From a garage in Palma to writing card messages with AI

There's a photo from December 2016 we've never hung in the shop: Ekaterina building a bouquet on a folding table in my parents' garage, and me next to her with a laptop, coding the first version of our website. Flowers and code, same afternoon, same garage. Almost ten years later we still do exactly the same thing — except the garage is now a workshop in Coll d'en Rabassa, and the laptop has got considerably smarter.

People often ask how a neighbourhood florist competes with the big flower-delivery platforms. The short answer is: we don't compete on their terms. The long answer is about what we chose to automate — and above all, what we decided never to automate.

In this article

What a machine will never do

The bouquet. Full stop.

Every bouquet that leaves our workshop is made by a person, with the flowers that arrived that week, watching how each stem opens and deciding what belongs with what. That isn't nostalgia: flowers are living material, and no machine yet knows that these hydrangeas will last three days longer if they're cut differently today. Ekaterina has been training that eye by hand since 2016, bouquet by bouquet.

We don't automate the final phone call either. Before a delivery goes out, someone here calls to make sure somebody is home. When an order is going to a funeral home, someone confirms the room. Those two calls are the difference between a delivered bouquet and one abandoned in a doorway, and we have no intention of delegating them.

Bloomi, or the card-message problem

If you've ever sent flowers, you know the moment. Bouquet chosen, payment done — and suddenly an empty box that says “write your message”. And there you stall. Saying what you feel in four lines, to a father on his birthday or a friend who has just lost someone, is surprisingly hard.

It was, by far, the point where most people abandoned their order. So we built Bloomi, an assistant that helps you write that card: you tell it who it's for, the occasion, the tone — and it suggests ways to say it. It doesn't write for you; it unblocks you. Most people take a suggestion and edit it until it sounds like their own, which is exactly what we wanted.

And because what you want to say doesn't always fit on a card, the editor adapts as you type: four lines go on the classic little card; if you get going and it turns into a letter, it switches by itself to a full-page format and we deliver it printed with the flowers. Nobody has to trim what they feel for lack of space.

It also looks after our WhatsApp. When someone writes at eleven at night asking whether we can reach Sóller tomorrow, they get an answer straight away. When things get delicate — an urgent delivery to a wake, a wedding, an unusual order — the conversation is handed to a person without the customer having to repeat themselves. The technology answers; we solve.

Four languages on an island of visitors

Mallorca shapes the way we work in one particular way: half our customers don't live here. A son in Munich sending flowers to his mother in Palma. An English couple getting married at a finca in Deià. Someone in Moscow sending a bouquet to a hotel in Illetas.

We serve customers in Spanish, English, German and Russian, and technology lets us do it properly and quickly in all of them — not with a machine translator bolted onto the website, but by making sure every message sounds natural in its own language. For a two-person business with a small team, that was simply impossible ten years ago.

We built our own website

The other thing we've built with artificial intelligence is our own website, designed around the real needs of a florist — the ones we live with every day behind the counter. Not a template to hammer the business into, but the other way round: a shop that understands some orders leave within two hours, that a funeral arrangement needs a ribbon with a name spelled exactly right, and that in August half the island is in a different hotel every week.

The newest piece came about the same way — a counter-side idea, built with AI: an occasions calendar. You save the birthdays and anniversaries you can't afford to miss, and we email you a few days ahead, with enough time for the flowers to arrive on the day. Bouquets that never get sent are rarely about lack of love — usually someone just remembered too late.

We don't tell this story to show off the technology. We tell it because we think it's reasonably good news for any small business: today, with enough stubbornness, a family workshop can afford tools that until recently belonged to companies with a whole department.

How we know it's working

We measure success in a rather low-tech way: reviews. We're 4.7 out of 5 from 384 reviews on Google and 4.8 from 240 on Trustpilot, and we read every single one. When someone writes that their mother cried when she opened the door, that was a good day.

In the end it's all about the same thing as in that garage in 2016: flowers arriving fresh, on time, with the right words on the card. Everything else is just tools.

Ekaterina & Sergio — Floristería Mallorca, Coll d'en Rabassa (Palma)