Aren't you Bloomex? What's an order gatherer?

If you've ever searched online for flowers in Brandon, Manitoba, you may have wondered whether The BloomBox and Bloomex are the same company. We understand the confusion—the names are remarkably similar—but let's clear that up right away: The BloomBox is not Bloomex.

The BloomBox is an independently owned flower shop located right here in Brandon, Manitoba, inside The Green Spot at 1451 Rosser Avenue East. Our flowers are designed in our shop, the arrangements featured on our website are designs we've actually created and photographed, and we deliver our own flowers throughout Brandon and many surrounding communities.

Bloomex is a completely separate company, and we've been mistaken for them for years. In fact, that confusion is why we originally wrote this article back in 2022.

Around Valentine's Day and other busy flower holidays, we would receive calls from upset recipients saying things like, “My flowers were left outside and froze,” or asking, “Why did I have to arrange the flowers myself?” We'd try to find their order in our system, only to eventually discover that the flowers hadn't come from The BloomBox at all. They had been ordered from Bloomex.

We still receive calls like these from time to time. To be clear, those individual experiences are reports made to us by callers who mistakenly contacted The BloomBox about their Bloomex orders. We didn't witness those deliveries ourselves and can't independently verify the circumstances of each one, nor are we suggesting that they represent every Bloomex customer's experience.

The confusion does raise a much larger question, though: when you order flowers online, how do you know who you're actually ordering from?

What Is an Order Gatherer?

Within the floral industry, companies that collect flower orders online or over the phone without necessarily being the local flower shop creating and delivering the flowers are commonly called order gatherers, or OGs.

The business model isn't particularly complicated. You search for something like “Brandon florist,” “flowers Brandon Manitoba,” or “flower delivery Brandon MB,” and a company advertises or creates webpages targeting those searches. You place your order through that company, and it then determines how the order will be fulfilled.

Depending on the company, location and product, that could involve another florist, a production facility, a courier network or another fulfillment method. The important distinction is that the company accepting your money isn't necessarily the local flower shop making your flowers.

That doesn't automatically mean there's something wrong with using the service. What matters is whether you understand that's what you're buying.

The problem comes when a website gives a customer the impression that they're dealing directly with a florist in the recipient's community when they aren't.

How Can You Tell Who You're Actually Ordering From?

Fortunately, you don't have to become an internet detective to figure this out. One of the easiest things you can do is look for a physical address and then check it on a map. Don't simply look for a page saying the company delivers to Brandon; find out whether the flower shop itself is actually located here.

For The BloomBox, you'll find us at 1451 Rosser Avenue East in Brandon, inside The Green Spot garden centre. We don't have our own exterior entrance, which occasionally causes some confusion of its own, but there's a real flower shop here with real florists working inside it.

An About page can tell you a lot as well. Who owns the business? Who designs the flowers? How long have they been there? Does the website show photographs of the people and the shop, or does it simply have hundreds or thousands of location pages?

Photographs are another useful clue. Every floral arrangement featured on The BloomBox website is created and photographed in our Brandon shop. Flowers are natural products and availability changes constantly, so substitutions are sometimes necessary, but when you look through our website you're looking at our design work.

And if you're still not sure, there's an incredibly sophisticated piece of technology that works remarkably well: the telephone.

Call the florist.

Ask where they're located. Ask whether they're making the arrangement themselves. Ask who's going to deliver it. A genuine local florist should have no difficulty answering any of those questions.

What Does Ordering Direct Actually Change?

When you place an order through The BloomBox website, the order comes directly to us. We select the flowers, create the arrangement and prepare it for delivery. For residential deliveries, we contact the recipient before the flowers leave the shop to make sure someone will be there to receive them. Then we load the arrangement into our own delivery vehicle and deliver it.

If you call with a question about your order, you're talking to the same business that's responsible for making it. If you want something changed, you're talking to the people who can actually change it. If you have a problem afterward, you're talking to the shop that created the flowers in the first place.

That's what we mean when we encourage people to order directly from a local florist. There isn't another company sitting between the customer and the florist doing the work.

This can also matter financially, although it's not as simple as saying a local florist will always be cheaper. We recently put that to the test by shopping both The BloomBox and Bloomex, selecting comparable products and following the orders through checkout for delivery in Brandon.

The results were interesting: Bloomex was less expensive in two of our three comparisons, while The BloomBox was less expensive in one. But the experiment also uncovered substantial differences in what was included in the advertised prices, whether vases were included, whether the flowers arrived professionally arranged, delivery charges, delivery methods and the guarantees behind the products.

Rather than repeat all of those numbers here—and have two articles that eventually become outdated—we've put the entire experiment in a separate article: The BloomBox vs. Bloomex: Are You Actually Comparing the Same Thing?

This article has a different purpose. It's about knowing who you're actually buying from in the first place.

So, What About Bloomex?

Bloomex is particularly relevant to us simply because our names are so similar. To be absolutely clear, The BloomBox and Bloomex have no connection whatsoever. We're not a Bloomex franchise, we're not their Brandon location, we don't fulfill their orders and we can't access their system when someone calls us looking for help with a Bloomex purchase.

Their published delivery information also describes a very different fulfillment model from ours. Bloomex lists production facilities in several major Canadian centres, including Winnipeg, and describes courier delivery for areas outside its listed markets. 

By contrast, flowers ordered from The BloomBox for Brandon are made here in our shop and delivered by us.

That's why checking the name at the top of the website matters. The BloomBox and Bloomex may sound remarkably similar, but they're very different businesses.

What If You're Sending Flowers Somewhere Else?

This is where our advice might seem a little strange for a business that sells flowers: if you're sending flowers somewhere outside our delivery area, you don't necessarily need to order from us.

Find a reputable florist in the recipient's community and order directly from them.

In fact, if you're having trouble finding one, give us a call. We've been in the floral industry for a long time, and we're happy to help our customers locate a legitimate florist somewhere else. If we know someone personally, even better. If we don't, we can often help determine whether a business you're considering is actually located near the recipient.

We don't need to make a commission from that recommendation. We'd rather help someone find a good florist and receive a quality product than watch one of our customers accidentally order from a website they believed was a local shop.

And obviously, this is The BloomBox website, so we'd love you to order from us when you're sending flowers in Brandon. But we're not the only legitimate flower shop here. If our design style isn't your cup of tea, there are other actual local florists in Brandon that would be happy to serve you.

That's really the point. We're not suggesting that consumers should choose The BloomBox simply because we're local. We're suggesting that consumers should know who they're choosing.

If you knowingly choose a national flower-delivery company because you prefer its price, products or service model, that's an informed decision. What we don't like seeing is someone who thought they ordered from a florist down the street discovering afterward that they didn't.

One Question to Ask Before Ordering Flowers Online

If you forget everything else in this article, there's one very simple question that can save a lot of confusion:

“Where is the flower shop that's actually making my flowers?”

If you're ordering flowers in Brandon and the answer is 1451 Rosser Avenue East, inside The Green Spot, you've found us.

We're The BloomBox.

We're not Bloomex, we're not a national call centre, and we're not trying to look like we have a flower shop in every community in Canada. We're one independent flower shop making and delivering flowers right here in Brandon.

Fresh. Unique. Flowers. It's What We Do!