Last year we made a promise. Here’s what we’re doing to keep it.

4th October 2021

Since our first pledge back in June 2020, we’ve been working hard to make the right kind of changes in our business when it comes to diversity and inclusion. Both internally and externally. And while we realise we still have a long way to go, we’re proud of our progress. So here’s what’s changed in the last year.

1. We’ve diversified our collection names and the models we use

We want to make sure that Black people and other ethnic minorities feel represented in all aspects of our marketing. So we’ve created a brand diversity & inclusion pledge that we're going to hold ourselves accountable to. In this, we promise to always use models from a range of ethnicities and races. Because we want the faces of our brand to reflect the diversity of our customers. Alongside that, we’ve made a conscious effort to use both European and non-European names for our bouquets.

2. We’re using our platform to spotlight BAME-owned businesses

One of the most direct ways to support the Black community is by shopping with Black-owned businesses. That’s why we’re using our social media platforms and email newsletters to spotlight some of our favourite ones. If you’re an email subscriber or follow us on our socials, you’ll know we often do giveaways. And since last year, a third of the competitions we’ve run have been with black-owned businesses. Half have been with a BAME-owned business.

3. We’ve continued to strengthen our internal diversity and inclusion policies

Last year, we introduced mandatory unconscious bias training for the whole team. We’re still working with these specialists to train all new starters too. And to make sure we all stay educated on topics relating to diversity and inclusion, we regularly host ‘Lunch & Learn’ sessions where we invite guest speakers or colleagues to talk about a particular subject.

Because of the D&I objectives our Leadership Team have been holding themselves accountable for, we’ve been able to increase our new hires who are people of colour by 74%, from 19% in April 2020 to 33% in April 2021. But we recognise that we’ve still got a way to go to be reflective of London’s working population by ethnicity. That’s why our People Team is continuously looking at new ways to attract more candidates from underrepresented ethnic groups.

4. We’ve partnered with companies and charities that support the Black community

We realised that as a South London based company, we could be doing more to support our local community. So last year, we started donating 10% of all sales made through Instagram to Blueprint For All (formerly the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust) as well as four other charities. They work with young people and communities to create an inclusive society where everyone - regardless of their race, ethnicity or background - can thrive.

We'll continue updating this page with all our progress.

Wondering what’s changed in the last four months?

8th October 2020

Back in June, the Black Lives Matter Movement made us realise we could do more to support Black communities. So we committed to making changes across the business. In celebration of UK Black History Month, we’d love to tell you about the progress we’ve made. And if you’d like to see our original promises - keep scrolling, they’re at the bottom of this page, exactly as we wrote them in June.

1. We’re now featuring more Black and NBPoC in our marketing

We realised our imagery wasn’t inclusive enough. So to address the issue, we’re now working with a more diverse range of models and we’ve increased our budgets to make sure we’ll always do this for every photoshoot. We were able to start this over the summer and will keep it up forever so that we can have fairer representation across the images we share.

2. We’ve diversified our influencer and partnerships base

We’ve now increased diversity in our influencer gifting lists. This means that the people we actively send flowers to on the regular are 40% BAME (of this 46% are Black, 20% are Asian and 34% are Mixed Race) and 60% White. We’re also looking at our representation of the LGBTQ+ community, and of this influencer split 23% are now LGBTQ+.

From a partnerships perspective, since August we’ve been working with Black independent businesses we love every month. If you know of any that you think would be a good fit for us in the future, we’d love to know! Feel free to drop us a line at partnerships@bloomandwild.com as we’re always looking for new businesses to hero with joint marketing activities (like competitions).

3. We’ve strengthened our internal diversity and inclusion policies

Our People team has prioritised working hard to strengthen our internal policy to better protect our team from any form of discrimination. They’ve worked with specialists to help educate our team about how to continue to create a consciously inclusive workplace and how to challenge their own - and other people’s - unconscious biases. We’ve introduced mandatory training on unconscious biases and our whole team is currently completing these courses. All new starters will have this too, so that as our team grows we’ll continuously educate ourselves on all topics related to diversity and inclusion. On top of this, we’ve built specific diversity and inclusion objectives into all our Leadership Team’s annual objectives so they can help us keep building an inclusive business.

We also think it's important for businesses to report on diversity within their teams. So we’ve signed up to the #knowyourdata campaign, which is calling on the UK’s startups and venture capitalists to commit to collecting diversity data of their employees and investees. We’ve now completed our first diversity and inclusion survey and we’ll be reporting internally on diversity in our team and measuring our progress year on year.

What next?

We know there’s always more progress to be made. So we’ll keep updating you on ours as we go.

Black lives matter. So here’s what we’re changing to recognise that.

12th June 2020

We posted a black tile on #blackouttuesday because Black lives matter. And because we know there’s more our business can do. So we used this as an opportunity to make a pledge to do better. Here are some of the things we’re prioritising right now that we’ll hold ourselves accountable for today, tomorrow and forever.

1. Featuring more Black people and NBPoC in our marketing

Coronavirus has meant we’ve had to press pause on all paid photoshoots for now. As soon as we are allowed to safely shoot again, we promise to diversify the models we work with. We’ll do this by always having more than one model so we can be more representative of Black and NBPoC. As well as showing better visual representation on our platforms, we want to do this to make sure we’re fairly giving work to people from minority ethnicities.

But we won’t stop there. To widen the base of people who get special offers and news from us, we’re updating our marketing and PR media list to include a more diverse mix of publishers. We’ve started this work already. But it will take a few months to be seen by customers because of booking and printing timelines.

We also promise to be more inclusive with the little details - like the names of our bouquets - starting from this summer.

2. Reviewing our influencer base for equal representation

While our influencer base does include Black people and NBPoC already, we know it’s not representative enough right now. Last week our Social team began working to fix this imbalance. As a first step, this week we started sharing photos that celebrate our wonderful community on social. And our influencer list is already looking much more representative. We will start actively reaching out to the people on this list when we do our next influencer gifting, this summer.

Know of a Black or NBPoC influencer who could work well with us? Just let us know by emailing social@bloomandwild.com. While we can’t promise work for everyone, we’d love your suggestions (and just so you know, as part of this work, we’re also trying to be more representative of LGBTQ+ and disabled influencers too).

3. Strengthening our internal diversity and inclusion policies

This is a big priority for our People team right now. We’re currently strengthening our internal policy to better protect our team from any form of discrimination, working with external specialists to help educate our team about unconscious biases (and how to question them) and reviewing our hiring processes to look for proactive ways to welcome Black and NBPoC employees.

We want to be very open and honest with you about our progress on these points. We’ve started working on them all already, but always welcome your thoughts on how we’re doing and what more we can do. If you’re interested to hear more, we’ll keep updating this page as things get underway so check back anytime.

We also want to use our platform to share some of the resources we’re learning and taking action from. They’re in the BLM highlights reel on our Instagram account. We hope this helps educate our customers and followers - and inspire action from them, too.

All our love and support,

The Bloom & Wild team