Drugs, stress and fire. They all share just one unlikely thing in common, flowers.  Indeed, from bud to bouquet, a flower’s life is not quite as innocent as one would think…
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1)      From The Netherlands with drugs

On occasion, the Dutch flower industry has been utilised by criminals as a cover for some of the most lucrative drug smuggling enterprises known to date.

Chrysanthemums and cannabis seems a highly unlikely coupling. Yet on March 10^th 2010, British police unearthed a staggering ten tonnes of skunk with an estimated street value of £30 million in a farm near Swindon. A gang were found to have been purchasing boxes of chrysanthemums at the enormous international flower market at Naaldwijk near The Haig before concealing cannabis inside each and exporting them to Britain.

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Cannabis is by no means an isolated drug in its occasional illegal relationship with the Dutch flower trade.  Indeed, on September 15^th 2010, the Spanish National Guard uncovered 120kg of speed masked in a shipment of Dutch flowers. The 400,000 doses of amphetamine sulphate were seized in time to prevent it flooding the market, a strategic move in the preservation of the Spanish population’s aesthetics, as the pictures below of methamphetamine users attests to.

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Rest assured, the only drug with which the flower-buying public has any contact is the crucial plant-food used during the growing process to make flowers beautiful and long-lasting.

2)      Dawn duels for the farmers’ jewels

It’s 6.30am and Europe is contemplating a shower over its morning coffee. Meanwhile, a fierce battle is underway in a small town in Holland where everything is at stake for those who dare to partake. The peaceful lakeside town of Aalsmeer boasts the largest flower auction in the world. The daily auction, frenetic, fast-paced and disturbingly competitive, is an event restricted to only the most stout-hearted members of our species.

After rising at an unseemly hour of the morning, 3000 buyers flock to the Aalsmeer auction house to make or break their fortunes in “the New York stock exchange of flowers”. Each morning upon entering an auction room, one will encounter an auditorium of anxious buyers, eyes frantically darting between the thirteen prominent clocks above and the convoy of flower laden carts below.

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The clocks, invented by a Dutch cauliflower grower in the 1870’s, rapidly tick down the price of the displayed batch of flowers. In order to buy the flowers, a buyer must press a button on their desk which freezes the price at its point on the fast-moving clock. Press too soon and the price paid will be too high, press too late and the competitor to your side will have beaten you to the bunch. Either way, a mistake will prove costly.

3)      Fiery funeral for a flower

A fiery end awaits those ill-starred flowers which remain unsold at the culmination of the auction. These hapless flowers enter a frightening incinerator, never to grace a table.

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As the auction sets a minimum price for each group of flowers, if no buyer stops the clock before it lowers beneath this price, the flowers are deemed unsold and are burnt. Greater numbers of flowers meet this fiery fate during the summer months when the flower yield is greatest yet holiday-making Europe exerts less demand. On a happier note, growers are paid this minimum price by the auction, a Dutch rose earning €0.05 for example.

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Post from: Arena Flowers - Flower Delivery London & UK

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Will has been busy as a regular contributor to econsultancy’s blog as well as others, so we thought we’d share some of his posts here too.

Having a growing online business can be filled with thousands of individual decisions, each of which in sum can lead to the shape of your business.  We thought we’d summarise some of them here as a guide for anyone making similar decisions.  Enjoy.

Tips for boot strapped startups (try saying that after two pints)

In his post, Six top tips for bootstrapped startups, Will shares his advice about what to expect when starting a new company without piles of VC backing behind you.

1. Employing friends and family at the start of a new company is a good way to get people who believe in you on board – but make sure the relationship can survive the stress.

2. Take the lead, the buck stops with you. Management by committee can lead to poor compromised decisions.

3. Don’t wing it or make rushed decisions. Tell your team exactly what you need to make a decision (data, costs, where assumptions are) then they will come prepared when seeking approval (and more likely to get a “yes”).

4. Don’t let minority investors run the game; this can slow down progress when small share holders dig their heels in because of different expectations.  It’s your business, so make sure you can run it your way.

5. Patience isn’t a virtue, it’s a necessity.   Will gives a rule of thumb that “raise twice as much as you think you need and expect it to take twice as long”.

