This post is in fact a little overdue as our Birthday was back in July so please excuse the tardiness (what can I say, it was a big party :). Its also been a while since I last wrote a post so seeing both are overdue I thought I would pen this particular post.

Somehow the years have slipped by, summers and winters have come and gone and we have quietly got older and dare I say it, wiser. We celebrated our fifth birthday in July and whilst this may be just a fraction of ones lifetime it is noteworthy as it is a long time in business. Truth is, celebrating our birthday in July is a bit formal as that is based around the paper work of setting up a business and moving into our new warehouse. For me the fun began on the 19th September 2006 when the florists moved in and we made our first sale (so perhaps this post isn’t late, just perfectly timed!). Seeing your hard work come together like that is genuinely priceless.

There have been many exciting times at Arena Flowers, with each year showing growth and innovation in numerous areas of the business. I am lucky enough to have been at Arena from the start and so have watched as we have built upon our foundations and grown up. As a parent I can say this as watching a business evolve is not unlike watching your kids get older, you take pride in each new development and want to tell your family and friends why yours is better than the rest. Will, our MD, may not be a dad (yet) but as the father of our business he will be the first one to talk your ear off about how amazing Arena Flowers is. :)

Much like the pencil marks in my kitchen that show my kids’ growth, I thought I would use this post to highlight some of those moments that have helped grow Arena into the business it is today.

Year One, March 2006 > June 2007

For me the first year starts a little earlier, back in March of 2006, when Will, Steve and I met in my local pub to talk about a website they wanted to build. The plan was to sell flowers, online! That first meeting quickly formed a plan and from there a first draft of a website, this grew and grew until it was something that Will felt confident he could show investors. A short while later, in July, we found ourselves in a board room in Pall Mall signing the incorporation document.

Like any new business our first year was all about setting up. We had set ourselves a significant benchmark, to be the best online florist out there and that required attention to detail in all areas from floristry, customer service, delivery and even our photography. We set about kitting out our new warehouse with a bespoke built fridge for all our flowers, hand made benches for the florists and the necessary phone system and computers.

Will quickly found his feet as MD and was soon immersed in paper work, buying a fleet of vans for our London deliveries and negotiating with suppliers. Steve, who had a background in the flower industry, got to work with the florists getting our ranges together (whilst also working on our SEO and Adwords). With the website up and running (we had finished building it in August 2006) I started work on a long to-do list to add more features to the site with our developer Zach. Having a background in photography and design I also set up a studio upstairs in our warehouse so we could take our own product shots. Jackie was kept very busy building the customer service team which quickly grew to match the increase in orders we were getting. Mariusz our head of distribution, was tasked with managing our London drivers, organising their orders each day and then managing the next day delivery orders. Everyone had their own department to manage and it quickly became evident that there was much to do!

Our first bit of development for the year (enter Henry, developer number 2) was an integration with Parcelforce so that our customers would get instant notifications of the orders being delivered. We also built our own SMS tool to extend this feature. Cool hey! This was followed by adding cross sell to the checkout, so you could add chocolates and balloons etc to your order and our Upload Photo tool which lets you upload a digital photo for us to print out and include with your message card. We had fun building our first Facebook app, Flowers&Fun which lets you send our flowers virtually to your friends on Facebook. As you can see from the links to past posts we also launched our blog. Not a bad start.

Year Two, July 2007 > July 2008

12 months later and with a successful Christmas, Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day under our belts we felt ready to start building on to the business. We added our International Flower delivery section, allowing our customer to send flowers all over the world. Our chocolate sales impressed our supplier Prestat so much that they asked us to build them their own chocolate website and manage their CS. We also took our first step into Europe, setting up a warehouse and business in Holland and launching ArenaBloemen.nl (which meant a lot of translations and adding Euros to our code base). Hot on the heels of the launch of our Dutch website we set our sights on Germany and armed with our new translations database we set about building ArenaBlumen.de and launched it in April 2008. I had fun branding our vans and my son Luke was born and Will stepped in as Godfather :) A good year all round.

Year Three, July 2008 > July 2009

This year marked our entry into B2B partnerships with our first white label website for Cancer Research UK. We also launched our Arena for Business service which allows approved businesses to order flowers on our website and add them to an invoice rather than getting their credit card out. In July 2008 we were invited to the IMRG online green awards and were delighted to win an OLGA. Enjoying our European expansion we launched our French website ArenaFleurs.fr . With four international websites operational we started building up our bi-lingual marketing team, employing a bright young team each one fluent in their native German, Dutch and French languages, as well as English. Keeping the development ball rolling we released our Calendar Reminder feature allowing our customers to add important dates to their account and we then remind them in time to send flowers next time the Birthday or Anniversary comes around.

Year Four, July 2009 > July 2010

At the end of July 2009 we launched our Dutch language Belgian website ArenaBloemen.be which was followed by the French language Belgian website ArenaFleurs.be. This marked our fourth country in mainland Europe and the realisation that we needed more boots on the ground in Holland. Steve took up the not insignificant task of moving to Holland and learning the language! His dedication to the task at hand and love of the country was confirmed when he married Elsa (who he had met when she joined us to help set up the Dutch website). Meanwhile we completed our API designed to allow larger partners to send us orders through a seamless XML service that manages prices, stock control and delivery dates to name a few. This milestone began some exciting conversations with some very interesting brands, all hush hush as I am sure you can appreciate :) In the later part of 2009 Pascale joined us to head up our marketing team and grow our European roll out. Perhaps the most significant addition to the Arena engine for the year came when Steve set to work planning a new stock control and buying database. Destined to revolutionalise our purchasing and warehouse management in the UK and in Europe the project rapidly expanded and we employed extra developers to help us build this crucial tool. In February 2010 we launched our Twitter app, FlowersFun.co.uk which instantly took off. Winning the Smarta 100 award was a nice way to conclude a very exciting year!

Year Five, July 2010 > July 2011

Seeing the business grow over the past years has caused us all to have to focus on our own specialist tasks. Gone are the days of multitasking, so much so that we hired a Group Financial Controller, Adnan, to manage our group finances < lucky him :) The snow in the winter of 2010 was eye watering to the extent that we are now integrated with 3 full time couriers. Despite this we had a successful Christmas and that was followed by a very slick Valentine’s Day And Mother’s Day. With Steve’s mega database live and monitoring our every step we had complete visibility of all our teams both here and abroad, a system that allowed us to fulfill over five times the number of orders that we delivered over our very first Valentine’s Day. With a larger management team we outgrew our offices in the warehouse and marketing, product and web development and admin moved to shiny new offices opposite BBC Television Centre. Once installed I set to work redesigning our website and in May we released the new design on our UK website and the rest followed shortly after. We also redesigned our product page to better display the photography our new product development team have worked so hard on. Finally, our international focus has caught the attention of the eCommerce Awards for Excellence 2011 and we have been nominated for the International e-Retail Award. The nomination alone is worthy of raising a glass, or two :)

Phew, that wasn’t supposed to be a long post, I guess we had been busier than I though and believe me I left a lot out! As I said at the beginning, five years is a long time in business and knowing we have done all this is testament to the hard work put in by each and every person (past and present) at Arena. To plagiarise Mr Newton we have only come this far today as we stand on the shoulders of giants. Here’s to the next five years.

