Happy Birthday to us, Happy Birthday to us, Happy Birthday Arena Flowers, Happy Birthday to us! Yes, believe it or not but Arena Flowers turns 3 years young today – and to celebrate, our Head Florist Andrew has created us this super-dooper birthday cake made from flowers!
Consisting of our ethically sourced Grand Prix roses, our [...]
Filed under: Floristry, Flowers, General, Operations, Setting up on July 28th, 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 »
Getting hitched in the chilly months of winter doesn’t mean that you need to compromise on your winter wedding flowers. Although relatively rare compared to summer weddings, winter ceremonies can indeed benefit from all the sparkle and glamour of the party season, with family and friends close to hand for the festive period. Wedding planners [...]
Filed under: Christmas Flowers, Customers, Ethics & Environment, Floristry, Flowers, Setting up, Weddings on January 9th, 2009 | 11 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 »
Our latest guest editor is Alicia, from MOO.com. MOO is one of the darlings of the “web 2.0″ world. Why? Because it tries not only to do the big things right, but all the little things too. MOO helps personalise things through print, and it’s a pretty unique business. At Arena Flowers we love personalisation [...]
Filed under: Ethics & Environment, General, Guest Posts, Setting up on July 10th, 2008 | No Comments »
We often get asked by friends and former colleagues who are thinking about setting up their own business for our top tips on fund-raising for start ups. We’re no experts so, rather than give exhaustive detail of what we’ve learnt here, we thought we’d share three avenues of government funding that we’ve found interesting [...]
Filed under: Finance & Investment, Setting up, Start up on June 16th, 2008 | 5 Comments »
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 »
Question: What should you expect from a blog post on a flowers blog on a flowers website?
Answer: A post about blog libel, of course!
Why?!: Arena started blogging about a year ago (to understand why we blog, please see this post). One of the great things about blogging is that it’s a two way communication process; [...]
Filed under: Big Mistakes, Ethics & Environment, Matters Webby, Setting up on March 26th, 2008 | 1 Comment »
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 »
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 »
Last weekend was a great weekend for us flower lovers; a trip to the flowers HQ of the world – Holland! (actually, if we’re being precise, we went to The Netherlands – Holland is merely a region of The Netherlands but who’s counting?).
Anyway, here are lots of pictures of our adventures in the country that [...]
Filed under: Flowers, General, Setting up, Start up on September 26th, 2007 | 5 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 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 [...]
Filed under: General, Marketing, Matters Webby, Setting up, Start up on June 4th, 2007 | No Comments »
One thing I’ve learned since we set up Arena is that, if you run a business, you have to pay for EVERYTHING! Especially banking.
Consumer banking is nominally free, but is rife with accusations of excessive charges, arbitrarily levied. This “free banking + costly slap” pricing model is the way high street banks bump up [...]
Filed under: Finance & Investment, Setting up on May 30th, 2007 | 1 Comment »
9th September 2006. Saturday.
Mmmmmm…weekend. Lie in, pub lunch then laze about talking nonsense, recharging the batteries. Sounds good.
No sir! We spent the weekend installing a gigantic fridge the size of a squash court in our warehouse. Here’s the space we had to fill (that’s Arena’s Dutch masterpiece, Ronald, waving).
We originally thought (hoped) [...]
Filed under: Setting up, Start up on May 21st, 2007 | No Comments »
Hello! Welcome to ArenaFlowers.com’s first blog. Ooooo. Exciting. Not quite sure what to say now. Hmmmm. *uncomfortable silence*
:)
Well, I guess as good a way as any to start is to explain why we’ve set this blog up. It’s actually not a straightforward question. After all, [...]
Filed under: General, Setting up on May 20th, 2007 | 3 Comments »
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