6. Know your end game. And keep it in mind the whole way along.  There are many reasons to start a business, but once you’re immersed in the detail and the hard slog, don’t forget your reasons and make sure the ship keeps moving in the right direction.

Nothing is normal

If you’re just at the early days of starting your business and feel like your life is a bit all over the place, it’s normal.  Feeling like you’ve done nothing for a week then completely manic the next week, it’s normal.  In Will’s post for Management Today, My Week: Will Wynne of ArenaFlowers, he describes how a day can involve going to meet with a courier company, or getting two hours sleep, or not having lunch, or flying to the US to check out how they do things out there.

Sit in big chair, stroke cat, ponder world domination

In one of Will’s post for econsultancy, he looked at issues regarding international expansion of an online business.  This can be an attractive prospect for business owners – you may have found that you get a lot of traffic from non-UK audiences, or that your product might be attractive for those outside of your current target country.

This is not an insignificant decision to expand your business internationally and there are some tools which can help you work out if or where markets for your products exist.  Will comments in the telegraph on Google’s new export research tool here. Called Global Market Finder, this tool from Google allows you to look at search terms and competition in new countries.  This might give you some ideas if there is demand for your product, or what people are looking for in your particular field.  For example, Marmite appears to be a popular search term in China, as is Marmalade in France.

Will also writes about the potential complications around websites, language, SEO and tax.  Once you determine that there is a market, how you get into that market is a plethora of details.  Will gives you 3 top things to consider in his post International e-commerce: three things to consider.

The first is how you show your content to your new audience.  Targeted, local websites?  Or using your main domain?  There are pros and cons to both; you need it to decide which are most important to you.  Having a local website gives a better customer experience, but takes more resource to build and may be harder to get integrated into your backend systems.  Having localised content on your main website maybe a good way to test the market before you invest in a new site.

Do you need to create a locally registered company?  No, it’s not a legal requirement within Europe (although it can help massively when negotiating with local suppliers.  Again, it’s worth weighing the benefits of a local company against the set up.  Creating one does lead to more admin and accounting costs.

VAT, under the distance selling rules for the EU, are charged at the local VAT rate of the goods-receiving country.  Up to a certain threshold.  And this threshold changes from country to country.  For example, once a UK company has sent 35K Euros of goods to Belgium, the company then has to register for VAT in Belgium and pay the Belgian tax to the local tax office (not the UK one).  Variable tax rates on products can create a development issue too, because different tax rates will need to be applied to products depending on which country they are to be sent.

Socially acceptable marketing

You have things up and running, plans of global domination simmering gently on the stove.  So what’s all this social media marketing malarkey?  Ok, that’s a bit patronising, if you’ve come here to a blog from a twitter link or a facebook post, you probably know.  But knowing how to use it for marketing is not necessarily so straightforward.  We hear a lot of examples from big brands with big bank accounts and what they do with social marketing, but how about young companies decide to use the space is trickier.   Will’s blog post on econsultancy “How should a young company approach social media marketing?” gives insight into our experiences of using social media.  Things that have worked long term (like our twitter application, Flowers and Fun) , things that have some success at key times (our Facebook valentine’s wishes page), and things that we could have done without (our world cup flowers video).

Will gives 6 points of sage advice:

1. Make the idea simple. It should be easy for people to pick up – but then also easy for you to put down if it falls flat.

2. Be realistic. Converting sales from social media campaign may disappoint you, but focus more on getting your name out.

3. Make it non-commercial. People don’t want to be marketed at, they want to be entertained.  If your marketing message is obviously selling something, people are less likely to engage, in our experience.

4. Don’t hashtag spam. There are plenty of examples of this going wrong (Habitat being the first example, although they’ve since gone into administration – not due to the hashtag spam, though!)

5. Have fun with it (if you post robotically, people won’t be very inclined to read it or respond)

6. Track what you can (traffic, use referral tags)

Staying on the right side of right

You may be on the right side of your customers – but are you on the right side of the law?  The Advertising Standards Agency released a new extension to its remit in March 2011, which includes content on websites, twitter feeds and Facebook walls.   There are some grey areas which we identified in the new remit and Will’s blog post on the new ASA online regulations, gave some examples of where companies had gone wron and some of the trickier issues.  We thought we’d summarise some of the grey areas and how to avoid getting an ASA complaint upheld:

1.  It’s all about context: Editorial content on a website is not within the remit.  Unless it’s used for marketing purposes.  The example Will gives is the Tanning Shop using a Daily Mail article about tanning being good for you in one of their marketing emails.  Complaints were upheld because although the article was published by the Daily Mail, that wasn’t enough for the Tanning Shop to substantiate the claims.  Similar with customer reviews.  You can’t control what people post on your wall, or how they review products on your website.  But you are responsible if you use those reviews for marketing purposes.

