Bloomage Daydream Delivers Bouquets By Bicycle—Because Beauty Isn’t Dead
By Allison Krupp . February 2, 2016
I’ll say it. It’s winter, and Berlin is, in many ways, in hibernation. People’ve abandoned the city that, mere months ago (over those Bite Club mini burgers), they proclaimed to love forevermore. And we feel it in the grey faces on the U-Bahn and the ghosttown-haze of the abandoned streets of Kreuzberg. We need something. Something alive.
Enter Bloomage Daydream (nearly called Tangled Up In Bloom, hey Dylan fans), is a 2015-born business that curates gorgeous bouquets and delivers them via bicycle to the main neighborhoods of Berlin. The owner and florist and bicycle-enthusiast herself, ex-Londoner Caroline, lives a Berlin daydream: whisking around the city on two wheels, humming Bowie, and working to build an eco-friendly and beautiful business alongside her partner, Alonso, from the ground up.
The Bloomage Daydream scheme goes like so: every Tuesday (at a life-threatening 4 a.m.), Caroline sweeps off to the Blumen Großmarkt with a few design ideas in her head, on a search for the freshest and most beautiful European blooms (preferably, something locally sourced, and never anything as far away as South America or Africa).
Afterwards, she assembles the two bouquet options for the week—a Pastel and a Colour Pop bouquet (along with a Potted Plant choice). From Tuesday throughout the rest of the week, these are up for order with free delivery across the central neighborhoods of Berlin. Caroline herself is often at the helm of delivery—the artist carrying her vision across the city in a bicycle basket. It’s pure poetry, really.
After years in PR, Caroline says: “I really believe that to make a business successful it has to be something that you feel really strongly about, and ever since I was a child I’ve been a lover of nature, plants, and flowers. The bike bit came in because that’s been my main form of transport for the last 10 years. If Berlin had even more bikes, it would be a better place… and nothing goes together better than bouquets and bicycles.”
Caroline opts not to have a storefront, using her Neukölln apartment as a base. “Filling a flower shop with fresh blooms every day inevitably means there is a lot of wasted stock, so the idea behind running Bloomage Daydream online is to be as simple and sustainable as possible. By keeping choice to a carefully curated minimum, and offering just the two bouquet options, no stem goes unused.”
And the flowers? Caroline says: “I love to create bouquets with a really natural look and loads of texture complemented by lush, interesting foliage. It’s a style I learned while assisting in a London flower shop that encouraged a naturalistic approach, following the wild form of the flowers. After all: nature always knows best.”