The 40.000 children used to sell flowers on the streets for cash, but digitalization and covid-19 changed this for good. Majblomman needed help to invent new ways to sell flowers through digital payment systems and online stores.
A008
Majblomman
Solutions
System Architecture, Development, Design, Mobile Apps, E-commerce
2020
Every spring since 1907, thousands of children sell flowers to collect money to fight child poverty in Sweden. The concept is called “children helping children” and the first flower is traditionally sold to Her Majesty The Queen.
How do you get kids to sell flowers online to grandparents who barely use email? The children understood digital commerce just fine, but their buyers needed something that felt like talking to a kid on the street corner.
We gave each child their own e-commerce store plus physical flowers for sidewalk sales. Behind it, we built a custom order management system that synced online and offline sales in real-time. Kids registered through an app where they could share their store links and watch their earnings grow with every sale.
Each purchase triggered a push notification with the buyer's name and running totals. Flowers got delivered on the spot or shipped home. The technical challenge was building extreme simplicity into both sides of the transaction.
No existing platform could handle what we needed, so we built it from scratch. The kids got their entrepreneurial experience, the buyers got their flowers, and everyone got to feel human in the process.
We built a native app to provide pocket-size tools for the young entrepreneurs. They use it to register, customize, promote and follow sales on the street and online.
Each child got their own webshop so they can sell flowers to relatives far away using a simple checkout process.
The child gets a notification on each sale so they can follow their progress in real-time!
When selling on the streets the buyer uses a QR-code to pay using the same order system.
When covid-19 hit, we had three months to digitalize their 100-year old income model.
Majblomman has always been about kids selling flowers door-to-door, outside stores, on buses — finding creative ways to reach people everywhere. Covid wiped that out overnight. They lost almost everything in year one.
But kids adapt fast, especially to new tech. We saw a chance to rebuild their entire sales approach digitally, and we had months to pull it off.
We wanted the online experience to feel as immediate as buying from a kid on the street. That meant stripping everything down to pure function — no friction, no confusion, just the essentials.
We built a rough prototype first so we could pivot quickly if needed. Then came the real work: designing stores that were fast, simple, and totally focused. Every button had to earn its place. We ran UX workshops, tested different flows, and kept cutting until we found something that worked like the food delivery apps people already knew.
The breakthrough was realizing we didn't need a shopping cart. The whole site could be the cart. Small insights like that helped us think past convention and build something that actually served the goal: getting kids back to selling flowers, just in a new way.
During the first 2 hours we had over 30.000 orders, sometimes coming in at a rate of 20 orders per second. For the entire period, 750.000 orders were placed and 45.000 children sold flowers, collecting around 60.000.000 SEK in total. All funds will be used as financial aid for low-income families in Sweden.
