Yes, that really is a full size elephant made of flowers!
The Haarlem Annual Flower Parade or the Bloemen Corso as it is known locally is a spectacular display of floral wizardry. With a cavalcade of twenty elaborate floats and thirty attractively decorated luxury cars, the event is replete with the vibrant splendour of superskilled floristry. […]
Filed under: Floristry, Flowers, General on May 2nd, 2008 | 2 Comments »
After a trip to the Alps for some skiing, the obvious choice of chocolate to bring back for the team was Toblerone. So I dutifully returned on Monday bearing a giant pack, boasting no less than 150 mini Toblerones. The only question - which poor unfortunate to force to pose for a picture […]
Filed under: General, Matters Webby, Operations on March 19th, 2008 | No Comments »
Answer? It was taken at 0410 in Harwich ferry port, on the East coast of the UK when Ronald and myself should have been sound asleep in our beds in Noordwijkerhout, NL and London, UK respectively.
Why? A consignment of box lids that was due to come over during Mother’s Day week didn’t materialise and we […]
Filed under: Big Mistakes, Distribution, Mega Days, Mother's Day, Operations on March 6th, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Valentine’s Day is the busiest day of the year at Flowers HQ. We plan and organise the day well in advance to try to minimise hiccups and to ensure we successfully bring lovers together on the big day. It’s not easy, as we do about 20 times more orders than normal on the […]
Filed under: Distribution, Floristry, Flowers, Mega Days, Operations, Valentine's Day on February 15th, 2008 | No Comments »
Recently we were on the receiving end of an attempted hustle by some fake wheel clampers. They’d immobilised one of our vans and were refusing to take the clamp off unless we paid £300 cash there and then. No credit cards allowed because of “possible fraud”. That set our own fraud alarm […]
Filed under: Distribution, Ethics & Environment, Fraud, General on January 17th, 2008 | 1 Comment »
We often get asked about floristry, how we make our bouquets, what goes into them and so on. So we thought it might be fun to actually show our readers first hand. With Valentine’s Day exactly a month away, we felt that we had to choose the most romantic bouquet of all for […]
Filed under: Floristry, Flowers, Mega Days, Valentine's Day on January 14th, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Hi. My name’s Rupert and I’ve been working as a customer service rep at Arena Flowers for a few months now to earn some cash to support my glamorous student lifestyle of baked beans on toast. Everything had gone as expected in the CS role, happily answering calls, updating orders etc until the 20th […]
Filed under: Christmas Flowers, Distribution, Flowers, General, Mega Days on December 28th, 2007 | No Comments »
It has to be said that our florists are some of the jolliest people I have ever met. It’s not difficult to imagine that spending every day with flowers puts a smile on your face so it’s always nice to come in to the office via the warehouse in the morning.
A typical path in […]
Filed under: Christmas Flowers, Distribution, Floristry, Flowers, General, Mega Days on December 14th, 2007 | 1 Comment »
Another month, another comedy chocolate post (have a look at Chocolate Snr and Chocolate Jnr if you don’t know what I’m on about).
I was lucky enough to have a week off in Portugal last week. The arid landscape was nowhere near as flowery as Flowers HQ’s offering - shame on Portugal. Fortunately, I’m safely back […]
Filed under: Distribution, General on September 12th, 2007 | No Comments »
I drive a scooter which takes me to work everyday. My scooter is a thing of joy, something I wanted since I first saw one driving down the King’s Road in Chelsea. It is a black Vespa GTS, 250cc and I have added a couple of optional extras, in particular a chrome crash bar […]
Filed under: Distribution, General, Marketing, Setting up on September 7th, 2007 | 12 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 […]
Filed under: Floristry, General, Marketing on July 9th, 2007 | 6 Comments »
I’ve been cycling to work most days of late, as we no longer have the electric van that we trialled recently so my options have been either extortionate pay as you go tube fares or a fun and healthy bike ride to kick the day off. Not much contest really. However, I clearly […]
Filed under: Distribution, Ethics & Environment, General, Setting up on June 18th, 2007 | 6 Comments »
We just got our copy of the Flower & Plants Association’s annual report through. The F&PA is the UK’s industry body, tasked with supporting and promoting the UK flower and indoor plants industry. There are a couple of interesting statistics in there:
£2.2bn of flowers and £509m of plants were sold in 2006; and
That […]
Filed under: Floristry, Flowers on June 9th, 2007 | No Comments »
We got this fine specimen in from Hiremech today, to begin a week’s trial - it’s an electric van. If it does the trick, we’ll get fully Arena-branded ones for all our central London deliveries.
Here’s Mariusz, Arena’s Head of Distribution, plugging her in for the first time.
And this is Tom (on the […]
Filed under: Distribution, Ethics & Environment on May 25th, 2007 | 3 Comments »