2. Familiarise yourself, your marketing team, your content team and your design team with the new regulations.

3. Respond if the ASA contact you.  From what we’ve read about complaints, the ASA don’t take kindly if you do not respond and you are very likely to have a complain upheld.

4. Be cautious on social media.  If you retweet a tweet from your company which has erroneous information about your company or products, that could lead to an upheld complaint.

5. Question any agency you use to write content about you to make sure they know the new regulations.  Put processes in place so that claims the write about you can be substantiated.  This means more editorial time.

There we go. Quite a few tips all in all! Hopefully helpful / of interest.

Post from: Arena Flowers - Flower Delivery London & UK

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We’ve been a little quiet on the blog front this past few weeks – call it a little blog break while we recovered from the excitement of serving sumptuous fresh flowers to the nation’s romantics on Valentine’s Day, then just a few weeks later, creating the perfect Mother’s Day bouquet arrangements for mums, grandmas and godmothers across the UK.

But it doesn’t stop there, it is actually only Great Britain, Ireland and Nigeria that celebrate Mother’s Day on the fourth Sunday of lent and, in fact, most of our international cousins consider May to be the month of Mothering Sundays with the most popular date falling on the second Sunday of May.

It is generally believed that Mother’s Day is celebrated internationally around the world on a variety of days through the year because the event has a number of different origins. For instance, in Iran the day originally commemorated the birthday of Fatima, Muhammad’s daughter. In Canada, Mother’s Day was introduced in the mid-19th century as a call to unite women against war.

With our burgeoning portfolio of European ventures in the guise of Arena Bloemen (Netherlands), Arena Blumen (Germany), and Arena Bloemen Belgium, as well as our international flower delivery service, our development team now consider Arena mums all year round, not just for Mother’s Day.

To help them, and you, here’s a comprehensive list of the countries we serve, and their respective Mother’s Days for the next twelve months…

May 3rd: Hungary, Lithuania, Portugal, Spain.

May 8th: South Korea (Parents’ Day)

May 10th: USA, Aruba, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Belize, Bermuda, Brazil, Brunei, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Ecuador, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Greece, Honduras, Hong Kong, Iceland, Italy, India, Jamaica, Japan, Latvia, Leichtenstein, Malaysia, Malta, Netherlands, New Zealand, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, Puerto Rico, Singapore, Slovakia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Suriname, Switzerland, Trinidad, Taiwan, Turkey, Ukraine, Uruguay, Venezuela, Zimbabwe.

May 15th: Paraguay.

May 26th: Poland (“Dzień Matki”).

May 27th: Bolivia.

May 30th: Nicaragua.

May 31st: Dominican Republic, France, Mauritius, Morocco, Sweden, Tunisia.

June 14th: Luxembourg.

June 28th: Kenya.

August 12th: Thailand.

August 15th: Antwerp Province (Belgium), Costa Rica.

October 12th: Malawi.

October 14th: Belarus.

October 18th: Argentina.

December 8th: Panama.

December 22nd: Indonesia.

Between 30th January – 1st March: Israel.

February 2nd: Greece.

February 14th: Norway.

March 8th: Armenia. Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Moldova, Montenegro, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Ukraine.

March 14th: UK, Ireland.

March 21st: Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Yemen

March 25th: Slovenia.

April 7th: Armenia.

If you enjoyed this post and would like to know more about Mother’s Day, check out Will’s rather excellent blog post on the moon’s influence on when we celebrate Mother’s Day in the UK.

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Steve and I were in The Netherlands end of last week, visiting Ronald and catching up on the progress of Arena Bloemen and Arena Blumen, as well making more preparations for Valentine’s Day.  It was a mite chilly here in good old Blighty, but we soon learned that our European cousins hadn’t got off any more lightly.  It was absolutely freezing; so cold in fact (-20C in places) that we suspended deliveries to East Germany last week as flowers were (sometimes) arriving frozen – not ideal.

