Our Team
Founder & Managing Director
Nicholas James
Nicholas James has been working with flowers since 2007, leading two of South Africa’s top florist and gifting brands, Fabulous Flowers & Gifts and Flower Guy. When Shopify launched in South Africa in 2014, he built the Fabulous Flowers & Gifts website himself, learning the platform from the inside out while still running a busy studio. He knows the reality behind the pretty pictures: early mornings at the market, last-minute wedding changes, Valentine’s Day chaos, staff who need care, cashflow that needs watching and a to-do list that never quite ends.
For seven years, he also served as Operations Manager at Bloomable, South Africa’s leading florist marketplace, supporting hundreds of independent florists and gift businesses. From that vantage point he saw patterns – why some shops quietly flourished online while others, just as talented, stayed hidden on page three.
A Love for Small Business
In 2022, Nicholas began working one-to-one with Shopify lifestyle brands, starting with The Good Stuff, a health and wellness shop in Cape Town; Peas in a Pod, a strengths-based leadership and training academy; Something Pretty, a luxury boutique for beautifully curated womenswear; and Shelley Ruth Wyndham, a transformational life coach devoted to helping people live in alignment with the Creator Source of all life. Those collaborations confirmed what he already suspected: when you honour the heart of a business and pair it with thoughtful SEO, you don’t have to shout to be seen.
Nicholas also supports The Village, South Africa’s biggest online parenting community with over 65,000 members in its Facebook group. He handles social media for this incredible community of caring parents and humans, helping to hold a warm, supportive space where people feel seen, heard and less alone in the messy, everyday reality of family life.
Outside of work, Nicholas is most himself when he’s travelling with his partner, cooking for family, or walking slowly through leafy suburbs, noticing the way light falls on old trees and front-garden roses. At home, two cats provide quality control and occasional keyboard interference. That same love of beauty, warmth and small details runs through the way he builds strategies, writes copy and looks after clients.
Nicholas’s work is grounded in his dedication to the Creator Source of all life, the Source that breathed us into being. He sees Blooming Checkout as a practical expression of that calling: to support small businesses to thrive, to act as a bridge and a connector, and to be a positive catalyst for change for the best and highest good of all concerned.
If you decide to work with Blooming Checkout, Nicholas is the steady presence in the background – listening carefully, asking good questions, and quietly tending to the roots of your business so the branches can bloom.
SEO & Collections Specialist
Ray Nkosi
Ray Nkosi works alongside Nicholas to turn strategy into live, working collections on your Shopify store. With five years’ experience in digital marketing and Shopify, he focuses on keyword research, collection copy and on-site implementation.
Ray maps the right search terms to each collection, builds or updates them in Shopify, and tidies titles, URLs and meta so everything is easy to find and easy to navigate. His calm, methodical work is the quiet engine that helps your collections start pulling in the right visitors and more sales.
GRAPHIC DESIGNER
Natalie van der Walt
When our clients need design that looks as considered as their words, we partner with Natalie van der Walt. With nearly two decades of experience in brand, brochure and presentation design, she has a gentle knack for turning rough ideas, screenshots and mood boards into clear, elegant visuals that feel like “you”, not a template.
Natalie steps in when Blooming Checkout clients need extra creative support – refreshed logos, polished brand elements, sales decks, lead magnets or campaign graphics that sit beautifully alongside their Shopify store. She thinks in colour, layout and tiny details, making sure everything we put into the world for you looks trustworthy, cohesive and ready to be seen.
FLORIST COACH
Josie van Aswegen
When florists want creative support from someone who truly understands the trade, we introduce them to Josie van Aswegen. A master florist with more than three decades of experience, Josie built a beloved floral studio and gifting brand, creating everything from everyday bouquets to large-scale designs for hotels, weddings and events.
As Blooming Checkout’s florist coach, Josie offers one-to-one creative coaching for global florists who want to refine their product ranges, shape profitable collections and keep their work feeling inspired, not repetitive. Her ideas are always rooted in reality – small, practical changes to designs, pricing and ranges that actually move the needle on what sells, not just what looks nice on Instagram.
Coaching is available as bi-weekly or once-a-month sessions, with a minimum commitment of three months, giving you enough time to experiment, adjust and see the impact in your shop and on your sales.
GOOGLE ADS SPECIALIST
Erich Oosthuizen
Erich is a highly experienced Google Ads specialist with a strong technical focus on performance marketing, conversion tracking, and data accuracy. He works with agencies and businesses across South Africa, the UK, the US and the Middle East, managing full Google Ads setups as well as complex tracking environments involving GA4, Google Tag Manager, Enhanced Conversions for Leads (ECL), and offline conversion upload workflows.
His strengths lie in building high-performing search, Performance Max and remarketing campaigns, implementing reliable conversion tracking across websites, CRMs and third-party platforms, and resolving measurement issues that limit optimisation. Erich regularly works with platforms like Salesforce, HubSpot, Zapier, WooCommerce, WordPress and Shopify, ensuring clean data flows from click to final conversion.
With deep experience across multiple industries—including retail, education, professional services, hospitality, construction, landscaping, and specialist B2B sectors—Erich brings a practical, hands-on approach to campaign optimisation. His work consistently improves lead quality, lowers acquisition costs, and gives clients the clear, accurate attribution they need to make better decisions.
PAID SOCIAL MEDIA SPECIALIST
Natasha Courtney
Natasha is a Senior Paid Social Media Specialist with 12+ years’ experience planning, managing and optimising campaigns across Meta, TikTok and LinkedIn. She specialises in full-funnel strategy, campaign setup, creative direction, continuous optimisation and performance reporting — all focused on delivering measurable, ROI-positive results.
She has partnered with brands and agencies across multiple industries to build scalable paid social systems that reliably drive high-quality leads, sales and engagement. Combining strong analytical thinking with hands-on execution, Natasha helps teams run campaigns that not only perform, but consistently improve over time.
