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Marketing automation and email marketing platform Intuit Mailchimp announces the second edition of Bloom Season, a community-centred digital magazine for underrepresented entrepreneurial communities, celebrating LGBTQIA+ identifying business owners, entrepreneurs, and advanced marketers.
Launched in 2022, Bloom Season was brought to life by Mailchimp and the impact-focused creative company Kin to serve as a valuable resource for those given less visibility in business literature and fewer opportunities in the business world. It’s full of first-hand stories, resources, and actionable insights from people with lived experience starting businesses, enduring challenges, and refusing to give up.
The first iteration of Bloom Season celebrated the entrepreneurial spirit of the BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Colour. This time around, Bloom Season 2 focuses on uplifting the voices within the LGBTQIA+ community, and continues to shine a light on the first-hand experiences, insights, and actionable possibilities for LGBTQIA+ identifying individuals in business.
“We’ve woven together a powerful combination of voices and resources to celebrate this latest edition of Bloom Season,” said Christina Humphrey, Senior Manager of Mailchimp Studios. “With so many LGBTQIA+ entrepreneurs breaking the status quo, we moved to craft a digital space that shines a spotlight on their stories and experiences.”
Bloom Season’s second edition to allow communities to tell their own stories, so Mailchimp and Kin worked to ensure all business owners, writers, illustrators and photographers assembled identify as LGBTQIA+.
Over 50+ collaborators are featured in Bloom Season 2, including Lisa Cannistraci, owner of Henrietta Hudson, the oldest lesbian bar in the US. It also shines a spotlight on Cora Hamilton, founder of Uns*, a Berlin-based model and talent agency that exclusively represents LGBTQIA+ people, advocating for representation of all identities, ethnicities, bodies and abilities.
Other collaborators include Robyn Exton of the social app HER, Kelly Rakowski of lex.app, Sarah Moore of the London LGBTQ+ Community Centre, Ryan Lanji of Hungama, and Nolah Hanson of Trans Boxing.
Kin centred this edition on the creative concept Bloom River, to reflect the constant fluidity and movement within the community, or collection of communities that have come together to make something stronger. The visual identity is based on the many colours of the Pride flag, reimagined in a state of flow to represent the diversity of the community and embrace all walks of life.
“The idea of a river worked in two ways,” says Kin co-founder Kwame Taylor-Hayford. “A river is historically a place that brings all people together—to drink, bathe, travel, play—and it’s simultaneously ancient and always changing. It encapsulates the community and constant evolution of being LGBTQIA+. It’s also fluid, like gender and sexual identity.”
“We wanted to pull that into the visuals, bleeding the rainbow colors together. There are no hard lines. Everything is connected, intersectional and builds to represent growth and a future between binaries.”
The new collection of content includes the feature film Sirens, an award-winning documentary following the Middle East’s first all-women thrash metal band, produced by Natasha Lyonne and Maya Rudolph, and directed by Rita Baghdadi. The film is available to stream for free at mailchimp.com/bloomseason and mailchimp.com/presents.
“Like all historically excluded groups, LGBTQIA+ business owners face unique obstacles,” says Sophie Ozoux, co-founder of Kin. “Our research showed LGBTQIA+ entrepreneurs find it harder to secure capital, identify relatable mentors and can face isolation. The difficulties are different in every country, so we looked across the globe to find people changing the world.”