Driving through the glacial Dutch countryside we saw some beautiful sights;  the sky laden with thick claustrophobic clouds; the land and trees covered in a crisp icey sheen; and the famous canals frozen over, as hard as tarmac.  Ever resourceful, the Dutch have turned the cold weather to their advantage, with what seems like every bit of frozen water having been repurposed as an impromptu ice rink.  I figured I’d share some pictures here.  Click images to enlarge.

Ducks on ice + archetypal windmill

Steve: “I caught a fish this big…”

Might be worth avoiding the unfrozen section of the “frozen” lake, kids…

Surprised the car’s engine worked under that much ice…

Ice hockey, anyone?

Start em young…

Hope you enjoyed the pics.  I’m rubbish with my phone’s camera so sorry if these aren’t very” pro” shots!

Enjoyed this post? Read Een Voorspoedig, Gezond en Gelukkig Nieuwjaar gewenst! team’s take on weather.  Our German customer service team had a torrid time dealing with complaints for delivering frozen flowers.  Read Alle Jahre wieder – Neujahrsvorsätze for more on frozen flowers.

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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!

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Some businesses like to wind-down or even close-down over the summer, but not us workaholics at Arena Flowers! Recently, Will, Steve and Elsa headed to what has now become our second home at Noordwijkerhout, on the west coast of the Netherlands for an extended stay to oversee some of the operational stuff going on for our Dutch language site, Arena Bloemen.

On their return, they brought with them a lovely box of some particularly yummy chocolates (featuring in true comedy chocolate style a local landmark (in this case Amsterdam’s Central Station)  – perfect comfort food for the rubbish weather we’ve experienced in the UK this summer! And of course, our intrepid trio offered the perfect opportunity initiate me into this ‘Comedy Chocolate’ malarkey that seems to have carved itself into the Arena psyche…

The only question – which bod at Flowers HQ to tie-up and interrogate?! Having previously jumped Ruth, Vanessa, Damian and Ronald, we thought it was about time Andrzej (or “Andre”, as we call him in these parts!) and his team of amazing award-winning, hard-grafting florists (pictured above) received a thorough ‘going over’ and put under the spotlight. Plus, as the new academic year is almost upon us, each of our experienced florists offer career advice for ‘budding’ (geddit?!) florists…

Andrzej joined us way back in November 2006 when ArenaFlowers.com was a mere seedling. With ten years under his belt as a florist, Andrzej favourite activity at Flowers HQ is creating new flower designs and fulfilling bespoke arrangements. His favourite flowers to work with are sunflowers, amaryllis, tulips, hydrangea and “exotic flowers”. Andrzej became a professional florist after visiting and helping out at his friend’s flower shop. A passion for flowers soon bloomed (!) and Andrzej opened his own florists which he ran for eight years before joining Arena Flowers.
Andrzej’s career tip: “Don’t be afraid to experiment with flower arrangements, and listen and learn from experienced florists.”

Judith has been with Arena Flowers since – practically – the very beginning. Carving herself an unrivalled reputation for her wedding flowers, Judith always rises to the challenge of creating show-stopping flower designs with her favourite stems of ranunculus, lily of the valley, tulips, calla lilies, peonies and “many more.” Judith tells us that she actually fell into floral design “accidentally” as she wanted to utilise her creativity. Having considered fashion and interior design, Judith finally settled on floristry.
Judith’s career tip: “Don’t be scared if it doesn’t meet your expectations and choose the people you want to learn from carefully!”

Paulina, at just 22, is the relative youngster of the Arena Flowers floristry team but flower design is in her blood. Starting out by helping with her sister’s flower shop, Paulina soon picked up the skills to enable her to embark on a career as a florist on her arrival in London. Paulina joined Arena Flowers in July 2007 and particularly enjoys working with tulips, hydrangea, roses and calla lilies. Her favourite Arena bouquet is A Dozen Red Roses.
Paulina’s career tip: “Go for it if you’re passionate about flowers – even if it seems hard at the beginning.”

