Free Flowers - For Charity!
This year, we elected to make a donation to the British Heart Foundation’s Valentine’s Campaign for every one of our Tulips Bouquets and our Heart of Chocolates products sold for Valentine’s Day. We’re happy to report that in this way we raised several hundred pounds for the BHF (exact figure and cheque to the BHF to follow tomorrow!). BUT - we found out a way to do more. We always try to buy slightly too many flowers for Valentine’s, to ensure we don’t run out. That gives the obvious problem of what we do with the leftovers afterwards. We can’t sell them as they’ll be a couple of days old and we pride ourselves on selling only the freshest product. So, we sold them, with proceeds to go to the the BHF. (Click to enlarge.)
Well, actually, we didn’t. That’s what we wanted to do but then, when we checked with the Police, we found that, without the correct licence, we might get arrested for “street peddling” if we went ahead with our plan. Woops! Since we had no time to get such a licence, we decided to simply give the flowers away, BHF Valentine’s Appeal flyer and a request to make a donation included with every bouquet. We had some lovely stories and caused quite a crowd scene on London’s King’s Road. So here are some pictures of what we got up to.
Unsuprisingly, it was really good fun to spend a few hours making people happy, and helping charity to boot. 
Last but not least - the gentleman above. I messed the photo up, but he was in the process of telling friend of Arena, Pascale, that he had open heart surgery 10 years ago and ever since has been donating monthly to the BHF. Hooray!
That’s it. Hope you enjoyed the pics.
PS Thanks to Pascale, Owen and Nathan for helping out - we’d have got nowhere without your help. You’re great!
Filed under: Ethics & Environment, Flowers, General, Mega Days, Valentine's Day on February 21st, 2008
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