April COVID brings me flowers - a Bloomsybox review

Last year, my friend Emily inspired me to start keeping fresh flowers in the house, and I've been obsessed ever since. I used to pick up bouquets from a little flower stand near my office, but ever since COVID happened and I stopped going outside, I've switched to flower subscription companies. Not all of them deliver to the Bay Area, but I think I've tried most if not all of the ones that do, because I'm insane.

So who to buy from? That's the $50ish question.

Quick Review

Bloomsybox: B. Not the most interesting bouquets, but still pretty with decent longevity. You don't get to choose your own adventure. Some sustainability/social impact questions.

...and that’s it. This is gonna get long, so I’m only reviewing one flower company at a time. Bloomsybox is actually one of the newer companies I’ve tried, but I haven’t been documenting my subscriptions until now, so we’re starting with this one.

I absolutely LOVE flowers. I think my love for flowers stems from (haha see what I did there) when I interned with an event planner after my freshman year of college. We worked a lot of weddings and I was allowed to take home some really gorgeous arrangements after each event. As a poor college student, I wasn't able to keep flowers around after that summer, but now that I am an ~adult~ I do what I want.

Ordering and delivery. Bloomsybox makes it super easy for you to start your subscription. You pick the plan you want and your first delivery date, and voila, the flowers show up. It's weird that I didn't get a shipping confirmation like 99.9% of other ecommerce shops normally send, but the flowers arrived when I asked them to, so nbd. From then on, you get charged on the 1st-4th of each month and your next bouquet supposedly arrives between the 16th-23rd. At first I was hesitant because this is a slower turnaround time than I would normally prefer, but in my experience it’s actually more like a week. The first time my subscription renewed, I didn’t anticipate my bouquet would arrive until the 16th at earliest so I went out of town; lo and behold they showed up while I was gone, so that was annoying. Now that I’m not going anywhere, it’s not a problem anymore, but a shipping confirmation would still be nice.

Another thing some people might not like is that you don’t get to choose what your flowers look like when you get a subscription. Bloomsybox says they try not to send you the same thing in one year, which is cool, but I can’t verify since I haven’t had Bloomsybox for a year. I believe them tho. As long as the flowers aren't falling apart when they arrive, I'm good.

Sustainability. It's so important to do your research into how these companies work. Flowers are a huge market and as with many imports and exports, there can be questionable labor and environmental practices up and down the supply chain. I didn't really think about this until I started buying flowers from these subscription companies, but there's a lot of shit that happens before your flowers are sent to you.

Bloomsybox says on their website that they work with flower farms that are Rainforest Alliance certified, so no toxic chemicals are involved in fertilization and farm workers are treated fairly. This doesn't mean much to me though, because I can't learn more about the specific farms they work with, so I don't know how true any of this is. I'm also not super happy with the carbon footprint (most flower subscription companies, Bloomsybox included, ship overnight so that the flowers don't die in the mail, which makes sense), but I do appreciate that the packaging is recyclable. I hope that they'll implement some kind of carbon neutral program soon like Etsy, but we'll see.

The actual flowers. FINALLY, right? This is probably what yall were waiting for. Sorry I blabbed for so long. For my September bouquet, they sent me a nice summery yellow and green arrangement with daisies, Peruvian lilies, roses, what I'm guessing is a type of dahlia, a baby's breath-type flower, green berry-flowers, green mini daisies(?) and lots of fun greenery. I don't know most flowers/plants. If any flower experts are out there, help a sister out.

There are certain flowers that just don't stay alive very long (looking at you calla lilies) so obviously longevity will depend on the flowers themselves. But I've found that having a larger variety of flowers means you can keep your bouquet around longer, you just need to keep removing the flowers that have wilted. The variety of flowers in this bouquet wasn't anything special imo, but enjoyable all the same.

This bouquet lasted a solid two weeks in full with water changes every two or three days and stem trimmings every other water change. In my experience, two weeks is pretty good and what I've come to expect for these "farm to table" flower companies. On Day 8, I did have to remove the roses, but the rest of the bouquet stayed healthy-looking until about Day 16.

The pics above were from Day 3, and below is Day 7 - you can kind of see from these angles that one of the roses has bloomed quite a lot since Day 3. The other rose was on the other side of the bouquet and looked about the same.

Gotta love portrait mode

The roses wilted/dried out around Day 9. I've noticed that when flowers wilt (even if you can't tell), the water in the vase gets cloudy faster, so I suggest keeping an eye on the vase water.

If you look at the bottom of the vase, there's some stuff hanging out around there

After removing the wilted roses and changing the water, the rest of the bouquet stayed healthy-looking for a while. Here's Day 15, six days after I removed the wilted roses:

Still looking pretty good I must say

The Peruvian lilies started dropping petals like crazy on Day 16 so I had to toss those out. The water was also cloudy within a day of my changing the water, so I just guesstimated that it was the baby's breath and took those out. I don't really like baby's breath too much anyway—it’s a bit of a filler flower imo.

Womp womp

I ended up with a pretty small bouquet after Day 16, but I think it still has a cute "just thrown together" sort of look. Kinda like you just went outside and picked some flowers like you live in a Disney movie or whatever.

Inconsistent lighting but this is the best I could do

Cost. I chose the $40/month subscription aka the cheapest option. Something that bothered me is that Bloomsybox wasn't clear about the number of stems in each subscription option. They all said 20-32 stems regardless of cost, so I was thinking to myself, why would I pay more for the possibility that I'll only get 20 stems anyway? Anyway, Bloomsybox seems to have updated their descriptions since I first signed up because they now clarify what comes in what subscription level. Yay!

This is just a snapshot - full options are available on Bloomsybox.com

$40 is kind of pricey for the flowers I got, but it was still pretty and it did last as long as expected. I think I’m going to try upgrading to another plan to see if the flowers get more interesting.

Final Rating. All in all, I give Bloomsybox a solid B. Ordering is easy and the bouquets I've gotten have been pretty (albeit boring) and lasted as long as I expected. I do have some questions about their sustainability practices, but then I sort of rabbit-hole into my own ethics as a consumer and the unintended consequences of my actions (I've been watching a lot of The Good Place). So sustainability questions aside, I think Bloomsybox’s original subscription is a good choice if you're not picky about what your bouquets look like and you just want some flowers to show up every once in a while, although it might be worth it to spend the extra $10 on the deluxe plan and receive more interesting flowers.