Posted by: Will – Priority Juggler on January 5th, 2009

Happy New Year to everyone!

We’ve been a bit quiet on the blog of late, what with having to get all our Christmas flower deliveries sorted and having to do some very very last minute Christmas shopping of our own too. We’re back in the saddle now, looking forward to 2009 and will be posting more regularly going forward. Meantime, here are five random New Year’s resolutions (in no particular order):

1. More charitable initiatives: We’ve supported a number of charitable initiatives in the past, but haven’t been that organised in our approach.  Hopefully in the next week or two, we’ll go live with a very cool new initiative.  Watch this space.
2. Focus Focus Focus for Valentine’s Day: Everyone thinks florists make a fortune selling Valentine’s flowers.  Sadly not; it’s the flower growers that really rake it in, as flower prices can quadruple (or more) for the big day.   Getting Valentine’s right is a real head ache for florists as so much can go wrong and cause disaster.  All rather stressful.  Still, Valentine’s Day is on a Saturday this year so it should be quieter, with less traffic on the roads.  Hooray!
3. Keep building our international businesses: The team also runs Arena Bloemen and Arena Blumen, fulfilling from our base in Holland and delivering the same experience for Benelux and German flower lovers as we do for UK flower lovers.  This year, we’ll focus on building up our international businesses and optimising the operating model to deliver great value and quality across Europe.
4. Green initiatives and FFP: We were the first florists to sell Fair Flowers Fair Plants flowers and we want to expand our FFP range as it’s not broad enough.  We also want to be more transparent about improvements in the green areas of our business, like recycling and green waste.  Adarsh has done some great work here recently, but just hasn’t had time to write up what he’s been up to.
5. The customer is king: Last but not least! We’ve got no business without happy customers, so our top resolution for this year, as with every other, is to keep making sure we do the best job we possibly can and delight our customers.  If you have any suggestions of how we can improve, please send them to feedback(at)arenaflowers.com or leave a comment below.
6. Fun!: A bonus 6th resolution is to remember life is fun and not to be taken too seriously.  In that vein, and for those that didn’t see it in our Arena Flowers Twitter feed, here’s an alternative take on the phrase “Arena Flowers” that we found on the web through our Google Alerts. The artist named the piece “Arena Flowers” entirely coincidentally and described it thus:

Batch of for-fun character designs! The concept is a group of young ladies with no predisposition towards this activity for various reasons find themselves involved in wizardly pit fights.

See his Arena Flowers in full here.

Happy New Year, Everyone!

 

Filed under: Customers, Ethics & Environment, Finance & Investment, General, Good Causes & Charities, International Flowers, Mega Days, Operations, Valentine's Day on January 5th, 2009

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