Good times!

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Will has been busy as a regular contributor to econsultancy’s blog as well as others, so we thought we’d share some of his posts here too.

Having a growing online business can be filled with thousands of individual decisions, each of which in sum can lead to the shape of your business.  We thought we’d summarise some of them here as a guide for anyone making similar decisions.  Enjoy.

Tips for boot strapped startups (try saying that after two pints)

In his post, Six top tips for bootstrapped startups, Will shares his advice about what to expect when starting a new company without piles of VC backing behind you.

1. Employing friends and family at the start of a new company is a good way to get people who believe in you on board – but make sure the relationship can survive the stress.

2. Take the lead, the buck stops with you. Management by committee can lead to poor compromised decisions.

3. Don’t wing it or make rushed decisions. Tell your team exactly what you need to make a decision (data, costs, where assumptions are) then they will come prepared when seeking approval (and more likely to get a “yes”).

4. Don’t let minority investors run the game; this can slow down progress when small share holders dig their heels in because of different expectations.  It’s your business, so make sure you can run it your way.

5. Patience isn’t a virtue, it’s a necessity.   Will gives a rule of thumb that “raise twice as much as you think you need and expect it to take twice as long”.

6. Know your end game. And keep it in mind the whole way along.  There are many reasons to start a business, but once you’re immersed in the detail and the hard slog, don’t forget your reasons and make sure the ship keeps moving in the right direction.

Nothing is normal

If you’re just at the early days of starting your business and feel like your life is a bit all over the place, it’s normal.  Feeling like you’ve done nothing for a week then completely manic the next week, it’s normal.  In Will’s post for Management Today, My Week: Will Wynne of ArenaFlowers, he describes how a day can involve going to meet with a courier company, or getting two hours sleep, or not having lunch, or flying to the US to check out how they do things out there.

Sit in big chair, stroke cat, ponder world domination

In one of Will’s post for econsultancy, he looked at issues regarding international expansion of an online business.  This can be an attractive prospect for business owners – you may have found that you get a lot of traffic from non-UK audiences, or that your product might be attractive for those outside of your current target country.

This is not an insignificant decision to expand your business internationally and there are some tools which can help you work out if or where markets for your products exist.  Will comments in the telegraph on Google’s new export research tool here. Called Global Market Finder, this tool from Google allows you to look at search terms and competition in new countries.  This might give you some ideas if there is demand for your product, or what people are looking for in your particular field.  For example, Marmite appears to be a popular search term in China, as is Marmalade in France.

Will also writes about the potential complications around websites, language, SEO and tax.  Once you determine that there is a market, how you get into that market is a plethora of details.  Will gives you 3 top things to consider in his post International e-commerce: three things to consider.

The first is how you show your content to your new audience.  Targeted, local websites?  Or using your main domain?  There are pros and cons to both; you need it to decide which are most important to you.  Having a local website gives a better customer experience, but takes more resource to build and may be harder to get integrated into your backend systems.  Having localised content on your main website maybe a good way to test the market before you invest in a new site.

Do you need to create a locally registered company?  No, it’s not a legal requirement within Europe (although it can help massively when negotiating with local suppliers.  Again, it’s worth weighing the benefits of a local company against the set up.  Creating one does lead to more admin and accounting costs.

VAT, under the distance selling rules for the EU, are charged at the local VAT rate of the goods-receiving country.  Up to a certain threshold.  And this threshold changes from country to country.  For example, once a UK company has sent 35K Euros of goods to Belgium, the company then has to register for VAT in Belgium and pay the Belgian tax to the local tax office (not the UK one).  Variable tax rates on products can create a development issue too, because different tax rates will need to be applied to products depending on which country they are to be sent.

Socially acceptable marketing

You have things up and running, plans of global domination simmering gently on the stove.  So what’s all this social media marketing malarkey?  Ok, that’s a bit patronising, if you’ve come here to a blog from a twitter link or a facebook post, you probably know.  But knowing how to use it for marketing is not necessarily so straightforward.  We hear a lot of examples from big brands with big bank accounts and what they do with social marketing, but how about young companies decide to use the space is trickier.   Will’s blog post on econsultancy “How should a young company approach social media marketing?” gives insight into our experiences of using social media.  Things that have worked long term (like our twitter application, Flowers and Fun) , things that have some success at key times (our Facebook valentine’s wishes page), and things that we could have done without (our world cup flowers video).

Will gives 6 points of sage advice:

1. Make the idea simple. It should be easy for people to pick up – but then also easy for you to put down if it falls flat.

2. Be realistic. Converting sales from social media campaign may disappoint you, but focus more on getting your name out.

3. Make it non-commercial. People don’t want to be marketed at, they want to be entertained.  If your marketing message is obviously selling something, people are less likely to engage, in our experience.

4. Don’t hashtag spam. There are plenty of examples of this going wrong (Habitat being the first example, although they’ve since gone into administration – not due to the hashtag spam, though!)

5. Have fun with it (if you post robotically, people won’t be very inclined to read it or respond)

6. Track what you can (traffic, use referral tags)

Staying on the right side of right

You may be on the right side of your customers – but are you on the right side of the law?  The Advertising Standards Agency released a new extension to its remit in March 2011, which includes content on websites, twitter feeds and Facebook walls.   There are some grey areas which we identified in the new remit and Will’s blog post on the new ASA online regulations, gave some examples of where companies had gone wron and some of the trickier issues.  We thought we’d summarise some of the grey areas and how to avoid getting an ASA complaint upheld:

1.  It’s all about context: Editorial content on a website is not within the remit.  Unless it’s used for marketing purposes.  The example Will gives is the Tanning Shop using a Daily Mail article about tanning being good for you in one of their marketing emails.  Complaints were upheld because although the article was published by the Daily Mail, that wasn’t enough for the Tanning Shop to substantiate the claims.  Similar with customer reviews.  You can’t control what people post on your wall, or how they review products on your website.  But you are responsible if you use those reviews for marketing purposes.

2. Familiarise yourself, your marketing team, your content team and your design team with the new regulations.

3. Respond if the ASA contact you.  From what we’ve read about complaints, the ASA don’t take kindly if you do not respond and you are very likely to have a complain upheld.

4. Be cautious on social media.  If you retweet a tweet from your company which has erroneous information about your company or products, that could lead to an upheld complaint.

5. Question any agency you use to write content about you to make sure they know the new regulations.  Put processes in place so that claims the write about you can be substantiated.  This means more editorial time.

There we go. Quite a few tips all in all! Hopefully helpful / of interest.

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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 signature Cherry Brandy roses, yellow and orange spray chrysanthemums, eucalyptus and creamy white hydrangea (all topped off with oranges, limes and kiwi fruit, making this a truly edible cake!), a celebratory flower cake has now become a tradition at Flowers HQ since our 1st birthday back in 2007.

Of course, there’ve been a lot of changes since those early days of Arena Flowers, and these ‘Then and Now’ pictures tell only half the story and make an interesting trip down memory lane:

Since our last birthday we have vastly expanded our product range and bespoke portfolio, partnered with an increasing number of charities and expanded across Europe with our international sites. And that’s all in just the past year!

