Bloomwise is a start-up business created by co-founders Frankie Lewns and Dr Paris Alexandros Lalousis. Bloomwise provides B2B proactive workplace mental health solutions. The Bloomwise ethos is about improving the mental health and wellbeing of employees in the workplace, to result in a healthier, happier, and more productive workplace. Bloomwise offers three products currently. Firstly, the Bloomwise Mental Health Plan, this helps employers create a mental health framework & policy for their organisation, helping them set aims, objectives, and goals with respect to mental health within their business, and identifying how they are going to achieve them.
They also offer workshops, with the aim to educate and empower people to feel confident when looking after and talking about their own mental health and wellbeing. These range from ‘Starting and Managing a Conversation’ to ‘Stress Awareness and Management’. Finally, the Bloomwise Workplace Mental Health App is mutually beneficial to both employers and employees. It helps employees track their own mental health and workplace health, whilst also providing key insights for the employer into the health of their organisation.
The aim of the app is to pre-empt employees needing to take time off work for mental health related reasons by acting as a proactive and preventative approach to mental health. To date we have successfully raised £27,000 through various awards and scholarships which has helped us develop a professional website, get marketing materials, and develop our workplace mental health app. We are currently seeking £200,000 of investment to create the second version of our app, hire within customer acquisition, and invest in marketing.
Get in contact with us:
Email: bloomwiseltd@gmail.com
Instagram: @bloom.wise
LinkedIn: Bloomwise
Facebook: Bloomwise
Twitter: @Bloomwise1
Our story:
Our idea was first developed as part of the University of Birmingham’s Virtual Consultancy Challenge (VCC) in March through to June 2020. Every year, the University of Birmingham holds a VCC which provides postgraduate researchers with a virtual training programme and team competition for them to solve a real-life challenge for an industry or charity client. For the 2020 challenge, the ‘client’ was Centre for Mental Health, and the University tasked researchers with finding a policy or practice solution to help small businesses support the mental health of their workers.
Poor mental health is a serious and costly problem for employers - in the UK alone, £56 billion is lost each year to poor workplace mental health. Our solution was selected as the winner and since then we have registered as a company and have been further developing our idea. This consisted of expanding on the initial idea we had and creating a more in depth and comprehensive Mental Health Plan. Additionally, we spent time creating our two additional services that we offer as a company - the workshops and our workplace mental health app. The Exchange provides the opportunity to receive support and guidance from experts within the Elevate team, which helps us grow our business. Additionally, it gives us access to funding schemes, investor networks, and intern hiring opportunities, which are vital to our future business plans. Most importantly, it provides a space for like-minded people to come together as a community and exchange ideas and provide support to create ultimately create successful businesses.
About Us:
Frankie:
I’m one of the Co-Founders at Bloomwise, as well as CEO. Currently I’m also a final year PhD student working in Biomaterials and Tissue Engineering. Outside of my academic life I have a background in healthcare communications, and from this I have developed an interest in marketing, digital communications and forming creative content for our business. In my spare time I like cooking, baking, and going to the gym. A fun fact about me is that I won Start-up Founder of the Year for Midlands Women in Tech for my work with Bloomwise.
Paris:
I am one of the Co-Founders and Chief Scientific Officer at Bloomwise. I recently finished my PhD in which I used various artificial intelligence techniques with neuroimaging and clinical data to improve the diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment of psychosis and depression. When I am not looking at brain scans and coding machine learning algorithms you can usually find me climbing in a bouldering centre, at the gym, or going on road trips. A fun fact about me is that I have multiple ethnic backgrounds (British, Greek, German, Sierra Leonese, and French).