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!

Post from: Arena Flowers - Flower Delivery London & UK

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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.

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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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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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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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 engine optimisation expert, Adarsh!

So recently, when we were just about to kick off recruitment for an accounts assistant, we were very happy to field a call from the gumfolk themselves, asking us if we wanted to try out a new feature.

“What’s the feature?”, we asked, and the gummers pointed us to this listing, featuring two highly amusing and idiotic students in Oxford advertising for a flat mate. The feature is the ability to add a video to your listing. Hardly revolutionary, but pretty neat.

Why do it? The theory is that it should ensure that, having viewed the video, people will better understand you as a business and then decide that yes, they think they definitely want to apply for the job or no way, Arena looks rubbish, I’ll look elsewhere thanks very much. It sounded like an excellent idea and good fun to boot, so we got it all set up and before we knew it Ray, from Strip Studios,

and his ace sidekick Nico

arrived at Flowers HQ to film the video.

Given we were recruiting for someone to work with Steve, it would have been handy for him to be part of the video, but sadly he was on holiday that week. So instead we did a speedy guided tour of Flowers HQ showing all the key parts and people at Arena.

So without further ado, here’s the video that lens-wizard Ray produced:

Thoughts:
* It was great fun to do and a welcome change from the day to day for the whole team.
* We got over 100 CVs for the job, of which 60 were strong.
* We interviewed 18 people, all of whom had seen the video and found it useful in understanding Arena. They appeared to have got the message that we were trying to convey; that Arena is young, fast growing and fun.
* It was felt there was too little about the actual job and responsibilities in the vid, so we’d do more of that next time.

Was the video worth doing? Yes it was. It definitely relaxed interviewees and set discussions off on a good footing. On a practical level, it also saved us time, as we had to do less explanation about the business.

Did we fill the role? Yes we did! Take a bow, Francis, Arena’s new book-keeper. Today is Francis’ first day and, typical of the spirit of versatility that is a must at Arena, Francis is not going to spend his first day ploughing through numbers but out delivering flowers with Steve across London – we had a giant order for 450 bouquets come in recently and, at such times, it’s all hands to the pumps. We wouldn’t have it any other way!

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…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 work out if it was a feasible project or just optimistic pub chat. Unfortunately, I couldn’t simply say to my boss “I’m off to America to spend a week learning about setting up an online business, see you next week!”. So I needed a smokescreen.

My trip to Jaipur was already booked. Yet I needed to go to America. The answer was obvious. Regretfully, I cancelled my ticket to Jaipur and booked one to San Francisco instead, feeling 1) like a rubbish friend and 2) guilty about the white lie to my eBay colleagues.

I went with Steve to meet up with Pete Flint, one of the first employees of lastminute.com, who subsequently set up the brilliant US real-estate website, Trulia.com. We also went to see Alex Schultz who, at age twenty-nothing, had already proven himself to be an absolute genius in online marketing and site structure – if you want a cocktail recipe, or instructions on making paper airplanes, you’ll find him impressively high on Google’s search rankings. SEO magic.

It was the right decision – we came back with our heads full of ideas and brimming with new-found web marketing know-how, determined to forgo our 9-5 jobs and forge ahead with Arena. Unfortunately, what we gleaned from these gurus meant that I missed out on a great friend’s wedding, including the highlight of Ash riding a white stallion to the ceremony – I’m assured that that sight alone was worth the trip.

The strangest thing was going straight from Heathrow to eBay HQ and rushing to my desk to Google timezones before anyone spoke to me (should I be jet-lagged and if so, in which direction (tired or wide awake?)?). And then going to lonely planet to dig up a couple of stories about Jaipur so, if asked, I’d have some good chat about where I was supposed to have been for the preceding week. All very silly really.

Still wracked with guilt, I recently I sent Ash and Julia my favourite bouquet, saying “Sorry I didn’t make the wedding!”. My luck was in – I happened to send them on the exact day of Ash and Julia’s wedding anniversary. Score! They were delighted, feeling that I’d done a great job in making up for my absence by remembering their anniversary a year on. Here’s hoping they don’t read this post. :)

I certainly wish I’d been there. Congrats, Ash and Julia – Arena owes you one.

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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) that this might be a “roll out of bed, turn up and supervise”-type occasion, fully replete with serious nodding and delegation-style behaviour. Rather than the “this fridge appears to be made of razor wire, it’s raining and slippery and no, we haven’t got any titanium gloves or supernatural strength with which to hold on to it before it slices our skin from our hands and rends the tendons from our bones” wake up call that we actually enjoyed.

Just to add some Monty Python style absurdity to the situation we happened to have the world’s favourite Irish leg waggler’s Rolls Royce Phantom parked up in our warehouse at the time. Our landlord is an amazing, larger than life character and his businesses happen to deal with lots of snazzy celebs. We agreed, somewhat foolhardily, to allow the gigantic (and very ungreen) motor to be parked in our warehouse over the weekend, prior to going to service. Car thieves please note: it’s not there any more, so please don’t burgle us.

So, we unloaded the giant fridge, sinews straining and eyes popping, with the added challenge of trying not to ding an inordinately expensive car parked right in the way.

Anyway, enough blah blah blah…here are our pics of getting our fridge in on a rainy but very entertaining Saturday nine months ago…

Stage 1: Impressed.
The fridge man is here, in his big truck. He must have loads of umpa lumpa style helpers to unload that giant wagon of his. The whole thing is full of fridge…they couldn’t have sent him alone…could they?

Stage 2: Denial.
Hmmm. He appears to be alone. Perhaps the helpers will come out soon. His name is “Klaas” after all. How could he let us down with a name like that?!

Stage 3: Gratefully received diversionary Rolls Royce (why isn’t there always one?)
Our physical torment and non-manliness are not things to dwell on at this stage, so instead we happily introduce the car we really really hope we didn’t dent.

Stage 4: Achievement
We made it! We emptied the whole trailer of fridge!

Stage 5: Self-awareness
Well, actually, he did most of the hard work, even without any umpa lumpa help. And he had time not only to make a phone call, but also to roll a cigarette. And he didn’t even appear to be bleeding. Klaas is well named.

Stage 6: Cover up
No one must ever know. We must always tell tall tales of how we unloaded the fridge ourselves, in a meteor shower. Klaas? Who is this “Klaas” of whom you speak?

A brilliant day, and one we shall always remember.

Our flowers now sit happily in 6.4 degrees Celsius environmental optimality every day, comfortable as can be. No baking hot florist’s window for our flowers. No sir. That’s why our flowers live longer and are the freshest flowers possible. Thanks be to Klaas.

Here’s the finished fridge, up and running:

Our only regret? That we never had that game of squash in it. Now that it’s stuffed full of flowers every day, we’ll never have that chance again.

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