It’s a week since Valentine’s Day – a busy time for florists around the globe – and things have remained as exciting as ever at Arena Flowers.
Particularly exciting as we launched our new tool: Flowers & Fun (http://www.flowersfun.co.uk). This is a completely free (and fun!) messaging service allowing you to send messages with a virtual [...]
Filed under: General, Marketing, Matters Webby on February 22nd, 2010 | No Comments »
It was my pleasure to be at Small Business 2.0 this year; an even greater pleasure to take part in the SEO panel and SEO forum session.
There were some interesting speakers there from BT Tradespace. Ivan Croxford had sage advice and hilarious anecdotes about managing reputation via the BT Tradespace platform and social sites more [...]
Filed under: General, Marketing, Matters Webby on January 26th, 2010 | No Comments »
A few months back, Will wrote a first post about previous newsletter winners and had promised to frequently update the winners on our blog. Since Will’s last post in March, we have sent out Seven more newsletters and we have seven new winners (Some are already updated on Will’s Post) who need a grand mention [...]
Filed under: Customers, Marketing on November 5th, 2009 | No Comments »
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 [...]
Filed under: General, International Flowers, Marketing, Mega Days, Mother's Day on April 23rd, 2009 | 3 Comments »
We quite often get asked “So, does anyone ever win that free newsletter competition or is it just a fake?”. The answers are “Yes, every month!” and “Absolutely not!”. We typically send one “postcard” email and one full newsletter every month (Mother’s Day flowers edition going out tomorrow). In the newsletter we announce the winner [...]
Filed under: Customers, Marketing on March 9th, 2009 | No Comments »
The Arena Weddings arm of Arena Flowers has been around for just over a year now, and what a better way to celebrate our first twelve months than to take some examples of our beautiful fresh wedding flowers on the road.
The enquiry from Marika, organiser of the Think Pink Wedding Show came late in the [...]
Filed under: Customers, Distribution, Floristry, Flowers, General, Good Causes & Charities, Marketing, Operations, Weddings on January 29th, 2009 | No Comments »
Following up from her previous well-received guest post, we asked Pascale, friend of Arena and online marketing guru, if there was another topic she fancied sharing her thoughts on. Sure enough, there was. So here’s a very interesting discussion of how the web and TV and other media are getting increasingly intertwined and changing the [...]
Filed under: General, Marketing, Matters Webby on January 27th, 2009 | 9 Comments »
Just three good reasons to mosey on down to the David Lloyd Health & Fitness Club in Raynes Park, South West London today (Saturday 24 January) where yours truly will be exhibiting the floral fineries of our rapidly growing wedding flowers arm Arena Weddings at the Wear It Pink Wedding Show.
On display will be some [...]
Filed under: Customers, Floristry, Flowers, General, Good Causes & Charities, Marketing, Weddings on January 24th, 2009 | 1 Comment »
Fancy a Twitter with Britney?
- The Sun, 10th January 2009
How boring: Celebrities sign up to Twitter to reveal the most mundane aspect of their lives
- Daily Mail, 3rd January 2009
Twitter set for its mainstream telly moment on Jonathan Ross’s comeback show
- Guardian, 7th January 2009
What started as a trickle at the end of last year [...]
Filed under: Customers, Distribution, Floristry, Marketing, Matters Webby, Setting up on January 15th, 2009 | No Comments »
Unless you’re living in a cave somewhere, you’ll know it’s Christmas very soon indeed – Google has even added holly and sweets to the ads shown for Christmas related searches. It’s very busy at Flowers HQ right now too, as well wishers send flowers home to loved ones. We’ve even sold out of Father Christmases [...]
Filed under: Christmas Flowers, Ethics & Environment, Marketing, Matters Webby, Mega Days on December 18th, 2008 | 5 Comments »
Yesterday was a busy day for anti-fraud newsflow plus some good old fashioned web fear mongering. Don’t get me wrong – web fraud happens and needs to be combated but there is often something shrill and hysterical about the reporting of online fraud, especially in the UK. “Everyone PANIC!” would seem to summarise the editorial [...]
Filed under: Big Mistakes, Ethics & Environment, Fraud, General, Marketing, Matters Webby on November 18th, 2008 | 11 Comments »
I was kindly invited by friend of Arena and former colleague, Dan Wilson, to talk at the Small Business 2.0 conference this weekend. So I duly roused myself at the rather sprightly time of 7am this Saturday and fired up PowerPoint for the first time in a while. I had to finish off the last [...]