We’d like to take this opportunity to thank you, our loyal customer base and friends for your continued support, custom and feedback to enable us to expand and establish ourselves as the UK’s leading, fastest-growing online florist in the UK and beyond…

If you’d like to learn more about how it all began, you may like to read this, this and this blog post.

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• 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 has become a deluge in the New Year, with headlines in the most popular newspapers in the UK showing incontrovertibly that Twitter has moved into the UK mainstream this year and established itself as the papers’ latest web darling.  Their interest is doubtless due, at least in part, to celebrity “tweeters” – celebs sell newspapers, so the papers are going where the celebs are and trying to grab some “Twitter scoops”.

Recently Jemima Kiss, a prominent blogger and journalist, revealed Jonathan Ross’s intention to discuss the service with keen Twitterer and web aficionado Stephen Fry on his first show back from suspension.   Yesterday, the Times Online made a story out of another of Ross’s “tweets”, publishing an article about his “announcement” that he would be hosting this year’s Bafta Awards.  There’s no end of celeb twittering going on, so if you’ve always wanted to know what John Cleese had for breakfast or are desperate to learn how Lance Armstrong’s comeback is going then here’s your chance.

There have been a few “bah humbug” articles too (hey, this is the British media after all) – work place concerns focus on how Twitter may hinder productivity, whilst some media sources simply complain about the lack of juicy gossip from celebrity tweeters.

We twitter too.  So we figured we’d share some of our thoughts on Twitter and Web 2.0.  In 2007 we launched our blog with a post explaining why we would be blogging.  Basically, as a new business in the impersonal online world we felt the blog would help give us a more human a voice, would enable us to communicate more personally with our customers, and would allow us to share interesting or fun insights or snippets on flowers and the online world more generally.

Since we started blogging, the “Web 2.0” movement and the social web have expanded significantly, offering additional channels and tempos of communication to complement the “older” channels.  The most obvious change is that the flow of communication is no longer as one directional or contrived as it once was. New media, to differing extents, encourage a balanced and more frequent communication between businesses and customers / visitors.

The most important difference though, in our opinion, is that new media channels enable real time, easy going contact between parties in a way that has never been possible before.  Historically, interactions between a business and a customer have been about hard nosed selling by the business and the making of informed purchasing decisions by the customer.  Social media communications are, in most cases, far more laid back.  If old media channels are like a full on business meeting in the office, then Web 2.0 channels are more like the “getting to know you” drink in the pub afterwards.  Consequently, the conversations are sometimes utterly inane and pointless but it doesn’t really matter as there’s not so much pressure on the communication to deliver immediately or at all (at least not as far as we’re concerned).

Many prominent brands have embraced Web 2.0 channels, with varying degrees of success.  Some examples of doing it right:

• Last year the web world was abuzz with the news that Top Shop, one of the UK’s leading high street fashion retailers, was getting 5% of its online visitors from MySpace. (“But is it good traffic?”, mutters my inner marketeer);
• One famously early adopter of Twitter was the popular US-based shoe retailer Zappos. Of their 1600 odd employees, 453 of them are actively on Twitter listening, engaging and responding to customer concerns;
• US-based low cost carrier JetBlue is on Twitter and has earned kudos from customers as their Twitter responses are often faster than those their customer service team;
• More recently, Dell reported $1 million worth of sales from Twitter alone. Although this number is miniscule in comparison to Dell’s overall revenue, it does offer plenty of brand exposure (eg us writing about them here).

The intangible value social media can add to a business is thought to be high. Guy Kawasaki, an early exponent of evangelism marketing who, in his capacity as chief evangelist for Apple, was responsible for creating a number of passionate user-advocates for the Apple brand, describes Twitter as one of the best new marketing tools of the century.  Of course, PR departments of big companies always produce a lot of hot air about such trendy initiatives, trying to push how cutting edge and down with the kids their brand is, so any such figures or self-congratulatory back-slapping press releases should always be taken with a pinch of salt.

Speaking for Arena, we have seen real benefits from our blog, our Facebook application (Flowers & Fun) and from our Twitter feed, and all at low cost.  However, anyone who tells you these channels will change your business overnight is talking rubbish (and may be trying to sell you something you don’t need – caveat emptor!).  There may also be a danger that with more and more people engaging with such channels, that the value will drowned out by the additional noise.

Nonetheless, we think it’s clear that Web 2.0 and new media channels can undoubtedly add value in many ways to any sized business.  As well as being informative, engaging with social media can also be just plain fun, and even eye opening on occasion.  A lot of the things we’ve found out or leads that we’ve picked were totally unexpected or from left field, and that’s one of the most rewarding aspects of Twitter; such serendipity can’t, by definition, be planned or manufactured.  On which note, here’s a final example of the unpredictable path that twittering can take: Let’s all ‘sue Telegraph’, say Twitterers.

UPDATE: For those that live on the other side of the world, the point about Twitter having arrived was made a million times better than this post by the first pic of the Hudson River plane landing appearing first on Twitterpic.

Some Useful Twitter Resources:

• 10 ways to use Twitter to Promote you Business
• 17 Ways You Can Use Twitter: A Guide for Beginners, Marketers and Business Owners
• Guardian list of Celebrities on Twitter (constantly updated)
• How companies use Twitter to bolster their brands
• How to use Twitter to grow your business
• List of Businesses on Twitter
• List of UK Businesses on Twitter
• Why Twitter should matter to you: Twustomer service edition

If you liked this post, you may enjoy reading our other posts on Social Media: Flowers in the Social Networking Arena & Send Free Flowers on Facebook.

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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 will normally recommend against sourcing for the low season as flowers can be much more expensive, and less available. However, if you’re all set for marriage in December, January or February – Arena is here to guide you in making the most of your winter wedding.

If you look out into the garden, it may seem that the selection of winter flowers is limited, but many varieties are available all year round. For instance, roses, lilies and carnations – the nation’s favourite wedding flowers – may traditionally be known as summer flowers but they can be found in virtually any colour throughout the year. Winter weddings may also be brightened by using lilies or chrysanthemums. Again both of these are a popular choice and are available all year round so you will not have to worry about breaking the bank when it comes to choosing your wedding flowers.

While the prices for winter wedding flower bouquets may run a bit on the high side, there are some great seasonal bargains to be found. For a real festive touch, what better than red or white amaryllis for an extra showy effect (as illustrated by our bridal bouquets above), or perhaps even poinsettia, holly or winter berries – mixing with winter evergreens such as firs and spruce.

Alternatively, there are also many varieties of lilies or orchids that make beautifully exotic winter wedding flower arrangements (as illustrated by our bridal bouquets below) and won’t necessarily cost you an arm and a leg. An exotic or tropical themed wedding in the bleak midwinter can make a lovely break from the cold.

Fire & Ice – Decorating Your Winter Wedding Flowers

Winter Bridal Bouquets
Winter white or very light ivory flatter any bride’s skin tone, and make the perfect canvas for bright, bold colours – bringing life to an otherwise monochromatic winter hues. When selecting a theme for your winter wedding flowers, a favourite choice is to opt for shades of white, rich greens and tones of copper or red and burgundy.

