Bloombox Club make plants accessible to everyone for more than just aesthetic reasons. Believing that plant care enhances our sense of wellbeing, Bloombox Club deliver the best and most interesting plants available directly to your door, complete with plant care information.
What is Bloombox Club?
We are the UK’s first plant subscription business and our mission is to help people rediscover the wellbeing benefits of bringing plants into their homes. In addition to a range of subscription options, we also have a plant webshop with an ever-changing range of plants, varying from small to big.
Where are you based?
Our office is near London Fields in Hackney, but as we’ve grown that office has turned into somewhat of a jungle, forcing us to work from nearby cafes. Thankfully, there’s an array of good places to sit and work in the area.
How did you come about forming Bloombox Club?
Bloombox Club was started by Katie Cooper, who is a Doctor of Psychology. She used plant care as a means of treating patients suffering from anxiety, depression and stress. The hugely positive results she had from this led her to start Bloombox Club, with the aim of spreading the word about the physical and mental wellbeing benefits of plants.
Not long after, Lana Novak joined Katie. With an already keen interest in plants and wellbeing, it was an easy decision to put her advertising skills to good use by helping to grow Bloombox Club.
How have you embedded purpose into your business?
Purpose pretty much came hand-in-hand with the business. Without the wellbeing aspect, Bloombox Club wouldn’t have been formed in the first place. Our stressful, urban, tech-heavy lives are taking a toll on our health and connecting with nature is one of the easiest ways to relieve some of that stress. Taking care of a plant, in turn, helps people nurture themselves. That’s why all our subscription plants come with care cards and we have an extensive plant care section on our website. We want people to not just buy plants, but make them part of their lives. It’s an active purchase which brings joy for a long time.
We are also building up our blog, so that it becomes a treasure trove of advice on both plant care and self-care. Plus, we are looking to commission our own deep research into the psychological benefits of plants.
Do you feel it’s important for businesses to be purpose-driven?
Absolutely. Having a purpose gives the business a reason to exist and survive. From a founder’s point-of-view, purpose gives you that extra drive to push forward. The startup world is tough, with an obstacle of some sort popping up on an almost daily basis. Knowing there is a genuine purpose to what you’re doing means you’ve always got that higher goal in mind, which helps you to get through the daily grind.
From a customer point-of-view, there’s been a definite shift in younger generations looking beyond just materialism. I think we’re starting to reach a point of realisation that endless purchasing neither brings happiness nor is good for the planet.
Seeing as it was National Stress Day yesterday, do you have any advice to share on how you manage stress as an entrepreneur?
Our plants play a pretty big part in it! Both of us have a big collection of plants, so we make sure we take the time each day to tend to them. Just 15 minutes of dusting some larger leaves and plucking dry ones off can bring about a sense of calm. It’s our way of meditating and rebalancing. And when things get too much, there’s always our office jungle to hide in for a while!
Katie actually wrote an article for National Stress Awareness Day, highlighting how plants help. It can be found here.
What’s the focus for Bloombox Club now?
We’re currently in the middle of a crowdfunding campaign on CrowdCube, raising money to move Bloombox Club to a new level. Alongside increasing marketing budgets and making a couple of key hires, we’d like to do a lot more with content and grow our engaged community further. The wellbeing aspect is what we feel really strongly about, as does our audience, so we want to make sure we offer as much of that as possible. We’ve also been working on a few more subscription offers and gowing the shop range.
We’d also like to get into the B2B sector in the next year. The UK has the longest working week in Europe and with research showing more and more on how plants can benefit productivity and creativity, we want to turn every office into a green oasis for its workforce.
Visit the BloomBox Club website.
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