INTERVIEW:
Bloomingville
In full bloom
Driven by a fascination of Nordic style and fashion, Bloominville has grown to become an international business covering many categories. Gifts Today questions their CEO Lars Krog to find out more. Can you tell us a little about Bloomingville’s history? What was the inspiration behind the business? Back in year 2000 the company was founded on a fascination of Nordic style and living. Passion and devotion grew the company over the first decade and in 2014 it became part of Regent Holding, a group based in the US, experts within home décor having a global approach. Bloomingville has always wanted to offer a wide range of products, that all look great individually but especially when put together. As a Danish company, where does the inspiration behind the range come from when we look at design and lifestyle? A dedicated PD team, based at HQ in Denmark, are the nerve of every new collection presented. The team always have eyes and ears open. New trends are being spotted, discussed and further delivered via moodboards to sourcing and sampling departments. As a business, Bloomingville started as an own brand company and has moved steadily to become a multi-brand business. Can you tell us a little more about this? The Bloomingville brand grew organically through the first years and in 2015 a little sister was born. Bloomingville MINI has its own separate brand, yet still rooted in the Bloomingville aestethics. Joining a global group in 2015 opened for cross selling the different entities and products and now 38 Gifts Today
Bloomingville Group offers a range of brands including Bloomingville, Bloomingville MINI, Creative Collection and Illume x Bloomingville. When did products from Bloomingville first enter the UK market and what was the ethos behind this? During the first years of Bloomingville, the brand was primarily offered in the beginning in Denmark and then further on also in Scandinavia. However, based on a great interest from nearby countries, ten years ago the company hired sales reps in the UK, at same time with other European countries. That step has certainly proven right. Since then, the UK business has performed exceptionally well – can you tell Gifts Today readers a little more on how this growth has been driven? In 2018 we had a change of structure in the UK. Signing an agreement with Simon Pykett. Simon was tasked with building both a team in the UK to represent us and also our turnover. This partnership has seen us double turnover in less than three years. How many SKUs do you currently hold within your offering and what categories do these cover? We always carry between 2.500 and 3.000 SKUs in stock at our warehouse in Denmark. The entire collection is even within the brands split in different themes giving our customers a great chance of finding styles exactly supporting their businesses.
We offer a wide range of products within more categories such as Home Accessories, Lighting, Kitchen, Bed & Bath, Outdoor, Furniture, Room Scents and Children (within Bloomingville MINI). A yearly collection of Christmas is also offered. When we look at the gifting arena, is there a particular product or range that your customer’s currently view as a must have item? We have a wide range of products in our collections, but there is no doubt that decorative items for the home are top sellers currently. Our customers are looking for anything that helps bring some cozyness and decorative styling into the home, for example, smaller pieces of furniture, vases, candle holders, scented candles, cushions, storage and kitchen accessories. Naturally, many brands experienced delivery and stock issues through the Pandemic and of course Brexit – did this create any challenges for the business and if so, how did you overcome these? The Pandemic and obviously also Brexit has certainly caused a lot of challenges for the business. In Bloomingville we have tried aggressively to face and attack these challenges from day one. The team working with purchase and import has done a tremendously great job in securing a solid level of inventory throughout both 2020 and 2021. Our UK export team has, similar to import, spent many of hours trying to make export to UK and import in UK as smooth as possible. Q1 was tough, but we think we succeeded