Buttonholes, Boutonnieres & Corsages
Continue a seasonal theme with spray roses coupled with holly and/or berries, or alternatively take the low season as an opportunity to experiment with exotic flowers such as orchids or asiatic lilies.

Flowers for the Ceremony & Reception
If opting for a ceremony in December or early January, it is likely that the wedding or reception venue will already be decorated in red and green for seasonal events however you do not need to feel constricted by these colour schemes. Metallics and whites will complement your festive setting, while extra colour can be added by lightly spraying petals with glitter to add that little extra winter sparkle.

Candles are highly recommended for adding warmth and glow to any venue, and decorating your winter wedding flowers with light or crystal embellishments also brightening your scheme. Mirrors, glass pebbles and baubles will add a glamorous touch to table decorations for your wedding reception. Wax apples, pine cones or cinnamon sticks will also add an extra festive feel to your centrepiece arrangements. For more ideas and inspiration for your wedding flowers visit our online portfolio.

Seasonal Availability & Christmas Flower Prices

In this day and age of under soil heating and imports from as far afield as Africa and Asia, most flowers are available to buy in the UK all seasons. However, the more ethically aware bride may have issues with the perceived carbon emissions associated with their availability – as well as inflated marketed prices over the Christmas period! Sadly, it is likely that wholesale prices for some flowers are set at a much higher market price then at other times of the year because of the increased demand for them for festive flower arrangements – something florists cannot control.

However, here’s a list of winter and all-year-round availability without the need for vastly inflated prices or air miles: Agapanthus, Alstromeria, Amaryllis, Anemone, Anthurium, Aster, Bouvardia, Calla Lily, Carnation, Chrysanthemum, Craspedia, Cymbidium Orchid, Euphorbia, Freesia, Gerbera, Gloriosa, Gypsophila, Heliconia, Hyacinth, Iris, Leucospermum, Lily (Asiatic & Oriental), Lisianthus, Muscari, Narcissus (Daffodil), Nymphaea, Ornithogalum, Phalaenopsis Orchid, Phlox, Poinsettia, Ranunculus, Rose, Sunflower, Strelitzia, Tulip, Veronica.

If you enjoyed this post, you may also enjoy this one about about our family summer wedding, or perhaps this post about spring wedding flowers or even this one about getting the best from your wedding photography.

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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 online marketing in positive light and it certainly gives us some confidence about our efforts… :D

Although we are florists in the traditional sense, at the heart of our business model is a website which makes shopping an enjoyable experience for our customers. Arena Flowers has always prided itself in offering unique customer focused experiences and believes that technology plays a significant role in achieving this. Since its inception we have envisaged customer needs and requirements and tailored our website accordingly. We have continually sought customer feedback and worked extensively to make improvements to make ordering flowers and gifts an incredible experience for the customer. Everything from the website interface to product display, shopping cart and the checkout is an intuitive process. We have leveraged the features of Web 2.0 to make Arena Flowers website, an enjoyable experience while ensuring the highest security standards to protect our customers from Internet fraud.

However, that represents one dimension of our website. Like all other online businesses, it is vital for Arena Flowers to be found by customers and we rely extensively on Internet marketing to achieve this. The Internet has changed the way we interact with our stakeholders. It is a vibrant and rich advertising medium full of opportunities despite being multi-faceted. It requires a variety of strategies to be woven together to succeed. The significant aspect of Internet marketing is the ability to to deliver relevant content to consumers at the right time. On the web, marketing and communications has shifted from the one size fits all approach of traditional advertising to delivering the right information at the right time to help consumers in making a decision.

The crux of our Internet marketing strategy is marketing for search engines. Search is an intrinsically buyer-led medium, which is flexible and responsive to consumer tastes. Research indicates that Internet users rarely type website addresses into the browser bars — they locate them through search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Ask or Live.  Therefore it is necessary for Arena Flowers to promote search rankings by improving our website’s structure and content. It is important for us to appear as near as possible to the top of search engine results for a set of keywords. We achieve this by investing in considerable time and resources to research and identify a number of measures including keywords, onsite content, external link partners etc while ensuring that the structure of our website is search engine friendly to warrant a listing.

Apart from search engines, we focus on other broader Internet marketing strategies to insulate our reliance on search. Online mediums such as blogs, podcasts, streaming video, etc are changing the way consumers research and buy products and services, necessitating Arena’s presence on such mediums. Furthermore, We also have a number of additional systems in place including Affiliate Marketing, Social Networking such as Facebook, Twitter, Squidoo etc, Comparison shopping, newsletters etc. We constantly evolve with the web 2.0 medium to strengthen our web presence. These initiatives help in getting prospective customers to Arena Flowers.

From the beginning, we have strived to strike the right balance between technology and design to benefit from the important and powerful marketing channel – the Internet. Through the Internet, we are committed to engage in a personal relationship with our customers to provide them value added service. We regularly measure our Internet marketing efforts internally and we feel happy to see an increase in the number of visitors to our website, conversions, sales, customer feedback etc. But We certainly feel privileged when we get appreciated by an unexpected quarter – to be cited by an academic text on Internet marketing. It highlights the success of our Internet marketing efforts and motivates us further to take it to the next level.

While we ponder on our Internet Marketing Strategy, please ensure that you pick a copy of Internet Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice to help you grow your online business!

Similar posts: If you enjoyed this post, you may find our other posts on UK Online Green Awards – Winner: Arena Flowers and Silver Gilt Award Winning Flowers at Hampton Court Flower Show 2008! Gold in 2009? interesting.

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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 and we try to be different; that’s why we tried out MOO’s new bespoke business cards.  We thought they were so cool that we invited MOO to write about them here.  We then dashed off a quick run of 300 bespoke cards to take to the Hampton Court Palace Flower Show this week, to hand out to admirers of our “emotion bouquets”.

Hello.  We’re MOO.com; a London-based, online stationer that turns our customer’s digital photography and designs into lovely printed products.  We print Business Cards, MiniCards, Postcards, Stickers and other products using ‘Printfinity Technology’ to print a different image on every single card in a pack, perfect for showing off a product range, portfolio or different company services.

Recently, we worked with Arena Flowers on the launch of our newest product; Business Cards.  Arena Flowers was a perfect case study for the launch of Business Cards as they have a wealth of beautiful product photography that look great printed on a pack of cards.  Arena Flowers chose a selection of images of their favourite bouquets, added their contact information and website url to the reverse, and created a beautiful pack of cards; almost as lovely as the flowers themselves!

Click To Enlarge – Cool Aren’t They?!

Because the cards show images of the flowers that they sell, when meeting with new suppliers or clients, Arena staff can show the bouquet in question, there and then (no more ‘oh, you can look it up – let me get a pen…’)

Like many small businesses, budget is often a leading factor in marketing decisions. With MOO’s short-run boxes of 50 cards every Arena employee can carry their own cards to promote the company – but, no one is left with thousands of cards they’re unlikely to use, just because they’ve changed a phone number.

For companies like Arena Flowers however, there‘s more than just money at stake. With ethical accreditation achieved for the flowers they sell, they wanted to keep these values running through everything they do. By choosing MOO‘s Green stock, they know it’s recycled fibre, totally chlorine free and 100% biodegradable. Even the recyclable box is made of 100% recycled pulp – which makes it as green as their fingers.

