H.Bloom Cuts Down On Dead Flowers With Software Picking Lilies

After leaving the software enterprise company he helped take public in 2009, Bryan Burkhart spent months mulling one question: What was the biggest industry that hadn’t been reinvented by technology?

Title insurance was a possibility. So was property management. After interviewing flower shop owners in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood, Burkhart became fascinated with flowers — a $32 billion market still sometimes managed on notepads in retail shops and grocery stores. He found that despite shop owners’ talent for arrangements, as much as half their product often went unsold.

“They were artists, not businesspeople,” the former senior vice president of sales at Callidus Software Inc. (CALD) said. “We thought, we’re going to hire the best designers, give them a good salary, and they can do what they’re good at and we can do what we’re good at.”

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