How Technology Helps Edible Blooms Keep Things Fresh

With Valentine’s Day just around the corner the Neto team visited ecommerce award-winning retailer Edible Blooms, where we spoke to the Brisbane store manager, Maud Assen about what makes Edible Blooms different, how she works to create an environment that the staff love, and what the company has in store for Valentine’s Day.

The Edible Blooms Story

Founder, Kelly Jamieson, started Edible Blooms 13 years ago after wanting to get out of the corporate world to instead make gifts with a difference—beautiful floral arrangements with chocolate and fruit. This dream was turned into a single store on the outskirts of Brisbane with just Kelly and another employee designing, meticulously crafting and delivering each bouquet in person.

Within the first 12 months of business, Kelly called upon her sister (and now business partner), Abbey Baker to assist, and together they opened another store in Sydney, followed by Adelaide, Melbourne, New Zealand, Perth, and more recently global expansion in Switzerland.

2017 was a big one for Kelly who became the face of Telstra business products, was named Telstra Young Business Woman of the Year for SA and awarded Internet Retailing’s 2017 Top 50 People in ecommerce.

Just when you think this woman couldn’t get any busier, in November 2017 she launched a brand new concept in the UK, taking the learnings from Edible Blooms and launching moniker, Gift Rebellion.

So, what makes Edible Blooms different? Everything is made to order – daily, even in peak retail periods where they deliver over 1,000 bouquets daily. Fascinated?

Here’s how they do it.

Culture - It’s The Little Things That Count

The culture at Edible Blooms is centered around the company values. Being fun, fresh, authentic and amazing, is a core part of who they are and how they operate on a day to day basis. It’s their mantra and all staff live and breathe these values each and every day.

“We always make sure we have a great culture in our store—that we have fun. We are creating different, great ways of gifting, and we love to amaze people. We want to make sure that there is a wow factor in every box that’s opened.” Maud says.

Part and parcel of this is fostering a culture of openness and communication so that each team member feels like they can bring new ideas to the table, helping Edible Blooms to constantly innovate and push the boundaries of what’s achievable.

“We have a small team but we communicate very well. From the first day new employees work with us they know what is expected. Every single person here has great ideas and they are all valued.”

This positive culture spreads infectiously even to passersby; customers, visitors, suppliers and couriers are welcomed into Edible Blooms with smiles and treats, “there’s a lot of TLC in our boxes, so we’ve got a jar of chocolates at the door for the couriers which makes them smile. You want the couriers to be happy because if the couriers are happy then the customers will see that big smile when their bouquet is delivered,” Maud explains.

Ask For Feedback and Keep Your Customers Happy

There are a variety of ways that Edible Blooms work to understand their customers and keep them happy. Here’s just a few of them:

1. Net Promoters Scores (NPS): a globally trusted indicator to predict future business growth, NPS scores measure customer experience, or how happy customers would be to recommend your business to family and friends. Edible Blooms started measuring NPS back in 2012 and have used the feedback to greatly improve their business, processes and product development, listening to the customer and taking ownership for any issues encountered to ensure the experience is even better next time.
2. Face to face: Edible Blooms in Brisbane is an actual storefront, so when the team gets walk-in customers Maud and her team can easily gauge their satisfaction in person and deal with any issues instantly.
3. Over the phone: the Adelaide-based call centre fields all the calls, emails, orders, complaints and concerns, promptly resolving issues and ensuring customers are happy. “We’re not perfect; there are hiccups and mistakes get made. What’s important to us is that if there is a mishap the customer is able to call the centre and speak to somebody and that person can relate to them.” Maud says.
4. Reviews: actively monitoring reviews across Google, social media, and other product review sites also helps Edible Blooms to understand customer preferences and pain points, and the reviews act as a trust mark for potential customers. The ecommerce website has a neat feature where a Google customer review score for each product floats in the bottom corner of the screen, and a subtle but effective message that pops up each time a purchase is made, creating that sense of urgency and feeling that ‘everybody else is doing it’.

Their consistent focus on service excellence has just seen them awarded the 2018 Canstar #1 Online Florist Award. Reviewed independently by the people of Australia, this recognition amongst their peers was a huge honour for the Edible Blooms team.

| Related Reading: Securing Customer Reviews: Your Key to Ecommerce Success

The Secret Is in the Tech

Starting the day at eight in the morning the very first thing the Edible Blooms team does is check out the Neto dashboard, their retail management platform, to review all of the orders that have come through.

“We then prioritise what we need to make first, because customers can order in the morning for that afternoon and go from there. We select the orders, print them out, get the card message or personalised messages and send out everything that afternoon. Simple.”

Although the teams are geographically dispersed thanks to the help of Neto’s cloud technology the teams work closely together. For example, over the busy Christmas period the Brisbane store might ask for help from another store, and can move the order across to the other store at the click of a button, maintaining control over stock across all the warehouses. Maud tells of the time they ran out of Moet:

“We ran out because it was so popular and the delivery was only arriving the next morning. We called the Perth store who said “no worries, pop it on our dash”, so we go into Neto, transfer it to their dash and they send it in the afternoon so the customer located in Brisbane will get their arrangement that we couldn’t fulfil—without us having to give any bad news. We collaborate as a team, work it out, and get it done.”

Using Neto has helped Edible Blooms automate manual tasks (like paperwork), and speed up processes so much so that they’ve gone from hiring 8-10 casual staff to cater for increased demand over Christmas to hiring only three. Working closely with the Neto design team has also helped Edible Blooms to optimise the customer’s journey and experience navigating the website, always trying new things to increase conversions.

What’s On The Cards for Valentine’s Day?

Before Valentine’s Day or other big occasions, the Edible Blooms team gets together to share their ideas for new ways of gifting. So, what’s the process after they land upon a new product idea? Maud explains the four step process

• Create a ‘recipe’ for constructing the bouquet with the number of chocolates, colours, materials etc.
• Create a training video to ensure consistency across the stores
• The marketing team takes photos and adds it to the website
• Wait for the orders to roll in!

And if you’re looking for a Valentine’s Day gift for that special someone, Edible Blooms won’t disappoint.

We do like to surprise our customers - we have great products coming out for Valentine’s Day, jump on the website to check it out.