Business is blooming:
How Kelly Jamieson scaled Edible Blooms beyond the messy middle
Before Edible Blooms became one of Australia’s most searched gifting brands, it was a Brisbane start-up with a small commercial kitchen and a founder willing to say yes before she had all the answers. More than two decades later, Co-Founder Kelly Jamieson has learned that the real work often begins after the first wave of success.
Edible Blooms specialises in gourmet hampers, gifts and their signature chocolate ‘bouquets’ intended as alternatives to traditional flowers. Today, the business delivers at least one moment of joy across Australia and New Zealand faster than every two minutes.
But as Kelly shared in the Brisbane Business Hub’s Northstar Webinar Series, that growth has never been as simple as opening more stores, reaching more customers or following a straight line from local idea to national brand.
“This is not my highlight reel,” she told attendees. “This is the real story of Edible Blooms over 21 years.”
Hosted by Brisbane’s Women in Business Champion Fleur Madden, the Northstar Webinar Series brings experienced business leaders into conversation with Brisbane’s business community, offering practical insights, lived experience and honest reflections on leadership, growth and impact.
For founders and business owners preparing to scale, Kelly’s story shows how growth can stretch a business before it strengthens it.
Nine products and a big idea
Edible Blooms launched in 2005 with nine fresh fruit bouquets, a website and a modest start-up budget. From its first premises in Salisbury, near the Rocklea fruit markets, the Brisbane business grew quickly.
In its first full financial year, Edible Blooms reached $1 million in sales. Within 12 months, it had expanded from Brisbane to Adelaide, Sydney and Melbourne.
“I wasn’t really thinking about what scaling meant,” Kelly said. “I knew I wanted to grow a bigger business, but I was ultimately reacting to something that I felt was broken in something that I loved.”
For Kelly, that “something” was how people could deliver gifts and give flowers. As someone who loved flowers and food, she saw an opportunity to bring the two together in a way that felt more joyful, memorable and different.
In the early days, that instinct was matched by speed. “I was 26 when I opened the doors of Edible Blooms and I didn't know what I didn’t know,” she said. “When you’re younger and you’ve got nothing to lose, you just go out and do things.”
That pace helped the business grow quickly, but speed alone does not create a business that can keep scaling. During the pandemic, demand lifted as people looked for ways to connect while they were apart. Revenue grew, the team grew and the business learned what it was capable of.
Then the market shifted again. “As soon as the doors opened and we could go and dine out and travel again, we were yesterday’s fish and chip wrapper,” Kelly said.
The business was larger, but so were its costs. Profit was tightening. Team confidence was wobbling. The same growth that had created momentum had also created pressure.
Kelly describes this as the “messy middle”: the stage where a business has grown beyond its original shape, but has not yet fully become the scaled operation it needs to be.
“There are times in our business journey when you say, ‘When did this stop being fun?’” she said. “It’s those turning points that can either make you or break you.”
Pick your path
One of Kelly’s most useful reflections was that not every business needs to scale in the same way.
A lifestyle business can be profitable, focused and personally rewarding. The founder may stay close to the day-to-day, the team may stay small and the business may be designed around income, flexibility and control.
A performance business, on the other hand, asks for something different. It is built to scale beyond the founder, which means stronger systems, a leadership team, clearer structure and a willingness to reinvest profit back into growth.
Neither path is wrong, but Kelly said founders need to be honest about which one they are building. “It’s excellent to be a lifestyle business and it’s also great to want to be a performance business, but they’re very different journeys that you embark on,” she said.
The risk comes when a business grows beyond its original model without the structure to support the next one. Costs increase, complexity builds and the founder can end up carrying a business that is too big to run like it used to, but not yet strong enough to scale properly.
“If you spend too much time transitioning from one to the other, that’s the danger zone,” Kelly said.
Buying the right kind of growth
More recently, Edible Blooms has pursued growth through acquisition, but with a far more deliberate approach. The business started small, acquiring Dessert Boxes, a Sydney-based brand with a strong social media following and a different customer profile to Edible Blooms. The acquisition allowed Kelly and her team to test their ability to integrate another business into their existing systems.
By day two, Dessert Boxes was fully integrated into the Edible Blooms technology stack. By week 12, the brand had moved from delivering only in Sydney and Wollongong to being available through the company’s national store network.
For Kelly, the key question in any acquisition is not simply whether the business is attractive. It’s whether Edible Blooms can genuinely make it stronger. “If you’re going to acquire, you’ve got to work out where the value piece is that you’re going to add,” she said.
That value might come through logistics, technology, brand, product or access to distribution. “It has to have a fit with my core business because that’s what we know,” she said. “We don’t want to buy more audiences exactly like my own because I can’t add value to that.”
The business has gradually built a house of brands, including Edible Blooms, Dessert Boxes, Lollies and Crunch, and more recently she and her sister acquired the Interflora hamper brands, GiftBasket.com.au and Hampers.com.au. Each brand brings a different audience, gifting moment or product category into the group, rather than simply duplicating what Edible Blooms already does well.
For Kelly, the later stages of growth have required a different kind of discipline. In the early days, she said yes to almost everything. As the business matured, the work became more selective, and she turned her focus to choosing the right opportunities, building the right systems and surrounding herself with people who could help her make better decisions.
In hindsight, one of the biggest lessons was learning not to carry so much of the business alone. “What would I do differently if I had my time again? It would be building a leadership structure earlier,” Kelly said.
That structure matters inside the business, but the same principle applies beyond it. Founders need people around them who can help them see clearly when the pressure is high, the decision is uncomfortable or the next step feels uncertain.
For business owners moving through the messy middle, Kelly said that the circle of people you surround yourself with can shape how bravely and clearly you lead. The right people will challenge your thinking, back your ambition and help you keep moving in those moments when growth feels more challenging than exciting.
“If you’ve got that circle around you,” she said, “you can do anything.”
If your business is moving into its next stage, the right conversation can shape what you do next. The Brisbane Business Hub offers complimentary workshops, webinars and events for local business owners and leaders who are building capability, strengthening their networks and making more confident growth decisions. Explore what’s coming up and register for an upcoming session.
