Revolutionary Software Technology for Flower Arrangements

Bloom-in-the-USA: INNOWWIDE grant winners seizing opportunity for US expansion. Read on to learn more about BloomyPro’s recent €60.000 INNOWWIDE win.

Opening the US market

BloomyPro’s pioneering software is bringing the floral industry much needed advancement with a data-driven 3D technology for flower arrangement, along with real-time inventory and customer data integration. BloomyPro recently secured a €60.000 award from INNOWWIDE, a Horizon 2020 project that serves to bring innovative European small- and medium-sized enterprises to the forefront of international markets. With this funding, BloomyPro will be able to begin their expansion into the US market, in collaboration with new partner, Vistaflor, a floral e-commerce store. BloomyPro Frontman Roy van Voorthuysen described the importance of the new Bloom-in-the-USA project, “This will allow us to open up the US market. Vistaflor sells flowers, and they can now market our unique software. They are eager to open up the e-commerce flower market with BloomyPro.”

“A worldwide premier…”

Collaborating with Vistaflor will place the BloomyPro experience in the hands of consumers, who will be provided with an unprecedented shopping experience that allows them to design their own bouquets. As Roy points out, this is unlike anything offered before in the floral industry, “It will be a worldwide premier. There is no consumer that can make their bouquet online anywhere in the world!”  Such innovation could redefine the floral industry, which has remained almost unchanged for 100s of years.

The new creator platform, which will be used by consumers for bouquet design, will begin testing in November before BloomyPro and Vistaflor plan to take it live in the new year. Roy highlights an important date for the launch of the new platform on Vistaflor: “We aim to start going live in January, which is absolutely important, because we need to have a subset of flowers ready for Valentine’s Day, which is one of the top three days for flower sales in the US. Then, the consumer can create their own bouquet, which Vistaflor will deliver to the local retailer.”

BloomyPro as an online learning tool

Since the Covid-19 crisis began, BloomyPro is also expanding in other ways to match the increase in online learning. They saw a rapid rise in requests for their platform from Universities across the USA, who are now using it as a learning tool. This required a redesign of the BloomyPro user-interface to improve its usability for students learning about floral design. Resultantly, 300 schools and over 5,000 students are now working with BloomyPro online. This comes as a big change, as BloomyPro has previously focused exclusively on business to business solutions.

Working again with Catalyze, this time for the INNOWWIDE award

Following an SME instrument Phase I award in 2019, the recent success of this INNOWWIDE application again highlighted the potential of this innovative floral software solution. BloomyPro worked with Catalyze for a second time in as many years to write the application. “[Catalyze] did a great job. Eric Egberts (BloomyPro CEO) said it is always fun to work with Sabine and Neeltje… probably because it always has a positive ending! But we cannot do it on our own. With so many grant schemes, it really is a jungle!”

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Read more about BloomyPro

Learn about the INNOWWIDE project