Before Bloomi had a place on Target’s shelves, it had a place in Rebecca Alvarez Story’s dining room. Inventory filled the space. Orders went out from the family home. A company that would eventually travel across the country began by making itself rather conspicuous around the dinner table.
Her husband, Matt Story, remembers the sequence: a conversation about starting a business while they were dating in 2015; development in evenings and weekends in 2017; the launch from their home office in 2018. The ambition arrived before the boxes. The boxes, one suspects, made the ambition harder to overlook.
There is something useful about starting here. A retail shelf makes a company look settled. The dining room reminds us that somebody had to accommodate it before anybody else would. Alvarez Story’s career has repeatedly involved making room for an idea: in an academic program, in a family budget, in an investor conversation and, eventually, in a store.
A question worth a college major
Alvarez Story grew up in California’s Bay Area, the daughter of Mexican immigrants. She attended an all-girls Catholic high school on a scholarship. Questions about intimacy were difficult to raise, both at school and in the community around her. The awkwardness attracted her attention. Why should a subject woven into ordinary life be so difficult to discuss?
At UC Berkeley, she found a different atmosphere. Here was a university where the subject could be studied and argued about. She designed her own major, assembling a course of study around the questions that had held her interest. It was an early example of the practical response that later produced Bloomi: if the available arrangement left something important out, she would try to assemble a better one.
The distinction matters. Curiosity is easy to admire in the abstract. A self-designed major requires curiosity to survive paperwork, reading lists and the obligation to finish. Alvarez Story gave her questions a structure. She went on to graduate study at San Francisco State, earning a master’s in Sexuality Studies; the university identifies her as a member of its 2017 graduating class.
Her education also belonged to a household. She was parenting and working while studying. The life surrounding the degree helps explain why the later business would be built with practical arrangements in mind. A founder’s interests can be expansive. The calendar still contains the same number of hours.
San Francisco State
from home
Target launch
The dining room acquires a second job
Before launching Bloomi, Alvarez Story worked with startups and developed products. She had seen how a company could begin with an idea and become something another business wanted to acquire. In a 2020 account of her career, she said four of the five startups she had worked with were acquired. Entrepreneurship had become a possibility she could examine at close range.
She did not immediately quit everything and declare destiny. Having become a mother young, she wanted financial stability before taking the leap. Later, she would question whether waiting for that level of certainty was necessary. At the time, it shaped the decision. Her conversation with her husband involved allocating responsibilities and working out how they would handle the money.
That is an appealingly uncinematic origin. The business plan had to coexist with a family plan. Someone would have to do particular jobs. Bills would still arrive. A declaration of passion could start the discussion, but it could hardly finish it.
Bloomi began as a marketplace, bringing together other intimacy brands. Clients had been asking Alvarez Story for product recommendations. The company gave those requests somewhere to go. Selling a selection before developing a line of her own also gave the business a first form customers could actually use.
The early work was bootstrapped. She paid part-time team members and went without a salary herself. Looking back, she wished she had hired sooner. Her account of learning to run the business is refreshingly concrete: software, vendor partners, legal steps, decisions about where to spend. These are the questions that occupy a founder long after the origin story has been polished.
“Now, if you give me a problem with Bloomi, I’ll figure it out.”
Rebecca Alvarez Story, 2023
Two languages on the same box
Alvarez Story’s Mexican family background appears throughout Bloomi’s public identity. The company uses English and Spanish. Its packaging makes that choice tangible: a customer can encounter the brand in a language familiar from home.
It is a small surface on which to make a large decision. Packaging has limited space, and every word competes with another word, an instruction or an image. Giving Spanish a place there turns a general intention to include people into something a shopper can read.
Bloomi’s own account describes recyclable or compostable packaging. Alvarez Story has also discussed resourcefulness as an influence on product design, including making products serve more than one purpose. These choices place her cultural reference points inside the operation of the business. They reach beyond a founder’s photograph or a paragraph about her heritage.
There was another reason to build a brand of her own. Once Bloomi developed its own products, Alvarez Story could make decisions about the objects as well as the selection. A marketplace lets its founder choose what belongs. A product company adds responsibility for what gets made and how it is presented. The shift enlarged both her authority and the number of details for which she was answerable.
The result invites a useful way of reading her company: look at the practical choices. Which languages appear? What gets explained? What can the packaging do after the purchase? The answers reveal priorities more clearly than an adjective in a pitch deck.
A different room of investors
Building the company required another kind of translation. Alvarez Story knew her audience and her subject. Raising money meant explaining the business to people whose experience could be far removed from either.
She has spoken about entering entrepreneurship without an inherited investor network or access to generational wealth. She had to make connections herself. Her experiences also led her to seek investors who understood the customers she wanted to reach. The audience for a pitch could matter as much as the pitch.
Bloomi used community fundraising as well as venture investment. A Republic campaign opened participation to people around the business, including customers, friends and family. Crowdfunding offered a way to widen the group with a financial interest in its future. It made ownership part of the community conversation.
The company raised a reported $600,000 pre-seed round in 2021 and a $2 million seed round in March 2022. Those are dated financing milestones, rather than a running total. They show the resources arriving as the business moved toward a broader retail presence.
Relationships helped make some of that work possible. Pipeline Angels backed Bloomi, and Alvarez Story described finding support through events associated with the Institute for Entrepreneurial Leadership. The importance of those rooms lies in their practical purpose: founders meet people who might support the business, and a conversation can become an investment.
By 2025, she described more than 1,000 community investors. She hoped successful growth might eventually help create generational wealth for them. That remains an ambition. It is also revealing about the scale on which she imagines the company’s consequences. Her desired outcome includes people beyond the founder.
The family in the aisle
In 2022, Bloomi launched at Target. The move placed a company that had started with orders from home inside a national shopping routine. An idea that once needed a space in the dining room now occupied a space on a retail shelf.
Alvarez Story has returned to the family meaning of that moment. A trip through the store with relatives let them see the business together. In a later interview, she recalled a video of the family shopping in the aisle: proud, laughing and pointing out Bloomi products. The reaction to that video made an impression on her.
There is a difference between a launch announcement and seeing someone you love point at your work. The first records a commercial milestone. The second gives it a place in family memory. For a daughter of immigrants, a shopping trip could hold years of effort that no sales label had room to explain.
Retail brought its own continuing work. In her Shelf Talks conversation, Alvarez Story discussed community feedback, getting ready for retail and understanding where customers wanted to buy. Landing on the shelf answered one question and produced several more. The business had to keep earning its place there.
Room for the next question
Running Bloomi has not exhausted Alvarez Story’s interest in teaching and conversation. Her personal website offers speaking, workshops and individual education sessions. Her public work keeps the founder connected to the questions that preceded the business.
She is a mother of two daughters and describes family as a first priority. She has also spoken about helping other entrepreneurs. A 2026 public LinkedIn announcement added a Tory Burch Foundation fellowship to her account of what comes next.
Her ambitions extend to further products, a wider audience and greater community participation. The size of those aims is easier to understand beside the beginnings: a student arranging her studies, a couple arranging their finances, inventory being arranged around a dining room.
The habit is consistent. Notice the question. Take it seriously. Work out what answering it would require. Then find somewhere to put the boxes.