ATLANTA, June 12, 2023 - Today, Intuit Mailchimp announces the second edition of Bloom Season, our community-centered 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.
Where the first iteration of Bloom Season celebrated the entrepreneurial spirit of the BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color) individuals re-writing the small business playbook—Bloom Season 2 is focused 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.
Bloom Season 2 continues to grow the platform as a place for everyone, of any identity, to find useful guidance for helping turn their plans into positive momentum for their businesses. Focusing on the LGBTQIA+ community was a natural step for Season 2.
"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."
It was essential for 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. Now 32 years old, Henrietta Hudson has thrived by evolving with the community
- 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
- Robyn Exton, founder of the HER social app for all lesbian, bi, queer, non-binary, trans, and gender non-conforming folxs
- Kelly Rakowski, of lex.app, an app to explore what's happening in your local LGBTQIA+ community
- Sarah Moore, co-founder of the London LGBTQ+ Community Centre
- Ryan Lanji, founder of Hungama, a London-based collective for QBIPOC
- Nolan Hanson of Trans Boxing, based in New York City
Kin centered 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 colors 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.”
