebuild the page from scratch, as is the current process for bloomon.”

Planting seeds for the next growing season

Migrating to Contentful empowered Bloom & Wild Group’s digital teams to deliver accurate and consistent content to its customers. More importantly, it allows Bloom & Wild Group to tailor the content it delivers to customers to avoid holidays or occasions that might create more distress than joy. That level of personalization not only furthers the company’s mission but also affirms its values.

“We use Contentful to help creators quickly and easily deliver content that inspires customer happiness,” Kazmi said.

Looking forward, the company hopes to build out content that can be consumed in the way modern customers most prefer it: self-serve.

“We’d like to explore how, from the tech side, we can push the boundaries of that content. We have the technical knowledge and Contentful has given us the space to experiment,” Kazmi said.