5,000 Red Roses for Amnesty International
Here at Arena Flowers we get a lot of special orders both large and small – sometimes for a particular birthday where the number of flowers is important or sometimes for the re-creation of a wedding bouquet for an anniversary.
We also receive requests for flower stems to be distributed at special events, such as yellow daffodils for Marie Curie Cancer Care, or pink roses for an end-of-year school ball.
In April we provided five hundred of our FFP red roses to Amnesty International for their national conference in Nottingham, which meant a lot of de-thorning work for Jozsef, our wonderful ‘jack-of-all-trades’.
At the time, this seemed quite a large order…
Then, last month, Karen also from Amnesty, contacted us, requesting a delivery of two thousand red roses to their London office on 4 June.
What could be simpler? Nothing as complicated as sending flowers to Nottingham – or so we thought!
And then Karen called again – this time asking for a further three thousand roses!
Well, having organised 2,000 roses, another 3,000 didn’t seem to present a problem so we were naturally particularly happy to be able to help.
It was only when our distribution manager pointed out quite how many buckets of flowers 5,000 red roses represented, that we were brought down to earth!
So, it was not one but two very full vans that eventually set off for the Amnesty International offices. The effect was amazing, though. Click the image to enlarge.
But we’ve learned our lesson: in future, we’ll warn the distribution manager well in advance when we take such large orders!
We had a snoop online to see just what Amnesty had used our flowers for, and came across their blog post about remembering Tiananmen Square nineteen years on.
It was strangely moving to see images of our beautiful roses commemorating such a tragic event…
PS. To give you a better idea of the scale of this whole operation last week, here is a shot of Judith with one of our rather splendid 100 Red Roses bouquet, freshly arranged today!
Filed under: Customers, Distribution, Ethics & Environment, Floristry, Flowers, Mega Days, Operations, Setting up on June 12th, 2008
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It’s definite a large order !
In Hong Kong we also had the same event about remembering Tiananmen Square on 4th June, but we used White candle only.
I think we had some candle-lit vigils for the remembrance of Tiananmen Square here in the UK as well. The reason our red roses were used is that the red rose is the symbol of the Tiananmen Mothers. Each year people try to place red roses in Tiananmen Square to commemorate their loved ones and each year the authorities prevent them from doing so.