Hello, dear reader.
Just a quick note to say that deliveries of gorgeous flowers from Flowers HQ to all our UK destinations (and indeed to all the European destinations that we cover) will NOT be disrupted by the Royal Mail strikes now or in the future.
Our deliveries, whether they’re made by our own full time drivers [...]
Filed under: Distribution, General on October 29th, 2009 | No Comments »
It’s nearly a week since Valentine’s Day and like previous years, this year too was manic with customers rushing to send flowers to their loved ones. Despite all the economic gloom and the discomforting worries about how we would compare our sales to previous years, sales were surprisingly strong adding to the notion that love [...]
Filed under: Distribution, Floristry, Flowers, Mega Days, Operations, Valentine's Day on February 19th, 2009 | 1 Comment »
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 »
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 »
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 [...]
Filed under: Distribution, General, International Flowers, Operations on January 13th, 2009 | No Comments »
It’s my birthday today. Hooray! Birthday flowers, birthday balloons, birthday greetings cards all round! Oh, and I’ll have some “healthy” chocolate too – I am getting old after all. Right – that’s the search engine optimisation bit out of the way. I’m 33 today. Ouch! 11 years til my next symmetrical birthday. Best enjoy this [...]
Filed under: Christmas Flowers, Distribution, General on December 2nd, 2008 | 9 Comments »
Something we learnt quite quickly after setting up Arena is that, if you run a business then it seems you’re fair game and people will make up outrageous claims to try and get money out of you. It may be down to the idea that “Well, they’re a company so they won’t bother wasting time [...]
Filed under: Distribution, Ethics & Environment, Fraud, General, Operations on October 24th, 2008 | 3 Comments »
We love our customers – we really do – and absolutely nothing gives us more pleasure than to make someone’s day by delivering our flowers. But sometimes customers can make life very interesting for us here at Flowers HQ, and they sometimes think we have almost magical powers of divination!
Here, in a light-hearted, tongue-in-cheek [...]
Filed under: Christmas Flowers, Customers, Distribution, General, Mega Days, Mother's Day, Operations, Valentine's Day on August 13th, 2008 | 6 Comments »
Quick intro from Will: We often get asked “So why is Arena Flowers so much better than John Lewis, Marks & Spencers or Interflora then? After all, you only sell a set of standard bouquets, just like them.” Well, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Unlike the bigger players, we do numerous bespoke and [...]
Filed under: Christmas Flowers, Customers, Distribution, Floristry, Flowers, General, Mega Days, Mother's Day, Operations, Valentine's Day, Weddings on August 6th, 2008 | No Comments »
Marry when June roses grow and over land and sea you’ll go…
Although late summer is fast becoming a popular time of the year for matrimonial activity, June is the traditonal month for weddings and anniversaries. This is because June is traditionally considered to be the luckiest month to marry in as it is named after [...]
Filed under: Distribution, Floristry, Flowers, General, Operations, Weddings on June 20th, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Here at Arena Flowers we get a lot of special orders both large and small – sometimes for a particular birthday where the number of flowers is important or sometimes for the re-creation of a wedding bouquet for an anniversary.
We also receive requests for flower stems to be distributed at special events, such as yellow [...]
Filed under: Customers, Distribution, Ethics & Environment, Floristry, Flowers, Good Causes & Charities, Mega Days, Operations, Setting up on June 12th, 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 »
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 | 7 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 »
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 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 »
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