Why We Built BloomCore

I want to tell you the story of how this company got started, because I think it matters — not as a marketing exercise, but because the problem we're solving is real, and it came from someone I love.

My mother has run a flower shop for over twenty years. She built it from nothing: a small cooler, a delivery van she drove herself, a reputation earned one arrangement at a time. If you've spent any time in a family flower shop, you know the kind of work it takes. Early mornings at the wholesale market. Late nights before Mother's Day. A level of craft and care that's invisible to the customer but everything to the person doing it.

For most of those twenty years, she was also enrolled in a wire service. The reasoning made sense at the time — incoming orders, access to a national network, the legitimacy of a recognized brand symbol in the window. What wasn't obvious, for a long time, was how much it was costing her.

The Commission Conversation

About three years ago, my father — who handles the books — sat down and added it up for the first time. Not the monthly membership fee, which was visible. The commissions. The percentage that came out of every filled order, automatically, before any money hit the account.

The number for that year was startling. It was tens of thousands of dollars. For a shop her size, it wasn't abstract. It was the difference between a comfortable year and a stressful one. It was the thing standing between where the business was and where it could be.

He called me because I work in software. "There has to be a better way," he said. "Why does a florist in 2023 have to give away a quarter of every sale to a middleman?"

I didn't have a good answer. So I started looking for one.

What We Found When We Looked

The floral technology market, it turns out, has not caught up with what independent florists actually need. The legacy wire services are large, entrenched, and not particularly motivated to change their commission structures. The POS platforms built specifically for florists are mostly old, difficult to use, and priced in a way that punishes shops as they grow.

The tools florists were using to run their businesses — for order management, customer data, delivery routing, online sales — were built 15 to 20 years ago and hadn't changed much since. Meanwhile, every other small business category had been transformed by modern software that was faster, more intuitive, and priced fairly.

We decided to build what should already exist: a complete operating system for a flower shop, charged at a flat monthly rate, with no commissions on sales.

What We Believe

We believe that the person who grows the relationship with the customer, who sources the flowers, designs the arrangement, and delivers it on time, should keep the overwhelming majority of the sale. The platform that facilitates that transaction should be paid a reasonable flat fee — like any other business tool — not a percentage that scales against the florist's success.

We believe independent flower shops are worth fighting for. They are a meaningful part of their communities. They exist because someone decided to build something with their own hands, their own taste, and their own risk tolerance. They deserve software that respects that.

We believe the people who work in flower shops are often underestimated. The operational complexity of running a floral business — managing perishable inventory, coordinating time-sensitive deliveries, maintaining customer relationships across holidays and funerals and weddings — is genuinely hard. The tools they use every day should make that easier, not add friction.

Where We Are Now

BloomCore is built. My mother's shop was one of our earliest test environments — in the best possible way. We built features by watching the real problems in a real shop. We fixed things when real orders revealed edge cases our spec didn't anticipate. We learned what "done" actually looks like when you're responsible for Valentine's Day.

The platform is available today for independent florists who are ready to stop giving away a commission on every sale. Flat rate. All features included. No long-term contract.

If you're reading this and it sounds familiar — if you've done the math and felt that same frustration my father felt when he first added it up — I'd love to show you what we built.

We built it for shops like my mother's. We hope it's useful for yours.

— The BloomCore Team