All of our products are printed in London and shipped worldwide (at one flat rate) so pop over to moo.com to have a look.

Post from: Arena Flowers - Flower Delivery London & UK

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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 and which potential/existing entrepreneurs might not be aware of. If you apply for any of them, good luck. We hope you’re successful and get to pose for one of those classic big cheque pics like we did. Here’s me and superstar Howard Beaumont of the Park Royal Partnership with our giganto-cheque:

Let’s start our list with the source of funding that yielded that happy mugshot:

1. The Park Royal Partnership

Arena Flowers is based in Park Royal, in West London, an area which has Europe’s largest concentration of businesses; Park Royal is home to over 2000 companies and over 40,000 employees. We chose to base Flowers HQ in Park Royal because of the excellent transport links and great business environment, plus because it’s an awful lot better value than swanky offices in central London (a saving which we can pass on to customers). One of the things we did before we signed up to our lease was to call in on the Park Royal Partnership (PRP). The PRP is a membership organisation founded in 1997 to regenerate and improve the Park Royal estate and Howard Beaumont, the PRP’s Business Development Manager, was incredibly helpful to us when we were setting up, providing employment support, introducing us to Prestat and their luxury hand made chocolates, and arranging for an environmental review of our business. Howard also let us know about a grant available to PRP members to support marketing programmes. Hence the giant cheque, which part-funded the branding of four of our delivery vans. Whilst Park Royal is unusually well supported as a result of the number of businesses based there, most areas of the UK have similar government-backed schemes and equivalent funding opportunities.

2. The London Development Agency

A case in point is the London Development Agency (LDA). They have a far wider remit than the PRP, and can support businesses based across the Greater London area. The LDA has recently been dragged into some tough PR to-ing and fro-ing as part of London’s recent mayoral election. We steer clear of politics on this blog but we’re pleased to say that our experience of the LDA has been overwhelmingly positive. In fact, without the support of David B and James S at the LDA, who helped us secure a “Selective Finance For Investment in England” grant, Arena Flowers simply wouldn’t exist. The essence of these government grants (also including the PRP award) is that applicants must demonstrate that the government funding will create new UK jobs. For our LDA grant, we needed to create 35 new jobs plus meet a capital expenditure target. Once that was achieved, the money was released. The level of any grant award is linked directly to the forecast capital expenditure figure (as a percentage of the capex). If I remember rightly, the % is capped at c 20%, in order to avoid healthy government support becoming anti-competitive government subsidy. Notably, the LDA can also assist businesses in the often expensive process of fund-raising through its Access To Finance grant. A fairly comprehensive list of funding available to businesses across the whole UK can be found on the government’s under-publicised Business Link website.

3. Small Firm Loan Guarantee

Arena hasn’t applied for a Small Firm Loan Guarantee (SFLG), though our very helpful Barclays bank manager, Alun, was kind enough to talk us through its ins and outs. The SFLG scheme is designed as a “lender of last resort” option for businesses that can’t secure funding from other sources. It’s a joint scheme by the government and SFLG approved lenders. Loans of up to £250k are available, with 75% of the loan guaranteed by the government and a maximum repayment period of 10 years for any approved loan. Repayment holidays will also be considered. There are certain qualification criteria, relating to age and turnover of the business, and it’s not particularly cheap (interest rate = Bank of England base rate + lender margin (typically 2%) + 2% guarantee fee), but it may well be cheaper than giving away a share of your business. Lenders are reputed to be fairly circumspect about approving such loans, despite the government guarantee, as, if banks are cavalier in their approach and approve dubious loans which fail and the government repeatedly has to pay out under its 75% guarantee, the government’s sense of humour failure is likely to be fairly titanic. Consequently, banks’ credit committees tend to be more interested in keeping on the right side of the British government than in putting additional small loans onto their books, meaning it can be quite hard work getting an SFLG approved. Apparently, the best tactic is to go to your bank’s competitors and say “If you get my SFLG approved, I’ll switch my banking to you”. Banks are reputed to be much more likely to approve an SFLG if they can win new business through the approval.

And that’s it for this post. There are obviously lots of other sources of finance, in particular business angels and venture capitalists / private equity, all of which are well covered on non-flower blogs. But there’s nothing a young business welcomes more than (sort of) free money from the government. Good luck with securing it!

PS if you’ve read this far, 1. well done!, 2 thank you!, and 3. here’s a nice random factoid for you, to reward your diligence. The image in para 3 shows the Bank of England. In my former career I walked past “The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street” daily for 5 years but it was only after I moved on that I learnt that it has no adjoining buildings and no windows on the ground floor. The reason? So that any ambitious ne’er-do-wells find it mighty hard to purloin the large piles of gold bullion stored therein. Still, one of my ancestors was Captain Blood, who famously failed to steal the Crown Jewels, so I wouldn’t fancy my chances of success even if the whole ground floor were made of tracing paper. I’m happy sticking to points 1-3 for Arena’s funding and focusing my efforts helping people send beautiful fresh flowers to their nearest and dearest. :)

PPS clearly, we are a flowers business, not a corporate finance house. Please do not rely on the information in this post in your decision making process and do seek your own, professional advice before making any funding decisions!

Post from: Arena Flowers - Flower Delivery London & UK

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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 daffodils for Marie Curie Cancer Care, or pink roses for an end-of-year school ball.

In April we provided five hundred of our FFP red roses to Amnesty International for their national conference in Nottingham, which meant a lot of de-thorning work for Jozsef, our wonderful ‘jack-of-all-trades’.
At the time, this seemed quite a large order…

Then, last month, Karen also from Amnesty, contacted us, requesting a delivery of two thousand red roses to their London office on 4 June.

What could be simpler? Nothing as complicated as sending flowers to Nottingham – or so we thought!

And then Karen called again – this time asking for a further three thousand roses!

Well, having organised 2,000 roses, another 3,000 didn’t seem to present a problem so we were naturally particularly happy to be able to help.

It was only when our distribution manager pointed out quite how many buckets of flowers 5,000 red roses represented, that we were brought down to earth!

So, it was not one but two very full vans that eventually set off for the Amnesty International offices. The effect was amazing, though. Click the image to enlarge.

But we’ve learned our lesson: in future, we’ll warn the distribution manager well in advance when we take such large orders!

We had a snoop online to see just what Amnesty had used our flowers for, and came across their blog post about remembering Tiananmen Square nineteen years on.

It was strangely moving to see images of our beautiful roses commemorating such a tragic event…

PS. To give you a better idea of the scale of this whole operation last week, here is a shot of Judith with one of our rather splendid 100 Red Roses bouquet, freshly arranged today!

Post from: Arena Flowers - Flower Delivery London & UK

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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 quality, ethical sourcing and freshness second to none. Excellence in flowers is the core of what we offer our customers. As part of that mission, we have a facility in Noordwijkerhout (NWH), west of Amsterdam, to receive flowers and to make some of them up into bouquets before they come over to the UK. Our Dutch team is led by Ronald, with Marion, Merel, Ellie and Mariska performing floristry magic crafting the bouquets and with Lyn assisting Ronald with everything else. Clearly, Ronald and Lyn weren’t pretty enough to make the group photo!

