Flowers…uncut

Posted by: Samwise of the front end on September 7th, 2007

I drive a scooter which takes me to work everyday. My scooter is a thing of joy, something I wanted since I first saw one driving down the King’s Road in Chelsea. It is a black Vespa GTS, 250cc and I have added a couple of optional extras, in particular a chrome crash bar that surrounds the bike.

Now, the bike works perfectly well without the crash bar and if I am honest I did not buy it to protect my bike in the event of a crash, I bought it purely because I wanted my bike to stand out :) The bike I had first seen in Chelsea (which also had the chrome bar) had made such an impact on me that I had to put my hand in my pocket and spend the extra cash!

So what does this have to do with Flowers??

Well, in the way that I had been hankering after other people’s bikes before I bought mine, I had also been dreaming of branding our vans. Being a scooter rider I spend a lot of time on the roads and am always impressed when I see a car or van that has been wrapped in vinyl branding. We have a fleet of vans that drive in to the capital everyday, and it is therefore almost irresponsible not to brand them as they are seen by so many people everyday. So when Will said “let’s sort out the vans” I jumped at the chance.

becomes……?????? You’ll have to read on to find out!

First off we had to inspect our vans. We had a mixed fleet of owned and hired vans and obviously wanted to wrap the vans we owned. Will had been keen to buy new Kangoos (smaller, more efficient vans) for some time. So whilst he spoke to Renault, I sat down with Photoshop to draw up some sample designs. Ellis was charged with finding us a company who could wrap the vans and found a competitive quote from a company called Totally Dynamic. I was under no illusion that the final design would have to be done by someone who had wrapped a van before but wanted to get a few ideas down on paper and so Totally Dynamic supplied some templates for us to work from.

We went to town coming up with ideas, filling the templates with brightly coloured flowers that were passed around the florists and customer service girls for comments. Everyone loved the ideas that required fully wrapping the vans which we knew cost more but were also aware was likely to have the desired impact.

After our extensive stock of flower photography was exhausted I took some cherry brandy roses upstairs to my studio and did a series of close ups. These flowers are a beautiful orange colour that, combined with their green leaves, makes them very ‘on brand’. Once the new flowers were added to the template it was immediately obvious that we had to use them – branding a van with ‘on brand’ flowers made so much sense.

Next came the wording. Obviously we need to include the usual contact details (web address telephone number etc) but we had also planned to include a promotional code on the side of the van. Our drivers meet so many people everyday and are forever receiving compliments on the flowers our customer send so it stands to reason that adding a promotional code will help incentivise those people who are already impressed to become Arena customers themselves. As we offer a same day service we also felt that people stuck in traffic might make use of their time now that the mobile internet has arrived, or just call customer services.

A layout was agreed and the assets were packed up and sent off to the designer a couple of frantic weeks later (we have had a very busy summer) and we had all but forgotten about the vans until Ellis sent me an email saying that one of the vans was ready to be picked up.

Richard drove up with another van that was to be wrapped and made the first exchange. Our first glimpse of the new van was when he returned and parked it up against a window in the customer service office that overlooks the courtyard. The van blocked out the sun, but somehow the room seemed just as bright. Going outside it was immediately apparent that Richard was no longer a ‘white van man’.

The van looked amazing, it screamed flowers and importantly the orange roses looked stunning with our logo in pride of place on each side.

That day Richard packed his van with almost 30 orders and headed off into central London. When he came in the next morning he told us of all the people that had honked at him and stopped him asking for flyers. The van was a complete success!

If you see one of the vans make sure you wave, you never know the driver may have a spare bouquet. :)

We even did the roofs so that our customers in tall buildings can share the joy - they also get a surprise promo code, different to the one on the side of the van, so well worth a look!

This is one of our Kangoos - note the backwards www.arenaflowers.com (ie moc.srewolfanera.www) on the bonnet, so that it reads correctly in in the rear view mirror, like the signage on an ambulance. We sure had fun playing colouring in with our vans and I have to say our courtyard looks very orange in the morning. :)

Filed under: Distribution, General, Marketing, Setting up on September 7th, 2007

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