How a small act of consideration by a British flower delivery startup grew into a global movement — and why the industry is still catching up with its own best instincts
In the spring of 2019, Bloom & Wild — then a fast-growing online florist operating out of the United Kingdom — noticed something in its customer feedback. A small but consistent number of people were writing in before Mother’s Day asking, in various ways, to be left alone. They were not complaining about bouquet quality or delivery times. They were grieving. Or estranged. Or struggling through infertility. They did not want to be sold pink roses, and they were saying so.
The company’s response was, in retrospect, almost disarmingly simple. It sent its email subscribers a message asking whether they would like to opt out of Mother’s Day communications entirely. Those who said yes were quietly removed from the holiday campaign via the brand’s customer engagement platform, Braze. They continued to receive Bloom & Wild’s regular newsletters. They simply did not hear about peonies.
Almost 18,000 customers opted out. More than 1,500 wrote back — not to complain, but to say thank you. Social media interactions with the brand surged to more than four times their normal rate on the day the campaign launched. The initiative was mentioned by name in the House of Commons, where MP Matt Warman argued that if other companies followed suit, “the dread — and I do mean dread — around this day might be mitigated for many people.”
What Bloom & Wild had stumbled upon was not merely a marketing tactic. It was evidence of a largely unspoken need. The company’s stated objective, notably, was not to capitalise on the projected £1.6 billion UK Mother’s Day spend, but to act in a thoughtful way for its customers — a distinction that was not lost on the people who received the email.
A movement takes root
The response was enough to prompt Bloom & Wild to do something more formal with what it had learned. In 2020, the company launched the Thoughtful Marketing Movement — a pledge that invited other brands to commit to offering opt-outs for sensitive occasions and to provide more tailored messaging to their customers. By the time the initiative had gathered momentum, over 170 businesses had signed up, including stationery brand Papier, salon booking platform Treatwell, restaurant chain Wagamama, and — significantly — companies well outside the gift and flower sector, including Canva, the Australian design platform, and The Body Shop.
The pledge required signatories to do something deceptively demanding: treat their customers as people who might, on any given occasion, be in pain. Canva, in joining the movement, described it explicitly as part of a stated commitment to being “a force for good.” Away, the American luggage company, documented over 4,000 subscribers opting out of its own holiday campaigns and received more than 250 messages of thanks in return. The pattern was consistent across categories and continents: customers who were acknowledged at a difficult moment remembered it, and returned.
Bloom & Wild itself has continued to raise the bar for what opt-out means in practice. It eventually extended the preference beyond email, so that customers who opted out saw no Mother’s Day content anywhere on the website — not on the homepage, navigation menus, or product listings when logged in. Opted-out customers also saw no mention of the occasion in Facebook, Instagram, or Gmail advertising, provided they used the same email address. The company’s own data provided an unexpected commercial argument for the approach: customers who had opted out of at least one sensitive occasion were found to have a lifetime value 1.7 times higher than those who had not. The act of being acknowledged, it turned out, was not merely kind. It was financially meaningful.
Lucy Evans, Bloom & Wild’s head of retention, has described the dual benefit plainly. The company both created a meaningful brand experience and “mitigated the risk of a full email unsubscribe for these customers, who we’d never be able to contact again.” The flowers, in other words, could wait. The relationship could not.
The problem with imitation
Success, however, has a tendency to produce clumsy copies. As opt-out emails spread across the industry and beyond — appearing in inboxes from luggage companies, pizza chains, and e-learning platforms, all earnestly acknowledging that Father’s Day might be “a sensitive time” — a backlash began to form.
The Washington Post documented the phenomenon as early as 2022: many people appreciated the opt-out emails, but others found that the sheer volume of companies participating had turned a considerate gesture into yet another form of inbox clutter. Gemma Crozier, account director at the marketing agency Thoughtmix, put the frustration more pointedly: “I’m more likely to opt out because the brand keeps asking if I want to opt out rather than from the messaging itself.” The opt-out email, divorced from any genuine relationship between brand and customer, was revealed as a gesture rather than a practice.
The companies doing it well — Bloom & Wild, and a modest number of others that had built their preference systems thoughtfully — remained distinguishable from those doing it performatively. The key differentiator was not technology but intention. Bloom & Wild had eventually replaced the annual ask with a standing preference centre, allowing customers to set their sensitivities once and have them respected permanently across all future campaigns. This subtle shift — from active burden to passive protection — is the direction in which the better operators have moved. It removes from the grieving customer the additional demand of having to announce their grief anew each year.