Given we already have the NWH facility, it was a natural next step for us to launch a Dutch language site, fulfilling from NWH and sending to the whole of the Netherlands and the Flemish speaking part of Belgium. We’re fairly certain that the quality of the product and the ease of use of the site that we built in the UK will also appeal to customers beyond our little island. Through the Send Flowers To Holland page on our UK site, we’re already sending a number of orders to the Netherlands every day. Now that we have our Dutch business out there, we can obviously guarantee the full “Arena experience” for our Dutch orders placed from the UK. For translation fans, our UK strap line “An experience delivered” becomes “Wij bezorgen emotie” in Dutch!

The project hasn’t been without challenges! Zach, our amazing developer (who built the whole Arena site and all the back end systems that our customers never see), and Sam, our head of design (who makes everything look pretty and shiny (amongst other things)), had to rebuild the whole way the website works so that it could be translated easily and do clever things like handle different VAT rates and different depots and different currencies. PayPal already allows us to accept Euros, but the Dutch also use a payment system called “Ideal” for a lot of their online payments, so we’ve had to integrate that too (it’s not live on the site just yet – we’re still testing it). Squirting orders placed on the Netherlands flowers page on the UK site into the fulfilment order table for the NWH depot is not easy either (that’s still in the testing phase on our development site) .

We’ve also had to spend a lot of time researching the language, with Ronald and his team, and with Elsa, another native Dutch speaker, to ensure that we are set up well for the search engines and online marketing. Adarsh and Stan, who run Arena’s marketing, have, for example, been spending a lot of time working out which keyword combinations we want to be top for in Google NL’s search. Bloemen bestellen in Amsterdam, Nederlandse Bloemist and Bloemen bezorgen anyone?! And of course, we’ve been giving a lot of thought to the right type of products for this market as, naturally, there are some differences in national tastes.

Zach actually lives in New York, 6 hours behind Holland, but this presents far fewer problems than one might imagine. The pictures below shows the moment last week when, with Steve and I sitting outside our hotel connected to the web via wireless broadband and with Zach in his apartment in Brooklyn talking to us via Skype, we put the site, hosted in Wembley, London, live. It’s amazing how small the world is, when you’ve got a latpop and broadband at your fingertips!

And finally, the point of it all. Our first orders. Here’s Ronald with our first five orders for delivery in the Netherlands. Not a huge number to begin with but then this was a soft launch. We’re shooting for 50 a day within three months. Time will tell!

PS It wasn’t all work and no play. While over in the orange country, we also got to sample a quite extraordinary Dutch musical phenomenon called “The Toppers” (in Amsterdam’s Arena Stadium no less!) plus we went on a 200km moped ride around the canals and roads of the famous green country outside Amsterdam. Beautiful and lush…and very very flat!

Post from: Arena Flowers - Flower Delivery London & UK

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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; we’ve learnt a lot from our readers in the last 12 months.

For instance, take Sarah – a ridiculously well-qualified legal eagle. On learning that Arena had started blogging, Sarah very kindly sent us her legal firm’s top tips on how to blog “safely”. Whilst we’re pretty uncontroversial in our blogging topics, generally liking to talk about flowers and gifts and sometimes web-related things or ethics, we found the guidance very interesting reading. We then thought our more webby readers might also find this of interest. Sarah happily said we could publish it, on condition that we anonymised it (to spare her inbox).

In blogging, there are some risks, but they’re easily manageable with a few simple rules. If you don’t know the rules, you could cause yourself significant trouble, as demonstrated by this recent (and admittedly plain stupid) example of blog self-destruction. So what are those rules…

GIGANTIC FLASHING DISCLAIMER – WE AREN’T LAWYERS SO DON’T RELY ON THIS INFORMATION. SEEK YOUR OWN LEGAL ADVICE!

Our Top 3 Tips
1. The difference – Slander vs Libel - simply, slander is spoken defamation and libel is written defamation. Simple. But, to complicate matters, slander and libel can both be described as verbal (as they both use words) but only slander can be described as oral (spoken) or aural
(heard), as slander involves the defamation being said out loud. Confused? So were we!
2. A blog isn’t exempted from the real world - just because a blog is, well, a blog and all webby and modern and stuff, it doesn’t mean that all of sudden the rules governing the rest of the world have suddenly been thrown away and we can write what we want. We can’t. The rules on defamation apply to blogs just as they do to all other media, be the author a business or an individual.
3. Comments – TOP TIP – Moderation method is surprisingly key - This is a tricky one. Comments on blogs can be administered by the blog “owner” in one of two ways.

1. “We never moderate, – all comments go up automatically.”

Or (the more common approach):

2. “All comments are read and manually approved”

In case 2, comments are manually reviewed to ensure that comments are genuine and not irrelevant “spam” comments).

The latter approach gives a better quality of comments BUT also brings with it a potential legal danger.

If:

• a comment has been reviewed and published by the blog owner;

• that comment is subsequently found to be slanderous; then

• it is the blog owner who is liable not the original author of the comment.

If there had been no “moderation” or “approval” of the comment, and the comment had simply appeared automatically, the blog owner would not be liable. A good analogy is a newspaper. If a newspaper knowingly publishes a slanderous article by a journalist, it’s not the journalist who gets hit, but the newspaper (fair enough). Same for blogging.

So, if you manually approve comments on your blog, then please bear the above in mind. So that’s our top 3 tips done.

Now, for the detail. The following is, word for word, the UK briefing note from a top tier UK legal firm, shared with us by Sarah. So, whilst you shouldn’t rely on this advice, it’s a good guide.

———

Client Briefing August 2007

Libel Law Checklist

The critical elements of libel law are that the statement is defamatory and that it has been published and that it identifies the claimant. The claimant has to prove its case on the balance of probabilities.

• A statement is defamatory if it lowers a person in the estimation of the right thinking members of society;
• A statement is published if it is communicated in writing to one or more persons; and
• A statement identifies the claimant if it refers to him or her. Generally, the claimant will be named and the issue will not arise but an unnamed but identifiable claimant will be able to sue. [Will: see a famous recent UK example of this exception here.]

In conclusion, the burden of proof on the claimant can be conveniently divided into three elements:

1. The defamatory statement: do the words convey a defamatory meaning?
2. Publications by the defendant: if the answer to (1) is yes, has the defendant published or been responsible for the publication of the defamatory statement?
3. Reference to the claimant: if the answers to (1) and (2) are yes, would the defamatory statement be reasonably understood to refer to the claimant?

Even if the claimant succeeds under each head and establishes a claim in defamation, this does not necessarily mean that he will win the case. It then falls to the defendant to establish one or more of the available defences. The most common defences are justification, fair comment and privilege.

Justification

A defendant “justifies” when he contends that the defamatory statement is true or substantially true. It is only necessary for a Defendant to prove that the “sting of libel” is true, not every detail.

Fair Comment

A Defendant must overcome four hurdles in order to establish this defence:

1. The statement must be comment and not fact.
2. The comment must be based on facts that are themselves true.
3. The comment must be one that a “fair-minded” man could honestly hold.
4. The subject matter of the comment must be of public interest.

