As Director of Range & Merchandising, my role expanded beyond the Bloom & Wild brand to encompass the physical product and merchandising strategy for bloomon, a Dutch flower subscription brand acquired in 2020. The acquisition of bloomon and Bergamotte - a French flower and plant business - made Bloom & Wild Group Europe’s largest online flower gifting brand. I lead the team responsible for the ideation, development and execution of hundreds of products in multiple categories for two brands that traded in 8 European countries, as well as in Sainsbury’s stores. Highlights included:Developing the ‘one-off’ strategy for bloomon who, prior to the acquisition, had been a subscription-first brand. We focussed on range expansion, onsite execution and identifying a range of customer use cases to capture incremental ordersCreating and scaling the Range & Merchandising function at bloomon. I grew the team and translated the processes and ways of working from Bloom & Wild to set the nascent bloomon Range team up for success Evolving the Bloom & Wild range strategy to capture a broader scope of customer missions to help sustain the brand’s growth as Bloom & Wild achieved market leadership in the UKAs a member of the Senior Leadership Team for the Group I was closely involved in company wide strategic decisions and helping to maintain the culture as we became a remote-first, international organisation

Led the team responsible for the physical product range for the Bloom & Wild brand, from product ideation through to development and onsite launch and merchandising. Highlights included:- Expanding the product range to 100s of products across multiple categories, and adapting the onsite merchandising to support this growth- Successfully protecting the customer experience through periods of hyper growth, maintaining an NPS score of 70+ across all markets - Led successful retail launches, firstly on Ocado and then Sainsbury's, where salesexceeded forecast by 100%+ leading to the 25 store trial becoming permanent in over 120 stores nationwide

It had become apparent to me that whilst we had developed a best in class app, slick onsite experience and the beginnings of an industry leading supply chain, the product itself - whilst innovative - needed a lot of refinement if we wanted customers to truly love what we were doing. I made it my mission to make Letterbox Flowers the most loved gift on the market. That meant elevating every customer touchpoint from onsite photography and merchandising through to the bouquets, unboxing experience and packaging. This would have been easy with unlimited budgets and an ambient product, but the reality of working with one of the fastest FMCGs at a hyper growth scale-up is that the commercial goals and operational reality have to be balanced with the customer-first ambitions. I became adept at balancing the needs of our customers with the objectives of the business, and ensuring that we reached an outcome that kept everyone happy. To begin with, it was just me, but over time I grew the team and put the processes in place to keep pace with the business as it grew.

Ostensibly responsible for creating and posting content on social media to grow our presence there, and managing and building our community of influencers. In reality, as the 6th person to join the team, it was all hands on deck so I got stuck in to all kinds of areas, from copy writing and bouquet naming to photography styling and packaging design (which overall was for the best. Scroll back far enough and you'll see the content I was creating, and the abrupt change when an actual professional took over...)

Mostly spent making seeds look sexy with the Valencia filter (it was a different time)

My introduction to the world of hyper-growth FMCG startups made me a passionateadvocate for customer experience, having witnessed first-hand the influence it has on abrand's success.