Privacy Policy
Last updated: 19th August 2026
Bloms Bulbs is part of Walter Blom and Son (UK) Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales under company number 5481901. We’ve been growing and supplying flower bulbs since 1860, and we take the trust our customers place in us seriously – including with their personal data.
This policy explains what personal information we collect when you use blomsbulbs.com, why we collect it, who we share it with, and what rights you have over it.
Who we are
Walter Blom and Son (UK) Ltd, trading as Bloms Bulbs.
Trading & Registered address: Primrose Nurseries, Melchbourne, Bedfordshire, MK44 1ZZ
Company number: 5481901
Phone: 01234 709099
Email: help@blomsbulbs.com
For anything relating to this policy or to your personal data specifically, please contact us at help@blomsbulbs.com or by post to the address above, marked for the attention of Mr. Adrian Blom.
The personal data we collect
We collect different information depending on how you use the site:
Browsing the site.
Even before you tell us anything about yourself, our website and the third-party services described below may collect technical information – your IP address, browser and device type, pages viewed, and how you arrived at the site – through cookies and similar technologies. See “Cookies” below.
Creating an account.
When you register, we collect your name, email address, password, phone number, and billing address.
Placing an order.
At checkout we collect your billing and delivery name and address, email address, phone number, and – to take payment – your card or bank details, which are collected and processed directly by our payment provider (see “Who we share your data with” below); we do not see or store your full card number ourselves. If you’re a member of our Bloms Private Membership scheme, we hold your membership number and status against your account.
Signing up to our newsletter.
If you tick the (unticked-by-default) newsletter box when registering or checking out, we pass your email address to our email marketing platform, Mailchimp, so we can send you offers and news. You can withdraw this consent at any time – see “Marketing” below.
Asking us to email you when a sold-out bulb is back in stock.
We hold the email address you give us against the specific product, purely so we can send you one notification when it’s available again.
Requesting a printed catalogue.
We collect your title, name, full postal address, email address and (optionally) phone number so we can post the catalogue to you, and a separate tick-box asking whether you’re happy to hear from us about offers in future.
Buying or receiving a gift card.
If you buy a Bloms gift card as a present, we collect the recipient’s name and email address, your name as the sender, a delivery date, and any personal message you choose to include, so that we can deliver the gift card as you’ve asked.
Using your wishlist.
If you’re logged in, the products you save to your wishlist are linked to your account. If you’re not logged in, they’re remembered in a cookie in your browser instead.
Contacting us.
If you get in touch through our contact form, by phone, or by post, we collect your name, email address and whatever you tell us in your message, so we can reply.
Ordering by phone or post.
If you place an order with us directly – by phone or by post, rather than through the website – our team records the same order and delivery details described above in our internal systems.
Where this information comes from.
In every case above, this information comes directly from you. A small number of older customer accounts were carried over from a previous ordering system when we moved to our current website, but no personal data reaches us from any source you haven’t dealt with directly.
We do not collect any special category data (such as health, religious belief, or similar sensitive information) and we don’t intend to.
How we use your personal data, and our legal basis for doing so
| We use your data to… | Our legal basis |
| Create and manage your account | Performance of a contract with you |
| Process and deliver your order, including taking payment, arranging delivery, and handling returns | Performance of a contract with you |
| Respond to enquiries, complaints, and customer service requests | Performance of a contract with you / our legitimate interest in resolving them |
| Send you the printed catalogue you asked for | Performance of a contract with you |
| Notify you when a product you asked about is back in stock | Performance of a contract with you |
| Send you marketing emails about our products and offers | Your consent (which you can withdraw at any time) |
| Show you relevant adverts on other websites and platforms | Your consent, given through our cookie banner |
| Understand how our website is used, and improve it | Your consent, given through our cookie banner (for anything beyond essential/functional cookies) |
| Detect and prevent fraud, and keep our systems secure | Our legitimate interest in protecting our business and our customers |
| Comply with our legal obligations – for example, keeping financial records for tax purposes | Legal obligation |
Who we share your data with
We share personal data with the following categories of organisation, only for the purposes described above:
Payment.
Card and other online payments are handled by Stripe, our payment processor, who receive and process your payment details directly – we never see or store your full card number. If you choose to pay with Klarna (offered as a payment option through Stripe), Klarna will separately process the information needed to offer that payment method, including carrying out its own credit and identity checks; Klarna acts as an independent controller of that data under its own privacy policy.
Email marketing.
If you opt in to our newsletter, your email address is shared with Mailchimp, who send those emails on our behalf.
Advertising and analytics.
