The Curate family is growing!
Curate has the distinct pleasure of welcoming BloomTrac (formerly Ularas) to the Curate family. In doing so, Curate will be able to serve our users and the floral community at a much deeper level.
BloomTrac's Story
BloomTrac was founded in 2010 as Sarah Hinton realized the need for something besides excel spreadsheets to manage her floral business. After too many costly math errors, she set out to find a better way to do things.
As a creative at heart, math and excel formulas were not what Sarah wanted to be spending her time on. She knew other florists likely had the same struggles as she did. So she partnered with a software developer and BloomTrac was born.
Curate's Story
In 2014, Rachael O'Neil was a floral entrepreneur who struggling to get out quick proposals with accurate pricing. She would spend hours trying to price out a single event but it would take too long and she'd lose clients.
Her husband, Ryan, initially built a spreadsheet that looked like it was made by Dr. Frankenstein, but if one formula broke, it could be disastrous.
Ryan had a crazy idea that would fix her problem - a program that would allow her to stem count during her consultations so she could give the clients an accurately priced proposal on-the-spot. What started as a husband trying to make his wife's life easier turned into a platform that has helped thousands of florists over the years, along with other event professionals like planners, caterers, and rental companies.
Educating, Creating, and Investing
There are three core focuses that make Curate unique among other floral softwares (and among event professional softwares, more broadly): educating, creating, and investing.
Educating is the heartbeat of where we started.
As Ryan and Rachael grew their floral studio, they knew it was important to share the lessons they learned with others in the industry. They dedicated time and energy to ensuring that the floral and events community grow together through the sharing of their knowledge.
Since then we have continued to invest time, love, and laughter working with the BEST Curate Partners, Educators and Gurus in this space. Whether it is sharing our knowledge or curating all the amazing information brought by the industry's finest, we have always known that by growing the network, we grow the education.
Our second focus, Creating, can look like a lot of things for many companies, whether it's the table scape, high centerpiece or curating all the little pieces that go into an event.
We. Love. Creating.
For a software company, we admit, it's a little different. While we are unable to work with stems and vessels every day, we still get to work on creating solutions and different opportunities so our customers can grow and THRIVE in the event community. This usually shows up in the form of new features in the software or even creating opportunities to highlight our customers, and through all those moments, we are always striving towards Creating.
Our third focus is just as important as the first two, and maybe even where we spend the most of our time! That focus is Investing.
While it seems a little vague and could mean a lot, it's all about investing into this community.
A lot has happened over 2020 and now, more than ever, we have tried to be mindful of how we invest. Whether it's investing our time, investing our learnings, or investing our energy into the overall industry, we think you're worth it.
Whether it's making your stem counts a walk in the park or helping in every way we can to grow the community, we love investing in you.
Why are these three focuses important?
BloomTrac needed to update their software due to aging technology to meet the demands of their customers. With the impacts of COVID, they were unable to raise funds to meet these demands.
So Sarah approached Ryan about the possibility of Curate acquiring BloomTrac so that BloomTrac users would have the opportunity to have a comprehensive, progressive platform to call home.
We love the floral community and would do just anything to help it flourish. But, we had to ensure that growing the Curate family by adding BloomTrac users would help us further our three goals of educating, creating, and investing in the floral and event communities.
After considering all the details, our team came to the conclusion that inviting BloomTrac users into the Curate family absolutely made sense for the betterment of the floral and events community.
Now, BloomTrac users will have access to features that were not possible with an outdated system, including:
- Quickbooks Online integration
- Google and outlook calendar syncing
- CRM capabilities that automatically change the status of events
- Integrated purchasing with wholesalers
- Gorgeous proposal themes
- Customizable colors and fonts
- On the fly markup adjustments
- Live online proposals
Additionally, existing Curate users will benefit from a larger customer base as the additional resources and feedback will be invested back into developing the best features for our users. There will also be new features added into Curate that were previously only available to BloomTrac users, including
- Saved product categories
- Sales category reporting with Quickbooks
- Enhanced reporting
The floral industry at large benefits from our growth too as Curate will be able to create more resources and partner with more leaders in the industry to develop best-in-class education opportunities. Additionally, Curate will be able to make a bigger impact on more florists' lives as features are developed to tackle some of the major pain points within operational workflows that are presently done manually.
We are absolutely thrilled about what the future holds as we move forward with our growing family.
Want to learn more about Curate? Schedule a consult to see the software in action!
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Note: If you are a BloomTrac user looking for more information about what this announcement means for you, please see your email for more details.