Delaware’s Business Friendly Community Allows Passion to Bloom

Being organized is a skill we all wish to have. For some, it comes easy; but for others, organization is a struggle. Luckily, there exist tools to help anyone keep their life on track. Michelle Askin and Kaylyn Minix founded bloom daily planners by combining their personal interests with their passion for inspiring others. The two met as interns working at Student Media Group during their time at the University of Delaware. Their work revolved around planners, and they were able to bond with one another over this shared interest. Both women took great joy and pride from being organized, and they found they wanted to share this ability with other people.

bloom daily planners was created with the intent to not only help people stay organized, but Askin and Minix wanted to focus on inspiring women to be their best selves. This is where they began, creating products anyone—not just college kids—could use and feel empowered. Ten years later, the company has over 300 different products and 400 shops. Askin and Minix have been able to share their talent and passion with thousands of people, and their messages of empowerment have been able to help women of any age all throughout the country.

ASKIN: I am Michelle Askin, and I am the co-founder of bloom daily planners. bloom is a stationery company and our mission is to inspire and empower women to bloom into the best version of themselves. So we create all kinds of planners, planning pads, all kinds of stationery to walk you through every age and stage of a woman’s life. I was interning at a company called Student Media Group when I was a sophomore at University of Delaware, and I met the co-founder of Bloom, Kaylyn, through that internship. Kaylyn and I obviously loved planners which is what brought us to that internship in the first place.

MINIX: I always had a planner, my brothers would make fun of me going on vacation in Delaware, making my packing lists and to-do lists.

ASKIN: And we had kind of a pet project idea to do a more inspirational, more general line that wasn’t specific to colleges. It took off, and 10 years later, we now have basically a whole other company from that idea.

MINIX: I don’t think that we could’ve ever imagined the amount of growth that we would’ve had.

ASKIN: We went from just one product to now having over 300. We have 10 full-time employees now and a bunch of interns from the University of Delaware. And at least, 400 bookstores and gift shops and we’re selling on Amazon and online. We love being to close to University of Delaware. It’s been a huge asset for us. We hire probably 10 to 15 interns per semester, and then we kind of use that as a talent pool to hire full-time.

MINIX: So it’s nice to just have that hometown kind of spirit within our company.

ASKIN: Delaware is definitely a very business-friendly community. We’re close to a lot of big cities, so you get a lot of people from New York and Philadelphia shopping in Delaware for that tax-free benefit. So it’s just a really business-friendly community feel, and I’m really proud to be from Delaware.