With your consent, we use Google Analytics to understand how visitors use our site, Google Ads and the Meta (Facebook) Pixel to measure and improve the performance of our advertising, and Microsoft Clarity to see how visitors interact with our pages (for example, anonymised mouse movement and scrolling), so we can spot and fix usability problems. Each of these companies acts as an independent controller for the data they collect through their own tool; their own privacy policies explain how they use it.
IT and hosting.
Our website is hosted by Pressable, who store the data needed to run the site and process orders on infrastructure within the EU. We also use security software (Wordfence) to help protect the site from attacks, and email delivery/logging tools to send and keep a short-term record of transactional emails such as order confirmations and password resets.
Delivery.
We share the delivery details needed to fulfil your order with the couriers and postal services we use to get bulbs to you.
Professional advisers and authorities.
We may share data with our accountants, auditors, legal advisers, insurers, or law enforcement and regulatory bodies, where we’re required to by law or need to in order to establish, exercise or defend our legal rights.
We do not sell your personal data to anyone, for any purpose.
International transfers
Some of the organisations listed above (including Stripe, Mailchimp, Google, Meta and Microsoft) are based outside the UK, principally in the United States. Where we transfer personal data outside the UK, we rely on legal safeguards recognised under UK data protection law – such as the UK’s International Data Transfer Addendum, EU/UK Standard Contractual Clauses, or a UK adequacy decision – to make sure your data continues to receive an appropriate level of protection.
Cookies
We use cookies and similar technologies for a few different purposes:
- Strictly necessary – to remember what’s in your basket and keep you logged in. These can’t be switched off, because the site can’t function without them.
- Functional – to remember your preferences, such as items on your wishlist if you’re browsing as a guest.
- Statistics/analytics – to understand, in aggregate, how visitors use the site (for example, Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity).
- Marketing – to measure our advertising and, where relevant, show you more relevant adverts on other sites (for example, Google Ads and the Meta Pixel).
You’ll be asked to choose which categories you’re happy with when you first visit the site, through the cookie banner at the bottom of the screen, and you can change your choice at any time using the “Cookie preferences” link in the footer. Only strictly necessary cookies are set before you make a choice.
How long we keep your data
We keep your personal data for as long as we need it for the purposes described in this policy, and to meet our legal obligations. As a guide:
- Order and account records are kept for 10 years.
- Marketing consent and preferences are kept until you withdraw your consent, or after a period of inactivity, whichever is sooner.
- Back-in-stock requests are deleted once we’ve sent the one notification email, or after 5 years if the product never comes back in stock.
- Enquiries and correspondence are kept for 10 years.
Your rights
Under UK GDPR, you have the right to:
- Access the personal data we hold about you
- Correct it, if it’s inaccurate or incomplete
- Erase it, in certain circumstances
- Restrict or object to how we use it, in certain circumstances
- Data portability – receive your data in a portable format, or have it transferred to another organisation
- Withdraw consent at any time, where we’re relying on consent (for example, marketing emails or non-essential cookies) – this won’t affect anything we did before you withdrew it
To exercise any of these rights, contact us using the details at the top of this policy. We’ll respond within one month. There’s no charge for making a request, unless it’s clearly unfounded, repetitive, or excessive.
If you’re not happy with how we’ve handled your data, you have the right to complain to the UK’s data protection regulator, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO):
- Website: ico.org.uk
- Phone: 0303 123 1113
- Post: Information Commissioner’s Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 5AF
We’d appreciate the chance to put things right first, so please get in touch with us before you do.
Marketing
We’ll only ever send you marketing emails if you’ve actively opted in – the newsletter tick-box on our registration and checkout pages is unticked by default, and ticking it is entirely optional. Every marketing email we send includes an unsubscribe link, or you can email us at help@blomsbulbs.com to be removed from our marketing list at any time. Opting out of marketing won’t affect order confirmations or other emails we need to send you to fulfil an order.
Children
Our website and products are intended for adults. We don’t knowingly collect personal data from children, and if we become aware that we’ve done so, we’ll delete it.
Keeping your data secure
We use appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect your personal data against unauthorised access, loss, or misuse, including but not limited to PCI-DSS compliant payment processing via Stripe, restricted access to customer data within our team, and regular security reviews of the website. No method of transmission over the internet is completely secure, but we work to protect your information to industry standards.
Changes to this policy
We may update this policy from time to time – for example, if we start using a new service, or the law changes. We’ll post any changes here and update the date at the top of this page. We’d encourage you to check back occasionally.
Contact us
If you have any questions about this policy or how we handle your personal data, please contact us:
- Email: help@blomsbulbs.com
- Phone: 01234 709099
- Post: Bloms Bulbs, Primrose Nurseries, Melchbourne, Bedfordshire, MK44 1ZZ