Beyond The Bouquet: Meet Wout-Jan And Claire Of Beyond Blossom
Some people work with flowers, and some people seem to live and breathe them. One thing we noticed immediately about the dynamic duo behind Beyond Blossom is their intense love and passion for all things floral.
Claire and Wout-Jan share a genuine fascination with flowers, from the subtle differences created by individual growers and growing regions to the way each variety can completely change the atmosphere of a design. Together, they have built a business that combines Claire’s lifelong love of floristry with Wout-Jan’s instinct for structure, space and creativity.
Two Very Different Journeys
Claire has been working with flowers since she was a little girl and knew from an early age that she wanted to become a florist. Even an allergy to certain flowers, and advice from doctors to consider another profession, could not persuade her to follow a different path.
At just 24, she opened her own flower shop. She ran it for five years, gaining an enormous amount of experience along the way. However, she eventually began to feel that the traditional flower-shop environment did not give her the freedom to take on the large, creative projects she truly loved.
Wout-Jan’s journey into wedding flowers was rather different. As a child, he dreamed of becoming an architect, but life took him in another direction. He spent ten years running a driving school, specialising in teaching people experiencing a fear of failure or a fear of driving.
Over time, he began to miss having a creative outlet. Just before COVID, he and Claire started running Beyond Blossom together. Today, they design some of the most beautiful and important days of people’s lives, allowing at least part of that childhood dream of architecture to find its way into Wout-Jan’s work.
A Shared Fascination with Flowers
Their passion extends far beyond simply selecting flowers that fit a particular colour palette. Claire and Wout-Jan are fascinated by the differences between flowers grown by different growers and the way the weather and conditions within each region can influence their shape and colour.
For an average wedding, Beyond Blossom works with around 30 different flower varieties, including at least seven types of roses. For larger projects, that number can increase significantly. Spray roses have always played an important role in their work. While they have not personally noticed a dramatic proportional increase in their use, the weddings they design are becoming larger, meaning the overall quantities required continue to grow.
They also believe that the increasing availability of large-flowered spray roses and new varieties will naturally create greater demand across the wider wedding and floral industries.
Creating Depth, Movement, and Atmosphere
For Claire and Wout-Jan, a spray rose is never simply a standard product. Each variety helps them create a completely different atmosphere within a design. Spray roses introduce variety, depth and layering, while their multiple blooms allow the pair to play with different flower sizes within the same stem. Depending on the variety, they can bring a playful, elegant or beautifully whimsical quality to a design.
Their favourites tend to be the larger, more unusual, or seasonal garden spray roses. Ritual is particularly loved, although its availability is very limited. When the season allows, they also use Gentle Trendsetter, usually choosing the longer stems because they create such an impressive display.
Then there is Sofie, a variety they regularly turn to for corsages and buttonholes. Its quality, strength and reliability make it especially suitable for detailed wearables. Its colouring also works beautifully with many of their palettes, although they have noticed that it can occasionally lean more towards peach than pink, depending on how much sunshine it has received.
Staying Ahead of the Trends
When asked about the trends appearing in their 2026 and 2027 bookings, Claire and Wout-Jan explained that they actively try to avoid following them. Instead, they see themselves as early adopters. They love discovering something new and working with ideas, materials or techniques before they reach the mainstream. By the time something becomes a mass-market trend, Beyond Blossom has usually already begun exploring what comes next.
This adventurous approach extends into their own home. As they spend more time there during winter, their flower choices are less about selecting a particular colour and more about finding an unusual variety they can test. Interestingly, they are also far more likely to choose bold, outspoken colours for their own home than they would typically use within their wedding work.
Sometimes You Just Have to Improvise
Thankfully, nothing has ever gone terribly wrong during one of their events, but there have certainly been a few unexpected moments. However, during the installation of a Chinese wedding on the other side of the country, the client’s mother asked if they could “quickly” create 50 additional buttonholes. These had not been ordered in advance and, had Claire and Wout-Jan known, they would naturally have brought extra red spray roses with them.
Fortunately, they had a bucket of Sofie roses available and could remove some from one of the larger installations. There was just one small problem: the family felt they were “too white”.
The solution involved an unexpected trip to the local hardware store for a can of pink spray paint, which they used to give the flowers an additional blush of colour. It may not have been their preferred method, but the result was surprisingly successful. Sometimes, floral design is as much about quick thinking and improvisation as it is about the original plan!
Treating Wedding Design as Spatial Art
The future of Beyond Blossom is about continuing to push the boundaries of wedding design. Claire and Wout-Jan want to move away from fragmented, traditional arrangements and focus increasingly on large-scale, immersive concepts that completely transform a space.
Within the next three years, they plan to move into a larger workspace. This will give them the room to engineer and pre-build even more ambitious statement pieces before installing them at each venue. Ultimately, their dream is to keep challenging themselves creatively, treating wedding design as spatial art and inspiring others within the floral industry to think bigger too.
With Claire’s lifelong connection to flowers, Wout-Jan’s architectural eye and their shared determination to explore what has not yet been done, we have a feeling there are some very exciting things ahead for Beyond Blossom.
A huge thank you to Claire and Wout-Jan for sharing their story with us. We cannot wait to see where their creativity takes them next!