Inclusion as product, not footnote
Beyond the mechanics of opting out, a subtler evolution is visible in the marketing language and brand strategy of the industry’s more considered players.
Bloom & Wild’s own brand platform, “Care Wildly,” was built around the premise that the intent behind flowers outlasts the flowers themselves. Its television campaigns have depicted not the idealised nuclear family, but a woman sending flowers to her sister, a friend group, the complexity of real relationships. The tagline does not instruct anyone to buy anything. It simply reflects that flowers are, often, about things that are hard to say.
Interflora, the century-old cooperative that operates through a network of roughly a thousand independent florists in the UK and Ireland, launched a campaign in 2024 under the banner “Say More” — a platform explicitly designed to reposition flowers as a vehicle for emotional communication rather than seasonal obligation. The campaign was the brand’s first large-scale advertising effort in four years. Directed by Jazmin Garcia and developed with Peckham-based creative collective Calling, it comprised what its producers described as “authentic and intimate vignettes” following an intertwined cast of characters navigating life’s varied and imperfect moments: a couple mid- argument, a woman mourning a loved one, a mother and child spending an ordinary afternoon together. Conspicuously absent was any instruction to buy flowers for a specific occasion.
Caroline Adams, head of marketing at Interflora, described the necessity of the shift with some frankness. “Extensive customer research and a fast-changing market meant change was needed for our 100-year-old brand to remain relevant and loved.” What that research had surfaced — though Adams did not say so directly — was that a significant portion of the younger audience the brand needed to reach was disengaging from traditional holiday-driven floral messaging. The “Say More” platform was the strategic answer: position the flower not as an occasion item but as an instrument of emotional honesty, available at any moment in life, including the hardest ones.
Calling’s founder and executive creative director, Josh Tenser, articulated the cultural logic behind the brief. “Today’s technology and social media platforms have created a communication paradox,” he said. “We’ve never been more connected, and yet, with a rising mental health and loneliness epidemic, we’ve never felt more alone.” The campaign, in short, was not really about Mother’s Day at all. It was about the gap between what people feel and what they know how to say — and the flower as a bridge across that gap.
Smaller voices, honest instincts
Some of the most considered responses to the problem of sensitive marketing have come not from large brands with formal preference centres and creative agencies, but from independent businesses whose founders have personal skin in the game.
Yumbles, a British artisan food marketplace, introduced opt-outs after its founder, Katie Kitiri, noticed a steady stream of complaints about Mother’s Day and Father’s Day marketing growing alongside the business itself. “We noticed around our Mother’s Day and Father’s Day marketing each year we would receive a small number of customers writing to us to mention how it upset them,” she said, “and as Yumbles has grown those messages have grown too. This was unacceptable for us, so we wanted to do something about it.” The decision, notably, preceded any broader commercial calculation. The messages from distressed customers were the data.
Betsy Benn, a small brand producing personalised prints and designs, is run by four women who have between them either lost their fathers or have difficult relationships with them. Their adoption of thoughtful marketing began when they observed larger companies doing it around Valentine’s Day in 2021, and felt the relevance immediately. “I imagine larger companies have a really great database of customers that tracks everything and has great functionality,” the brand noted. “We literally have to do it manually each holiday.” They do it anyway, because, as they put it, they believe it is worth the effort.
This quality — of authenticity that comes from lived experience rather than brand guidelines — is difficult to manufacture and easy to detect. The Thoughtful Marketing Movement’s own growth from Bloom & Wild to over 170 signatories has been driven less by corporate strategy than by the individual decisions of founders and marketing directors who recognised themselves in the problem. The Body Shop joined not because a consultant recommended it, but because the brand’s values made the alternative seem inconsistent. The Telegraph, Britain’s conservative broadsheet, joined for the same reason its more progressive counterparts did: because the logic, once seen, is hard to unsee.
Japan: a dual symbolism made explicit
Cultural context shapes what sensitive marketing can look like. In Japan, where flower gifting is governed by a precise vocabulary of symbolic meaning — known as hana kotoba — the floral industry has long possessed tools for acknowledging the full spectrum of maternal experience that Western brands have only recently begun to develop.
The carnation is the undisputed centrepiece of Japanese Mother’s Day. It appears in florists and grocery stores alike in the weeks beforehand, in two colours that carry distinct and well-understood significance. Red carnations are given to living mothers as tokens of familial love. White carnations, which carry meanings of pure love and remembrance in hana kotoba, are given in honour of mothers who have died. This distinction — encoded in tradition, expressed in product — means that a Japanese florist stocking white carnations before Mother’s Day is already, implicitly, marketing to those who are grieving rather than celebrating.
