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 [...]
Filed under: General, Setting up, Start up on September 12th, 2011 | No Comments »
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 [...]
Filed under: Big Mistakes, General, International Flowers, Marketing, Setting up, Start up on July 11th, 2011 | 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 and [...]
Filed under: Finance & Investment, Setting up, Start up on June 16th, 2008 | 5 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, [...]
Filed under: Distribution, Floristry, International Flowers, Marketing, Matters Webby, Operations, Setting up, Start up on June 4th, 2008 | 2 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 »
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 »
…I was pretending to go to my friend Ash’s wedding in Jaipur, India, whilst actually flying to sit at the feet of web gurus in San Francisco, USA. I had a job at the time (at eBay UK), but, having agreed in principle with Steve that we should set up Arena, I then had to [...]
Filed under: Marketing, Matters Webby, Start up on May 27th, 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 »
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