Absolute Privilege

Absolute privilege is a complete defence. The law recognises that public interest may require that a person should be protected from liability in some circumstances for a statement which is defamatory even though the words cannot be proved to be true or defended as Fair Comment. Absolute privilege applies to limited situations only, such as statements made in the course of parliamentary or judicial proceedings , or contemporaneous and accurate reports of such proceedings.

Qualified Privilege

The exact boundaries of this defence are uncertain. Qualified privilege may arise in relation to a statement made by a person in pursuance of a legal, social or moral duty to a person who has a corresponding duty or interest to receive it (for example, a prospective employer who is seeking a reference from a former employer), for the protection of a legitimate interest or fair and accurate reports of judicial proceedings.

——-

Okay, so I’ll admit that it’s hardly a page turner like the Da Vinci Code and this post is unlikely to threaten the Harry Potter series in the popularity stakes, but, personally, I’m very glad I now know where I stand and what to avoid. For example, the implications of the comments reviewing thing caused me to double check the comments on a post from a while back, about some trouble Interflora had.

Hopefully this was helpful. Thanks again to Sarah for her help. We really appreciate it and we welcome feedback and comments from all our customers and visitors.

Now, for those feeling dangerously under supplied with flower pictures, here is my favourite Arena bouquet (again) – it is stunning and every time I see one I simply have to stop to take it in.

Back to flowers next week!

REMINDER OF GIGANTIC FLASHING DISCLAIMER – WE AREN’T LAWYERS SO DON’T RELY ON THIS INFORMATION. SEEK YOUR OWN LEGAL ADVICE!

Post from: Arena Flowers - Flower Delivery London & UK

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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 that before? We haven’t (let us know if you have!). How does this magic work? Read on!

We’ve been obsessed with providing the most beautiful flowers that money can buy, at great value, since we launched. The most important thing to us, by far, is sourcing flowers direct from growers at great prices and delivering them direct to our customers, so that we can give flower lovers service second to none. Middlemen and UK relay organisations get no money from us and our flowers never sit in shop windows – savings and quality are passed direct to our customers.

But that’s not enough. We want to do more. We want to do things better. We want to do new things, like allow people to send virtual flowers on Facebook. We want to keep improving the whole experience of sending flowers.

When people send flowers, they send a message. The flowers represent more than just flowers. They also represent emotion and sentiment. The message card tells a story. Put simply, flower sending is personal. We’ve therefore spent a lot of time pondering how we can help our customers personalise their gift giving experience even more and built some new features which we think will help:

• We a built tool to allow customers to format the appearance of the text on the message card – 90% of our customers now format their message in some way using the “wysiwyg” editor.
• We offer occasion-specific greetings cards, to reflect the key message (eg “I love you!”).
• Arena customers can upload a photo to go with their order. We’ve sent enough photos to fill a lot of albums since the photo feature launched.

And, from yesterday evening, Arena customers have been able to upload a video or sound file to go with their order. Why? Well, we think that if you’re sending Valentine’s flowers or wishing your mum Mother’s Day love, then this is just about the best possible way, on top of the flowers that you send, to personalise your message.

It’s pretty simple (we hope):

• As you go through checkout, you choose to add a video/sound file
• After checkout completion, you add your video/sound file
• We send your recipient a card telling them how to access the video
• They go and view it!
• As an added extra, you can elect for you video to be ‘Public’ – if you do it will appear (subject to the expected terms and cons) on our Arena Video page for other Arena Flowers browsers to see.

We’ve even got our first public video up there. It was made by the great team at Vzaar (the place to go to put videos (for free) into your eBay listings). Arena Video is powered by Vzaar so they know exactly how it works!

We don’t expect everyone to use this feature, especially not to begin with. That was our experience with photos. But we think that, like the photo feature, usage will rise as customers return and know that the feature is there. If people don’t want to send a video or sound file – no problem. But if they do want to, the only flower shop in the world where they can is Arena Flowers!

Any feedback very welcome!

PS I got knocked off my bike again today and the last thing that I thought before thumping into the road was “If I go to hospital, I hope I get a video message from the team!”. Fortunately, no trip in an ambulance was required so I’ll have to wait before I get a first hand experience of the video message. :)

Post from: Arena Flowers - Flower Delivery London & UK

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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 just launched one.

ArenaFlowers.com was launched in 2006, based on a different model to the rest of the flowers industry – we import direct from Holland’s flower markets and send direct to the customer. This means we offer some of the freshest, best value flowers available in the UK which is probably why we’ve grown so quickly and customers come back again and again. But we also want to service the business sector – eg people regularly sending flowers for birthdays or to celebrate deal completions.

So how did we come up with a business proposition? Through listening to our customers. Whilst we are an online florist, many people still prefer to place an order with a person. Our customer services team is also on hand to sort out problems, make last minute changes, confirm delivery… you name it. So the team is constantly talking to customers and noting pain points and unmet needs.

Initially, it was simply a case of “can you invoice me for these” enquiries, but after further investigation, there was a raft of additional requirements such as quicker ordering, the ability to delegate budget and storing details from previous orders (such as messages and addresses).

We’ve now finished Arena For Business and think we’ve tweaked the consumer experience to make it much easier for business customers to order, with the same outstanding product quality as ever. It’s certainly the most comprehensive, all round such service we’ve found online…and we hope you’ll agree!

Post from: Arena Flowers - Flower Delivery London & UK

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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 gave us our favourite flower, the tulip. The post will be about embarrassing pictures and the amazing Dutch flower industry and will feature no blatant attempts to sell our loyal readers red roses, designer flowers, birthday bouquets or anything else. Oh. :)

One caveat: Sam, who deprived the world of the colour orange last month, is our resident camera wizard but sadly he wasn’t match fit so couldn’t come to NL. Therefore you will have to make do with the less, erm, professional photography of myself and Ronald. Let the shaky-handed, mobile-phone photo-montage begin…

It was an early start. To compound the pain, both Mariusz, our head of operations, and Steve, our finance guru and inspiration, were trapped inside a yellow submarine, looking scarily hard for two guys in the flower industry.

The auction we were visiting, the Westland auction, is the largest flower auction in the world. The auction is built on three levels, with the total buildings area covering the equivalent of 180 football pitches. Over eight million cut flower stems from 2,250 suppliers from around the world pass through Westland every day, on ten different auction clocks. Westland even has its own hairdresser to cater for the countless people working at Westland. Sadly neither Ronald nor myself has much hair left with which to trouble the hairdresser. Fortunately, the camera blur spares us our blushes here (click to enlarge if you must!).

Here Ronald wows Steve and Mariusz with the true floweriness of it all:

The flowers in Holland are bought in a process known as a Dutch Auction. Sounds simple but, in fact, it’s a very difficult game of chicken which is not for the faint hearted. 100 men and women, who have generally got out of bed at 0330 in the morning and who are monitoring the other flower auctions simultaneously on laptops, sit in the “tribune” intently eyeballing a clock (between Steve and Ronald in the picture – click to enlarge) that rapidly ticks down the price for the current lot of flowers. The first person to press the button on their desk stops the clock and wins the current lot of flowers. That person pays the price showing at the moment they stopped the clock.