Several larger Tokyo-based chains have moved to make this implicit offering more explicit, promoting white carnation arrangements in the weeks before the holiday under language that directly acknowledges loss. The commercial logic is transparent: there is a market of bereaved adult children who wish to mark the day in some way, and who are currently underserved by the dominant pink-and-red promotional palette. The cultural foundation was already there. Contemporary marketing has simply built on it.
The supermarket challenge
For independent studios, mindful marketing is largely a matter of tone and will. For supermarket chains — which in many markets now account for well over half of all floral sales — the challenge is structural. Personalisation at scale is expensive; campaign assets are frequently prepared months in advance; and the institutional incentive is always to maximise reach, not to minimise distress.
UK grocery retailer Waitrose has been among the more prominent mainstream adopters of the opt-out approach, offering customers the chance to avoid Mother’s Day promotional communications ahead of the holiday. The move was noted and circulated widely among marketing professionals, partly because Waitrose, unlike many of the brands in the Thoughtful Marketing Movement, is a mass-market retailer without a natural prior connection to empathetic messaging. Its participation signalled that the practice was moving from niche to expected.
The Dutch flower industry presents a further instructive case. The Netherlands is the world’s largest exporter of cut flowers, and Dutch growers and wholesalers have historically been agnostic about how their product is marketed downstream. That is beginning to change, as several large auction houses have introduced marketing guidelines for retailers — not mandates, but suggestions — that include language around accessibility and emotional inclusion. The initiative is partly commercial (protecting the reputation of Dutch flowers in premium markets) and partly cultural. Either way, it signals that mindful marketing is no longer a niche affectation. When the wholesalers start caring about the tone of their retailers’ emails, something has shifted.
The technology underneath
What makes the better implementations of thoughtful marketing work is not instinct alone, but the infrastructure built to support it. Bloom & Wild’s preference centre — built using the customer engagement platform Braze — allows customers to opt out of a growing list of sensitive occasions, not just Mother’s Day. Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day, and others are all covered. The system operates continuously rather than reactively: customers set their preferences once, and the brand respects them automatically across all channels — email, on-site content, paid social advertising — without requiring any further action.
This matters because the alternative places a recurring burden on the people least equipped to bear it. A customer who has recently lost a parent should not have to re-announce that loss each spring and summer. The shift from annual opt-out email to standing preference is, in practical terms, modest. In human terms, it is significant. It replaces the gesture with the practice.
Marketing technologists have begun to note a broader trend of which floral opt-outs are merely the most visible example: the move toward what some call “emotional segmentation,” in which customer data includes not just purchase history and browsing behaviour, but explicitly stated emotional preferences about the kinds of communications they wish to receive. Spotify’s “Don’t Play This Artist” feature is an analogue from the music world. The underlying logic is identical: give people control over what they are exposed to, and they will trust you more, not less.
Does it sell more flowers?
The commercial case for sensitivity, at least as Bloom & Wild’s internal data suggests, rests on retention rather than acquisition. Opting customers out of holiday emails does not, by itself, sell more flowers in the short term. What it does is prevent the kind of alienation that causes a customer to quietly unsubscribe or defect to a competitor. The distinction matters: in a category as emotionally charged as flowers, the brands that lose a customer’s trust rarely get the chance to regain it.
Retention, in other words, is the mechanism. Florists who treat difficult emotions with care find that customers remember. The lifetime value data from Bloom & Wild — opted-out customers valued at 1.7 times the average — is striking not because it is large, but because it exists at all. Intuition might suggest that customers who have asked to hear less from a brand would be worth less to that brand. The data says the opposite. The act of asking permission builds a relationship that discount codes cannot.
None of this means that Mother’s Day will become a solemn occasion, or that the pink roses will disappear. The holiday remains enormously profitable; the joy it occasions for millions of families is real and worth celebrating. The shift underway is not a retreat from sentiment but a refinement of it — an industry learning, belatedly, that the full complexity of its customers’ emotional lives is not a problem to be managed but a truth to be respected.
Bloom & Wild, now reporting 21% revenue growth in the first half of its 2026 fiscal year, is doing rather well. So, it would appear, is the instinct that started it.
The Thoughtful Marketing Movement pledge is open to businesses of any size at bloomandwild.com/thoughtful-marketing
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