Posted by: Will – Priority Juggler on September 26th, 2007

Last weekend was a great weekend for us flower lovers; a trip to the flowers HQ of the world - Holland! (actually, if we’re being precise, we went to The Netherlands - Holland is merely a region of The Netherlands but who’s counting?).

Anyway, here are lots of pictures of our adventures in the country that gave us our favourite flower, the tulip. The post will be about embarrassing pictures and the amazing Dutch flower industry and will feature no blatant attempts to sell our loyal readers red roses, designer flowers, birthday bouquets or anything else. Oh. :)

One caveat: Sam, who deprived the world of the colour orange last month, is our resident camera wizard but sadly he wasn’t match fit so couldn’t come to NL. Therefore you will have to make do with the less, erm, professional photography of myself and Ronald. Let the shaky-handed, mobile-phone photo-montage begin…

It was an early start. To compound the pain, both Mariusz, our head of operations, and Steve, our finance guru and inspiration, were trapped inside a yellow submarine, looking scarily hard for two guys in the flower industry.

The auction we were visiting, the Westland auction, is the largest flower auction in the world. The auction is built on three levels, with the total buildings area covering the equivalent of 180 football pitches. Over eight million cut flower stems from 2,250 suppliers from around the world pass through Westland every day, on ten different auction clocks. Westland even has its own hairdresser to cater for the countless people working at Westland. Sadly neither Ronald nor myself has much hair left with which to trouble the hairdresser. Fortunately, the camera blur spares us our blushes here (click to enlarge if you must!).

Here Ronald wows Steve and Mariusz with the true floweriness of it all:

The flowers in Holland are bought in a process known as a Dutch Auction. Sounds simple but, in fact, it’s a very difficult game of chicken which is not for the faint hearted. 100 men and women, who have generally got out of bed at 0330 in the morning and who are monitoring the other flower auctions simultaneously on laptops, sit in the “tribune” intently eyeballing a clock (between Steve and Ronald in the picture - click to enlarge) that rapidly ticks down the price for the current lot of flowers. The first person to press the button on their desk stops the clock and wins the current lot of flowers. That person pays the price showing at the moment they stopped the clock.

If they stop the clock too early and pay too much, they’re likely to be on the receiving end of hoots and jeers from their gigantic countrymen (the average Dutchman is 6 foot 1 tall, a full 3 inches taller than the average Brit!). If they leave their bids too late, they can miss out on all the lots and may leave the auction empty handed. Oh, and if no one stops the clock before it reaches zero, the unsold flowers are incinerated. Tough crowd.

What kind of supermen could possibly do this job? Well, for starters Arena’s own Ronald - “the man who never sleeps”. Big Ron is ably assisted by Gerard Heemskerk and Jan Durieux, two Dutch legends of the flower business and, thankfully, friends of Arena Flowers. Between the three of them they outchicken and outpsyche the rest of Holland to buy Arena’s flowers across ten auction clocks whilst the rest of the world sleeps. Like the special forces, their images must be blurred to keep their identities secret but here is a pixellated version of them (I really need a better camera phone!). NB Gerard also finds time to be honorary chairman of local football team, VVSB, which meant we were treated like royalty when we were with him.

We then went on to see two of the biggest rose farms in the world, to negotiate a better rate for Valentine’s flowers for Arena’s customers (we’re actually considering boycotting roses altogether for Valentine’s Day, in protest at the prices, though that may be commercial suicide). One farm was quite old school and the second was super hi-tech. In the latter, hundreds of square metres of flowers were continuously moved around, bit by bit, by the equivalent of a NASA mission control centre. All whilst meeting the highest ethical and sustainability standards. Superb.

Next - an important meeting to discuss Florisoft, the market leading software application for flower nerds such as ourselves. Important, but also very very boring for non flower nerds. So instead, we will draw a veil over that with a three question quiz:

1. Look at this picture of Mariusz in a 400 year old pub in Amsterdam and spot what’s wrong with the picture:

Didn’t get it? The man behind him has a green moustache. Of course. Don’t we all?

2. What about this one? What happened next?

Correct. Steve, Ronald and Super Mario were spotted by a Hollywood casting agent and asked to star in the new movie: Reservoir Dogs vs Quadrophenia.

3. Can you spot Arena hide and seek champion, Steve?

(My 1/16th Dutch ancestry is clearly not helpful in this game!)

There was much more and it was a very busy weekend of work and stupendously early mornings. We will, as a result, be bringing even better flower knowledge, expertise and excellence to the UK market…if you have any questions about anything to do with flowers or the auctions, please feel free to email ronald @ arenaflowers.com. Meantime, I’ll finish off our post with one final tale. At the end of our time in Holland, Ronald decided to initiate us into wakeboarding. Primarily, in my opinion, to humiliate me utterly. :)

Here I am, innocently happy, moments before being dragged head first at Mach 1 through the largest reservoir in Holland. I’ll never be thirsty again. :O

However, Ronald, like Jan and Gerard, is a truly class act and has been a key man in helping Arena bring fantastic flowers to UK flower lovers. He buys the best flowers in the world at the best flower prices. He is the reason Arena was the first UK florist to sell FFP-accredited flowers. He works all the hours that God sends on behalf of our great customers with never a word of complaint. And now we know that in his spare time he is moonlighting not only as a doting father and husband but also as James Bond.

Holland, The Netherlands, Jan, Gerard and Ronald…we salute you all!

PS but don’t milk it! No one likes a smart a***!

:)

Filed under: Flowers, General, Setting up, Start up on September 26th, 2007

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