If they stop the clock too early and pay too much, they’re likely to be on the receiving end of hoots and jeers from their gigantic countrymen (the average Dutchman is 6 foot 1 tall, a full 3 inches taller than the average Brit!). If they leave their bids too late, they can miss out on all the lots and may leave the auction empty handed. Oh, and if no one stops the clock before it reaches zero, the unsold flowers are incinerated. Tough crowd.

What kind of supermen could possibly do this job? Well, for starters Arena’s own Ronald – “the man who never sleeps”. Big Ron is ably assisted by Gerard Heemskerk and Jan Durieux, two Dutch legends of the flower business and, thankfully, friends of Arena Flowers. Between the three of them they outchicken and outpsyche the rest of Holland to buy Arena’s flowers across ten auction clocks whilst the rest of the world sleeps. Like the special forces, their images must be blurred to keep their identities secret but here is a pixellated version of them (I really need a better camera phone!). NB Gerard also finds time to be honorary chairman of local football team, VVSB, which meant we were treated like royalty when we were with him.

We then went on to see two of the biggest rose farms in the world, to negotiate a better rate for Valentine’s flowers for Arena’s customers (we’re actually considering boycotting roses altogether for Valentine’s Day, in protest at the prices, though that may be commercial suicide). One farm was quite old school and the second was super hi-tech. In the latter, hundreds of square metres of flowers were continuously moved around, bit by bit, by the equivalent of a NASA mission control centre. All whilst meeting the highest ethical and sustainability standards. Superb.

Next – an important meeting to discuss Florisoft, the market leading software application for flower nerds such as ourselves. Important, but also very very boring for non flower nerds. So instead, we will draw a veil over that with a three question quiz:

1. Look at this picture of Mariusz in a 400 year old pub in Amsterdam and spot what’s wrong with the picture:

Didn’t get it? The man behind him has a green moustache. Of course. Don’t we all?

2. What about this one? What happened next?

Correct. Steve, Ronald and Super Mario were spotted by a Hollywood casting agent and asked to star in the new movie: Reservoir Dogs vs Quadrophenia.

3. Can you spot Arena hide and seek champion, Steve?

(My 1/16th Dutch ancestry is clearly not helpful in this game!)

There was much more and it was a very busy weekend of work and stupendously early mornings. We will, as a result, be bringing even better flower knowledge, expertise and excellence to the UK market…if you have any questions about anything to do with flowers or the auctions, please feel free to email ronald @ arenaflowers.com. Meantime, I’ll finish off our post with one final tale. At the end of our time in Holland, Ronald decided to initiate us into wakeboarding. Primarily, in my opinion, to humiliate me utterly. :)

Here I am, innocently happy, moments before being dragged head first at Mach 1 through the largest reservoir in Holland. I’ll never be thirsty again. :O

However, Ronald, like Jan and Gerard, is a truly class act and has been a key man in helping Arena bring fantastic flowers to UK flower lovers. He buys the best flowers in the world at the best flower prices. He is the reason Arena was the first UK florist to sell FFP-accredited flowers. He works all the hours that God sends on behalf of our great customers with never a word of complaint. And now we know that in his spare time he is moonlighting not only as a doting father and husband but also as James Bond.

Holland, The Netherlands, Jan, Gerard and Ronald…we salute you all!

PS but don’t milk it! No one likes a smart a***!

:)

Post from: Arena Flowers - Flower Delivery London & UK

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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 that surrounds the bike.

Now, the bike works perfectly well without the crash bar and if I am honest I did not buy it to protect my bike in the event of a crash, I bought it purely because I wanted my bike to stand out :) The bike I had first seen in Chelsea (which also had the chrome bar) had made such an impact on me that I had to put my hand in my pocket and spend the extra cash!

So what does this have to do with Flowers??

Well, in the way that I had been hankering after other people’s bikes before I bought mine, I had also been dreaming of branding our vans. Being a scooter rider I spend a lot of time on the roads and am always impressed when I see a car or van that has been wrapped in vinyl branding. We have a fleet of vans that drive in to the capital everyday, and it is therefore almost irresponsible not to brand them as they are seen by so many people everyday. So when Will said “let’s sort out the vans” I jumped at the chance.

becomes……?????? You’ll have to read on to find out!

First off we had to inspect our vans. We had a mixed fleet of owned and hired vans and obviously wanted to wrap the vans we owned. Will had been keen to buy new Kangoos (smaller, more efficient vans) for some time. So whilst he spoke to Renault, I sat down with Photoshop to draw up some sample designs. Ellis was charged with finding us a company who could wrap the vans and found a competitive quote from a company called Totally Dynamic. I was under no illusion that the final design would have to be done by someone who had wrapped a van before but wanted to get a few ideas down on paper and so Totally Dynamic supplied some templates for us to work from.

We went to town coming up with ideas, filling the templates with brightly coloured flowers that were passed around the florists and customer service girls for comments. Everyone loved the ideas that required fully wrapping the vans which we knew cost more but were also aware was likely to have the desired impact.

After our extensive stock of flower photography was exhausted I took some cherry brandy roses upstairs to my studio and did a series of close ups. These flowers are a beautiful orange colour that, combined with their green leaves, makes them very ‘on brand’. Once the new flowers were added to the template it was immediately obvious that we had to use them – branding a van with ‘on brand’ flowers made so much sense.

Next came the wording. Obviously we need to include the usual contact details (web address telephone number etc) but we had also planned to include a promotional code on the side of the van. Our drivers meet so many people everyday and are forever receiving compliments on the flowers our customer send so it stands to reason that adding a promotional code will help incentivise those people who are already impressed to become Arena customers themselves. As we offer a same day service we also felt that people stuck in traffic might make use of their time now that the mobile internet has arrived, or just call customer services.

A layout was agreed and the assets were packed up and sent off to the designer a couple of frantic weeks later (we have had a very busy summer) and we had all but forgotten about the vans until Ellis sent me an email saying that one of the vans was ready to be picked up.

Richard drove up with another van that was to be wrapped and made the first exchange. Our first glimpse of the new van was when he returned and parked it up against a window in the customer service office that overlooks the courtyard. The van blocked out the sun, but somehow the room seemed just as bright. Going outside it was immediately apparent that Richard was no longer a ‘white van man’.

The van looked amazing, it screamed flowers and importantly the orange roses looked stunning with our logo in pride of place on each side.

That day Richard packed his van with almost 30 orders and headed off into central London. When he came in the next morning he told us of all the people that had honked at him and stopped him asking for flyers. The van was a complete success!

If you see one of the vans make sure you wave, you never know the driver may have a spare bouquet. :)

We even did the roofs so that our customers in tall buildings can share the joy – they also get a surprise promo code, different to the one on the side of the van, so well worth a look!

This is one of our Kangoos – note the backwards www.arenaflowers.com (ie moc.srewolfanera.www) on the bonnet, so that it reads correctly in in the rear view mirror, like the signage on an ambulance. We sure had fun playing colouring in with our vans and I have to say our courtyard looks very orange in the morning. :)

Post from: Arena Flowers - Flower Delivery London & UK

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