The True Story of What Happened to The Bloom

THE SEARCH FOR A SOLUTION: FIRST TRIES & THE OBVIOUS ANSWER ALL ALONG

After soul searching, the answer that came through was “Expand The Brand”: While the webseries didn’t have a viable business model, I would develop one around the brand that would provide it with a financial base and allow it to operate sustainably as a business.

The three parts of the brand would be the webseries/media channel plus a social media platform dedicated to advancing the global festival community and an online retail store for festival artisan clothing and goods.

The social platform would be prototyped with the festival community and then, once perfected, scaled to strengthen the network of forward-thinking evolutionary projects and communities globally. We would build a proof-of-concept / minimum-viable-product to raise investment, and as a byproduct, secure my work visa and finish Episode Four.

As it happened, the saving grace of this otherwise-challenging time was that I met the woman who would become the mother of my child in the week of my return. Through our relationship, I soon found myself in a quite-magical community sharing a large home on the west side of Vancouver.

One of my housemates was already developing a social platform prototype with his partner that we could build off. His dad was also an ex-Wall Street guy who agreed to help me develop my business case. Taking this as a sign from the Universe that I was on the right path, I embarked on the new mission with them as collaborators.

Easy, right? Lol 😹

Now, to be fair, we were influenced by the zeitgeist of the time, which was at the height of “Start-Up Fever” when it seemed like anyone with a smart innovation could secure venture capital and have a chance to make it big. 

We did get the platform to a semi-public beta stage, which we invited newsletter subscribers to join. (Some of you may remember this.)

However, even though we were outsourcing the programming at a relatively cheap rate, we were burning through cash—which, at this point, was coming from a modest yet meaningful inheritance from my father. Coupled with the unreliability of my twenty-something-year-old partners, after 1.5 years of hard work, design & development, the project stalled. 

That said, a lot of quality work and innovative concepts were put into the design. I still believe it would be viable and worth revisiting from a better-resourced position. It would offer a much-needed alternative to the norm by fostering and connecting a global community united by the drive to create solutions for our current predicaments.

The retail store was a much simpler concept. There are so many talented artisans in the scene, most of whom don’t have any capacity for marketing. Unless you’re physically at the festival they’re vending at, chances are you’re not going to find them.

We would solve this problem by bringing their goods to the global festival community on a dedicated platform, which we would also curate to build our own identity around quality and style. The store took a year to build and when we launched, we had a beautiful site with over 200 carefully-selected products by festival designers.

WHEN THE OBVIOUS ANSWER ALL ALONG WAS…

As the store was in the home stretch of being built was when I realized the television series was the obvious answer all along. It was an “A-ha” (or perhaps “duh”) moment. Obviously, this is exactly the industry that finances creative endeavors like The Bloom.

I recall the day after our first Series Preview came out, a sales agent contacted us wanting to pitch the show to several networks. At the time, my countercultural bias led me to dismiss the idea immediately, equating television with a corrupting influence that would interfere with the truth being shown.

But in just a few years since then, television was in the midst of its own mini-revolution. Streaming platforms were upending the traditional model of broadcast television and their gate-keepers. Detached from linear schedules and based on building viewership through subscriptions rather than generating revenue from ads, content-hungry platforms such as Netflix, Hulu and Amazon were investing massive budgets into boundary-pushing shows by a much more diverse array of creators.

By then, Burning Man had also crossed fully into mainstream awareness (albeit superficially), which created a curiosity and an opening that The Bloom was exactly made to fill. 

So, it was off to the races in this direction too. I gathered a small array of allies in the media field as my inner council and started putting together a pitch trailer and deck.

MEANWHILE, LIFE…

By the time of this realization, my daughter Sahara Skye had been recently born after a 24-hour labor in our collective mansion home. She was absolutely beautiful. Since then, she has been the bright light and treasure of my life. As a father, I couldn’t ask for more.

Then, two weeks after Sahara’s birth, my mom suffered a major stroke. It was touch-and-go for a few days but, thankfully, she pulled through—however with the loss of use of most of her right side.

Since then, as her only immediate family (my brother lives out east) I help her with all the errands she can no longer do herself, getting groceries, driving her to appointments, etc. The first couple of years after the stroke were particularly intense as she had several hospitalizations due to falls as well as a lot of extra physiotherapy. 

So I was suddenly double-whammied on the adulting front and abruptly inducted into the “Sandwich Generation” with two vulnerable family members, each needing a lot of care but on opposite ends of the age spectrum.

CHOICES TO MAKE…

So there I was: a newborn baby, elderly mom fresh from a stroke, operating the new store by myself from the ground up, and editing the trailer and developing pitch materials for the TV series.

Because all that wasn’t interesting enough, my relationship with my daughter’s mom—who I had originally started the store with—was also on the rocks. (We got pregnant just a year into our relationship.)

I tried to do it all for a while, but it was too much. Something was going to have to give. Baby and mom were non-negotiable, so between the TV series and the store, I chose to pursue the TV series.

We had just met the producers involved with putting together the first deal and it looked like the financing of the series would be imminent. I put the store on the back-burner with the plan to hire someone to manage it and keep it going once the financing came through.

DEVELOPMENT YEARS OR WASTED YEARS?

Looking back at these first “failures”, I feel I mainly overshot in ambition relative to the resources I had on hand to accomplish them. There was a LOT of quality work done and the concepts behind them remain solid. 

Although it stings, I have to accept I may need to write these years off as wasted effort, other than the knowledge and skills I’ve gained from doing them. My hope though is that these will turn out to be “development” years and that I can circle back to them when better-resourced and established. (Say, after producing a ground-breaking wildly-successful TV series 😉.)

They are worthy and viable endeavors but need a team employed to accomplish. The social platform, in particular, feels necessary to provide a values-based alternative to mainstream social media that has distorted our cultural landscape and supported the rise of terrible forces in the world.

In any case, this is all in hindsight as, at the time, the TV deal looked like it was going to be an imminent solution to our challenges.

READ: THE FIRST TV DEAL TO NOW