This year has been a real roller coaster at Arena already. The first three months of the year for any florist are consumed by Valentine’s day and Mother’s day, with all florists living in mortal terror of getting it wrong and losing a lot of money. In order to get through such mega days, Valentine’s [...]
Filed under: Marketing, Matters Webby on August 9th, 2007 | 7 Comments »
Last night, after an enthusiastic exchange of final amends we launched ‘Flowers & Fun’ the Arena Flowers Facebook application. As with all things Arena, Flowers & Fun had always been there in our ‘to do’ list but it wasn’t until last week that Will’s frantic text messages became too much to ignore – the application [...]
Filed under: Flowers, General, Marketing, Matters Webby on July 27th, 2007 | 3 Comments »
I received the email below yesterday (no idea why it was written in lurid purple!). Having had a look, I wasn’t initially convinced that Blackle is for real. Both natural and paid search results differ from those returned on conventional Google. It could be that it’s only set up for US searchers. Or a more [...]
Filed under: Ethics & Environment, Marketing, Matters Webby on July 25th, 2007 | 3 Comments »
Being an online retailer is not easy, especially when it’s such an interconnected world where making the right connections is the key to achieving objectives. At Arena Flowers we mull over the different online advertising channels every day, reviewing their promises to dramatically boost our visitors overnight. It would be easy if we had very [...]
Filed under: Big Mistakes, Marketing, Matters Webby on July 23rd, 2007 | 5 Comments »
For those that don’t know, sesame snaps are these sort of stick confectionery type things made by coating sesame seeds with caramelised sugar and letting the whole thing set (at least as far as I can tell). They’re probably not that healthy (though sesame seeds are pretty good for you) but by jove they’re tasty! [...]
Filed under: Floristry, General, Marketing on July 9th, 2007 | 8 Comments »
Tuesday 5th June was an exciting day for Sam (tech and design guru), Ronald (flower buying Dutch masterpiece), Alina (chief flower wrangler) and myself (me!), as we attended ABN Amro’s “World Environment Day” fair in ABN’s offices in the City of London. ABN Amro is pretty hot on sustainable initiatives and driving ethical, environmental policies [...]
Filed under: Customers, Ethics & Environment, Marketing on June 26th, 2007 | No Comments »
An online florist doesn’t mean that we exist in the virtual world. Each one of us at Arena is a social animal, with a desire to share our experiences with our customers and an eagerness to grab attention. That’s how we realised the importance of blogging as a new form of communication to share our [...]
Filed under: Marketing, Matters Webby on June 12th, 2007 | 4 Comments »
We love gumtree. We’ve recruited about 20 members of our team using the site, at a fraction of the cost of using a recruitment agency. In fact, aside from people we always knew we wanted to hire, every single other recruit has come through gumtree, including drivers, florists, customer service ladies and even our search [...]
Filed under: General, Marketing, Matters Webby, Setting up, Start up on June 4th, 2007 | No Comments »
…I was pretending to go to my friend Ash’s wedding in Jaipur, India, whilst actually flying to sit at the feet of web gurus in San Francisco, USA. I had a job at the time (at eBay UK), but, having agreed in principle with Steve that we should set up Arena, I then had to [...]
Filed under: Marketing, Matters Webby, Start up on May 27th, 2007 | 1 Comment »
Simple 3 step plan to throw away £229 in less than an hour and a half. 1. 0938: Think that it might be a good idea to put up some PPC, targeting Chelsea Flower Show searches. Set up campaign at default bid levels. 2. Spend an hour wrestling payroll and our online banking system. 3. [...]
Filed under: Big Mistakes, Marketing on May 22nd, 2007 | 4 Comments »
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