Filed under: Marketing on October 13th, 2008 | 11 Comments »
It’s been a while since my last post and yesterday I was mulling over which of numerous topics I should write about when a Friday fun shaped answer dropped conveniently into my lap. A while back Adrian, friend of Arena and the man behind adding videos to your eBay listings, sent through a link to [...]
Filed under: General, Marketing on October 3rd, 2008 | 3 Comments »
Those of you with a keen eye will have already spotted what the title of this post is alluding to. In fact we published the new template for the website several weeks ago but it was only this week that we finished the revamp by publishing a new blog theme in line with the look [...]
Filed under: General, Marketing, Matters Webby on September 14th, 2008 | 5 Comments »
We were surprised this week to receive mail from one of the leading academic publishers, Pearson Education’s Higher and Professional Education Division seeking our permission to reproduce a copy of our website image for a new edition of Chaffey et al’s book, Internet Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice. We assume that the book shows our [...]
Filed under: Marketing, Matters Webby, Setting up on September 9th, 2008 | 4 Comments »
Imitation, they say is the sincerest form of flattery. They also say success breeds imitation. Every now and then we find our competitors ordering flower arrangements from us, which makes us wonder if our bouquets are being copied and sold by other florists. We have regularly battled image and content thievery, where we have had [...]
Filed under: Ethics & Environment, Flowers, General, Marketing, Matters Webby on September 2nd, 2008 | 4 Comments »
Sarah Holland is part of the crack team at the Flowers & Plants Association plus she also pops by every now and again to fill us in on the latest flower fashion trends, arrangement tips and to answer any questions you may have about flowers or plants. Our ‘Bouquets of Emotion‘ helped the FPA to [...]
Filed under: Floristry, Flowers, General, Guest Posts, Marketing, Operations on July 21st, 2008 | No Comments »
You always know when summer’s truly here:
Monsoon rains across the UK (not again!)
Tornadoes in the north (eh?)
The RHS Hampton Court Palace Flower Show opens (yay!)
It may be soggy on the grounds of Hampton Court Palace but inside the International Language of Flowers marquee, something bright and warm is emerging from the Flowers & Plants Association [...]
Filed under: Customers, Floristry, Flowers, General, Marketing on July 7th, 2008 | 2 Comments »
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 [...]
Filed under: Distribution, Floristry, International Flowers, Marketing, Matters Webby, Operations, Setting up, Start up on June 4th, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Many established online businesses still rely heavily on the Internet’s gatekeeper, Google, for traffic. So much so, that whole industries have sprung up to help business mangers optimise their site to suit the world’s leading search engine. Search engine optimisation throws up some interesting new challenges and opportunities. But rather than give [...]
Filed under: Guest Posts, Marketing, Matters Webby on May 6th, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Hello, everyone. Apologies for the relative blog silence of late. We’ve been super busy at Flowers HQ – not only is Valentine’s Day looming, but we’ve also been hard at work on a top secret, world first feature for our customers – video and voice messages delivered with flowers. Heard of [...]
Filed under: Customers, Marketing, Matters Webby, Mega Days, Setting up, Valentine's Day on February 8th, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Our constant scouting for SEO related tips and articles on the Web has led us to experiment with many Widgets on our blog. People who follow our blog closely would have noticed the nonstop activity on the Widget Columns. Just like we bring flowers to customers instead of bringing customers to our flowers, we strive [...]
Filed under: General, Marketing, Matters Webby on November 23rd, 2007 | 6 Comments »
It’s hard coming up with a catchy name for a new service that breaks the mould. After much discussion, we settled on Arena for Business. It’s been a while coming, but we’ve grown organically (much like many of our plants and flowers, wines and chocolates) and the clamour for a business proposition has meant we’ve [...]
Filed under: Customers, Marketing, Setting up on November 20th, 2007 | 3 Comments »
When we set up Arena, we wanted to ensure that we had a great range of add on gifts to make the perfect complement(s) to the perfect flower arrangement (that’s my personal favourite). Because we buy direct from the flower auctions in Holland, our flowers are incredibly fresh and, because we cut out the [...]
Filed under: Ethics & Environment, General, Marketing, Mega Days on November 7th, 2007 | 2 Comments »
Today was a fun day at Flowers HQ. One of those days when I reflect how happy I am that our team took the risk and ventured away from our easy(ish) jobs into the uncharted (and scarier) waters of Arena, flowers and building a business for flower lovers. Hooray!
I’ve been out of the office for [...]
Filed under: Ethics & Environment, Flowers, General, Good Causes & Charities, Marketing, Matters Webby on October 25th, 2007 | 4 Comments »
