Aquarelle Brand Guidelines: Rennes 1987, Photo-Proof Bouquets & a Workshop in the Oise

Two brothers and a chain of flower shops.

Aquarelle is a French flower-delivery brand that makes up its own bouquets and sends them across France and several other European countries. The company says it was co-founded in 1987 by two brothers, Henri and François de Maublanc, and its list of key dates places the first Aquarelle flower shop in Rennes that year; French Wikipedia gives the same town and year. The brothers built a chain of branded florists in French town centres, reaching 30 shops by 1995, the company says, and in 1990 they started a second chain, Au nom de la rose, which French Wikipedia says also took franchisees.

The move online came in the late 1990s. The company dates the launch of its website to October 1997, and says it shipped 31 orders that December. According to French Wikipedia, which cites Le Figaro Économie from 2004, the brothers set out to change flower relay delivery, which many customers saw as useful but costly and unreliable in what actually arrived. Most of the shops were then closed; one Aquarelle shop remains in Paris’s 8th arrondissement, the company says.

The French company register lists Aquarelle.com as a simplified joint-stock company created on 1 April 1998 at Levallois-Perret, just west of Paris, and classed as specialised distance selling, and the holding company Aquarelle.com Group as created in March 2000 in the same town. French Wikipedia says the group is majority-owned by its two founders, and the company’s own pages still describe it as created by the two brothers.

Bouquets made in the Oise.

Aquarelle’s distinguishing claim is that it makes what it sells. The company says every bouquet delivered in France and northern Europe is composed by hand by the staff of its workshop at Brasseuse, a village in the Oise, north of Paris; French Wikipedia says the group moved its workshops there in 2001, into a late-19th-century distillery that it bought and restored. Its Spanish business, Aquarelle Bucaro, was set up in 2000 with the florist Bucaro and has its own workshop in Spain, the company says; French Wikipedia places it in Madrid.

Two service ideas recur in the company’s account of itself. The first is the photo proof: since 1998, it says, a sender can receive a photograph of the bouquet taken just before it is shipped, so they see what is actually sent. The second is packaging for the journey. The company says that in 1990 it devised a “bulle d’eau,” a water bubble that let flowers travel in water, later replaced by a non-spill transport pot that it also sells to other florists. Senders can add a message card and a printed photo, it says.

The range has grown in steps that the company dates itself: chocolates with flowers in 2005, gift boxes in 2009, scented candles in 2012, an orchid collection in 2016, a line of bouquets for big occasions in 2017 and flower subscriptions in 2018. Mobile apps followed, for iPhone in 2010 and for Android in 2011. Since 12 April 2016 it has sold a range of roses that it describes as fair-trade, grown on horticultural farms in Ethiopia. Its catalogue is organised around mixed bouquets, armfuls of a single flower such as peonies or tulips, roses, and plants and orchids.

How florists present themselves.

Flower delivery brands sell something that changes with every order. The bouquet a customer sees on screen is a photograph of one arrangement, made up again by a florist or a packing team when the order arrives, so the photograph does much of the work of the brand. A bouquet is often given a name and sold in more than one size: in 2019, for example, House Beautiful reported Serenata Flowers bouquets offered in standard, deluxe and grande versions.

Packaging is the other visible surface. Some online florists send flowers in boxes made to fit through a letterbox, and that packaging has become part of how they are described: House Beautiful noted in 2019 that one Bloom & Wild bouquet came “delivered through your door” in the company’s letterbox packaging. Others work through networks of local shops, where the arrangement is made by an independent florist and the brand lives mainly on the website and the order confirmation.

Naming carries much of the rest. Seasonal launches, bouquets named after a month or a festival, gift ranges and, at some companies, subscription schemes can give a brand a calendar to talk about, and the trade revolves around a few peak days; Valentine’s Day is the clearest, which the Swedish trade site Ehandel.se called the most intense day of the year for flower delivery in February 2026.

Behind the shop fronts, ownership is often more concentrated than the brand names suggest. Groups such as Euroflorist run several national web shops and keep separate corporate and investor pages that list the brands they own. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it and how it sells — and attributes to the company any claim that rests on its own word alone.

Across borders, and a test of copying.

Abroad, Aquarelle trades through its own sites and subsidiaries. The company lists Aquarelle-Boeckx for Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, Aquarelle Deutschland for Germany, Aquarelle UK for Britain and Aquarelle Bucaro for Spain. In the United States it works with Ode à la Rose, a New York flower-delivery start-up; the New York tech site AlleyWatch reported in January 2015 that Aquarelle.com Group had taken an equity stake in it in May 2014, alongside a New York family office. In France, the company says it acquired the 123fleurs network of independent florists in 2015, while French Wikipedia describes a stake and a partnership; through 123fleurs it offers delivery to France’s overseas territories and to other countries. It has also obtained its own internet extension, .aquarelle, which it uses for sites on candles, chocolates, orchids and floral-art tutorials.

The brand’s reliance on bouquet photography was tested in court. In June 2014 Aquarelle.com sued Réseau Fleuri, which runs the rival site florajet.com, saying it had copied four photographs of its signature arrangements. On 29 January 2016 the Paris tribunal de grande instance found the photographs, of peonies, roses, two-stem orchids and bougainvillea, not original enough for copyright protection and found no parasitic competition proved; on 9 December 2016 the Paris Court of Appeal upheld that judgment and rejected the unfair-competition claim, according to the ruling published by Legalis.

The company also lists sponsorships in sailing, backing skippers in races including the Vendée Globe and the Transat Jacques Vabre, and in classical music, through festivals in Deauville and the Limousin. The name itself is the French word for watercolour, so the domain aquarelle.com and the art-supply sense of the word are easy to confuse in searches.

For a design guide, Aquarelle shows a florist that sells on proof: a photograph of each bouquet before it ships, a named workshop, and product steps it dates year by year. Compare Interflora, the flowers-by-wire network whose relay model Aquarelle set out to challenge, and Bloom & Wild, a London delivery brand of the 2010s. For this guide we use a deep rose, a soft rose wash and a leaf green with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Aquarelle’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.