Ela started at Arena Flowers around the same time as Paulina and loves working with our luxury bouquets, especially Luxury White and Mass of Red Roses. Ela tells us that she “always knew she would one day become a florist as she was always very active in home decoration for different occasions.” After studying, Ela decided to try her real passion, so here she is…
Ela’s career tip: “Although it is hard work, your satisfaction and motivation rises when you see the happiness on the recipients’ faces.”

Kristina has been with Arena Flowers for nearly a year and originates from the Czech Republic. Her favourite Arena bouquets are Lovely in Lilac and A Dozen Peach Roses. Freesias, orchids and peach roses feature among some of the many flowers favoured by Kristina to work with.

Similar posts: If you enjoyed this dose of comedy chocolate and meeting some of our team, you might also enjoy the four previous comedy chocolate posts.

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Sam mentioned a new arrival for his family last week, and this week it’s the turn of the Arena family to welcome its own new member: our Dutch language site, ArenaBloemen.nl!

Our team spends a huge amount of time and effort securing deals direct with the best growers so that we can ensure great prices, superb quality, ethical sourcing and freshness second to none. Excellence in flowers is the core of what we offer our customers. As part of that mission, we have a facility in Noordwijkerhout (NWH), west of Amsterdam, to receive flowers and to make some of them up into bouquets before they come over to the UK. Our Dutch team is led by Ronald, with Marion, Merel, Ellie and Mariska performing floristry magic crafting the bouquets and with Lyn assisting Ronald with everything else. Clearly, Ronald and Lyn weren’t pretty enough to make the group photo!

Given we already have the NWH facility, it was a natural next step for us to launch a Dutch language site, fulfilling from NWH and sending to the whole of the Netherlands and the Flemish speaking part of Belgium. We’re fairly certain that the quality of the product and the ease of use of the site that we built in the UK will also appeal to customers beyond our little island. Through the Send Flowers To Holland page on our UK site, we’re already sending a number of orders to the Netherlands every day. Now that we have our Dutch business out there, we can obviously guarantee the full “Arena experience” for our Dutch orders placed from the UK. For translation fans, our UK strap line “An experience delivered” becomes “Wij bezorgen emotie” in Dutch!

The project hasn’t been without challenges! Zach, our amazing developer (who built the whole Arena site and all the back end systems that our customers never see), and Sam, our head of design (who makes everything look pretty and shiny (amongst other things)), had to rebuild the whole way the website works so that it could be translated easily and do clever things like handle different VAT rates and different depots and different currencies. PayPal already allows us to accept Euros, but the Dutch also use a payment system called “Ideal” for a lot of their online payments, so we’ve had to integrate that too (it’s not live on the site just yet – we’re still testing it). Squirting orders placed on the Netherlands flowers page on the UK site into the fulfilment order table for the NWH depot is not easy either (that’s still in the testing phase on our development site) .

We’ve also had to spend a lot of time researching the language, with Ronald and his team, and with Elsa, another native Dutch speaker, to ensure that we are set up well for the search engines and online marketing. Adarsh and Stan, who run Arena’s marketing, have, for example, been spending a lot of time working out which keyword combinations we want to be top for in Google NL’s search. Bloemen bestellen in Amsterdam, Nederlandse Bloemist and Bloemen bezorgen anyone?! And of course, we’ve been giving a lot of thought to the right type of products for this market as, naturally, there are some differences in national tastes.

Zach actually lives in New York, 6 hours behind Holland, but this presents far fewer problems than one might imagine. The pictures below shows the moment last week when, with Steve and I sitting outside our hotel connected to the web via wireless broadband and with Zach in his apartment in Brooklyn talking to us via Skype, we put the site, hosted in Wembley, London, live. It’s amazing how small the world is, when you’ve got a latpop and broadband at your fingertips!

And finally, the point of it all. Our first orders. Here’s Ronald with our first five orders for delivery in the Netherlands. Not a huge number to begin with but then this was a soft launch. We’re shooting for 50 a day within three months. Time will tell!

PS It wasn’t all work and no play. While over in the orange country, we also got to sample a quite extraordinary Dutch musical phenomenon called “The Toppers” (in Amsterdam’s Arena Stadium no less!) plus we went on a 200km moped ride around the canals and roads of the famous green country outside Amsterdam. Beautiful and lush…and very very flat!

Post from: Arena Flowers - Flower Delivery London & UK

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