Flowers…uncut

Posted by: Ellis - Deal Maker on June 26th, 2007

Tuesday 5th June was an exciting day for Sam (tech and design guru), Ronald (flower buying Dutch masterpiece), Alina (chief flower wrangler) and myself (me!), as we attended ABN Amro’s “World Environment Day” fair in ABN’s offices in the City of London.

ABN Amro is pretty hot on sustainable initiatives and driving ethical, environmental policies through the bank…plus they’re a Dutch company to boot (interesting for us, as we source our flowers from the world’s largest flower market in Holland). So when we were offered a space at their exhibition/fair for internal staff, to drive awareness of ethical and sustainable living initiatives, we were delighted to say “Yes!”.

We then had to have a bit of a sit down and brainstorm to work out what we were actually going to do on the day. After all, this was a pretty interesting opportunity to tell lots of people about our ethical flower range and other green practices, such as our electric van trial and our carbon neutral web hosting. But we didn’t want to be too worthy; our aim was to capture the imagination by giving the right mix of fun and ethical insight.

A few burnt braincells later and we thought we had it cracked. Basically, we decided to keep it simple. We’d have a draw to win one of most popular and impactful FFP bouquets – 100 red grand prix roses (FFP accredited, of course) - and give everyone who entered a single, FFP gerbera to take back to their desk and help spread the word about Arena (everyone likes a freebie, we figured). In return, we got all entrants’ email addresses so we could email them after the event with more details of our ethical flowers. Simply put, we wanted the flowers to do the talking, not us!

Tuesday arrived all too quickly, but we were ready; Sam had been on the ball and sorted out swanky new display boards, Ronald had been working hard with FFP to get the flowers sorted and some support materials together, and Alina was prepped to make some beautiful bouquets on the fly. An Arena Flowers van load later (we took over 500 colourful FFP gerberas, lilies, freesias, various indoor plants and of course the 100 red roses),

PLUS some good old fashioned elbow grease and the stand was soon ready:

Throughout the day, we were endlessly surprised by the steady stream of people and the general knowledge about sustainability…and of course the Gerberas went down a treat (I had no idea they are the favourite flower of so many ladies!!) By 4 o’clock we were all pretty exhausted but happy: we had spoken to over 300 people during the day and really made our business known to three of ABN Amro’s key offices in central London so we were very happy.

Our day done, we packed up and headed home. In my role as chief deal maker at Arena, I was really pleased we’d been able to make some valuable contacts, introduced lots of people to our ethical flowers range, taken a lot of orders and plenty of promise for future business plus we’d even discussed possible partnership activity with some of the other exhibitors, including Ethical Edibles, Corporate Express and Ecoutlet.co.uk …so all in all really fun and worthwhile. I’ll keep you posted as things develop further!

PS if you have any bright ideas as to strategic link ups between Arena and your business (or a business you think fits with us), please let me know by emailing ellis at arenaflowers.com!

Filed under: Customers, Ethics & Environment, Marketing on June 26th, 2007