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 [...]
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 that before? We haven’t [...]
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 [...]
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 that [...]
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 had bad [...]
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 search [...]
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, why do busy start-ups invest their time in [...]
Filed under: General, Setting up on May 20th, 2007 | 3 Comments »
